History isn’t made in stirring individual moments — an election, speech, or protest — just remembered by them. An Incomplete Haunting, an exhibition at 601Artspace curated by Rachel Raphaela Gugelberger, is part of Fall of Freedom, a decentralized series of events across the United States on November 21 and 22 opposing growing authoritarianism and censorship. Three of its 14 artists and collectives — Kris Grey, Miguel Luciano, and Dread Scott — co-organized Fall of Freedom and are listed as initiators of the exhibition. But curator Gugelberger submitted the curatorial proposal for An Incomplete Haunting two years ago, before Trump’s reelection. Indeed, its themes — that we are the ghosts of history, products of systems and decisions that continue to reverberate — suggest ideas that have long been percolating in the ether as the country barrels toward fascism. But in an increasingly numbed world, where atrocities are scrolled past and claims about power and resistance are further leeched of meaning with each successive repetition, the exhibition’s greatest success is in making those ideas viscerally and urgently present.
This exhibition trades in art’s auratic power; its objects assert the power of collective memory. Kenneth Tam’s “Why Do You Abuse Me” (2022) consists of the earth from sites along the Transcontinental Railroad, where many Chinese laborers died amid perilous working conditions and low wages in the 1860s. Embedded with dried fruits, seeds, mushrooms, and other sources of physical and spiritual nourishment, and standing almost preternaturally erect on one coin-edge to block your path, the piece feels almost alive. Meanwhile, Kris Grey’s “Capital T” (2025) consists of weathered wooden beams that I initially read as a crucifix; I could feel their weariness, the burden of persecution. Only upon reading the curatorial essay did I learn that it was salvaged from the dance floor of the original Stonewall Inn, the site of one of the most pivotal rebellions in queer history. Suddenly, an event I’d encountered only through repeated historical reference was startlingly, physically present.
Installation view of Kenneth Tam, “Why Do You Abuse Me” (2022), epoxy resin, dirt, sand, dried mushrooms, dried seaweed, dried bamboo shoots, dried jujube, dried goji berries, preserved apricots, sunflower seeds, dried roots, dried sweet potato, and steel
One notable — and slightly unusual — emphasis in this show is on recreations and reenactments, suggesting that there are more impactful ways to tell the truth than simply recounting what happened and offering another channel to feel history in the now. The late Nona Faustine’s “Dorothy Angola, Stay Free, In Land of the Blacks, Minetta Lane, the Village, NYC” (2021), for instance, brings the deeply buried history of one of the first enslaved women trafficked here by the Dutch West India Company in the 1600s back to the fore by embodying her ghost: Faustine stands in the center of a former semi-free Black settlement in all white, looking straight into the camera. Mark Tribe’s Port Huron Project (2006–8) documents reenactments of iconic protest speeches on location; hearing the same words spoken in the same space, you feel the presence of past audiences and part of the same movement as them — a thread continued by Andrea Ray’s “The Sound of Women’s Rights” (2020/25), which interweaves voices from the 1970s with those of the past decade.
That may be An Incomplete Haunting and Fall of Freedom’s most important act: bringing us together to feel history as a shared, living force, and refusing to let that feeling dissipate when we leave.
Installation view of An Incomplete Haunting
Installation view of An Incomplete Haunting
Kris Grey, “Capital T” (2025), salvaged wooden joists from Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center
Installation view of An Incomplete Haunting
Mark Tribe, “The Liberation of Our People: Angela Davis” (1969/2008)
Installation view of Andrea Ray, “The Sound of Women’s Rights” (2020/2025), stoneware with glaze, steel with finish, speaker, audio equipment, 5-minute audio on loop
An Incomplete Haunting continues at 601Artspace (88 Eldridge Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through February 22, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Rachel Raphaela Gugelberger.
Tagged: Fall of Freedom, New York
Lisa Yin Zhang
Lisa Yin Zhang is Associate Editor at Hyperallergic, based in Queens, New York. More by Lisa Yin Zhang
