Remote Control - Issue 4. The Portal Is The Place

Miller ICA - Remote Control Issue 4.
The Portal is the Place

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Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it. —Arundhati Roy, Financial Times, April 3rd, 2020

Arundhati Roy’s prescient quote circulated widely in the early and anxious days of the pandemic. These words quake with foresight. After a summer of demonstrations that powerfully brought racial justice to the forefront of conversations at the dinner table, in boardrooms, and on our newsfeeds, the rupture caused by the pandemic has opened up a portal into another world.

The portal is not just a liminal space of waiting, but stretched out over time, it has grown into a place of its own. March 11th will mark the one year anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring coronavirus a pandemic. March 13th was the last day before the Miller ICA’s operations became remote. This year in the portal has been both destructive and generative.

This issue of Remote Control explores how portals can be creative spaces and looks closer at artists from the 2019 exhibition, This Skin of Ours, whose work connects to ideas about portals and thresholds. It also includes written and recorded interviews with artists, details for upcoming events, a guide to resources, and curated reading lists.

This is also the Miller ICA’s first issue of Remote Control after launching a newly designed website that better supports virtual formats for connecting with content. We invite you to visit us online until we can all visit each other in person.

Wishing you health and safety,
Elizabeth Chodos
Miller ICA Director

Image Credit: Victoria Fu & Matt Rich, Comet, Big X, Blue Pendant, installation in This Skin of Ours curated by Liz Park at Miller ICA, 2019. Photo by Tom Little.