In the Picket Family Video Gallery, Floor 2L
Considered by many critics one of the most poignant and moving works in the 2022 edition of the Whitney Biennial, Cuban American artist and social activist Coco Fusco’s single-channel video from 2021, Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word, shows the artist rowing a small boat around Hart Island, New York City’s public cemetery for the unclaimed dead. The island, which from a distance appears idyllic, has been used in this way since 1869, its mass graves until recently dug by prison inmates.
As Fusco rows to and around the island, tossing flowers on the water, she is tracked by a drone-mounted camera dazzling the viewer with the unreal-seeming blues and greens of Long Island Sound. Poet Pamela Sneed narrates the artist’s text, contemplating the disjunction between private loss and public, daily statistics that so many experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The film’s title was inspired by a poem by Cesare Pavese—“For each of us, death has a face. / When death comes, it will have your eyes”—which the artist incorporated into her text. Fusco’s piece is, in the words of art critic Ariella Budick, “about death, but also about the politics of death, the inequalities that persist to each victim’s final breath—and beyond.” Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word powerfully encapsulates the experience of a pandemic and its aftermath, offering a space for private reflection and mourning in place of public memorials and monuments.
Coco Fusco is the recipient of many awards, including 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award, a 2021 Latinx Artist Fellowship, a 2021 Anonymous Was a Woman award, and 2013 Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships. Her performances and videos have been presented at the 56th Venice Biennale, three Whitney Biennials (2022, 2008, and 1993), and several other international exhibitions. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum, the Centre Pompidou, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. Fusco is also the author of numerous books, most recently Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (2015). Fusco is a professor at the Cooper Union School of Art.
Andrea Inselmann
The Gale and Ira Drukier Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
Images: Coco Fusco, Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word, 2021 (stills). HD video (color, sound); 12 min.
© 2023 Coco Fusco / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Coco Fusco: Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word is supported by the Mary Hyde Field Endowment and the Jan Abrams Exhibition Endowment.