Joshua Leon

The Shiva, the Jewish Mourning ritual, takes place over seven days, during which family and friends are invited to attend the home of the deceased, where the grieving family host, offering their home as the site for individuals to lament in a social setting, performing mourning communion.

The Sitting: (after) If This is a Man considers itself an embodied practice, that treats research as practice and practice as research, entangling these modes through a concern for ‘liveness’. This practice functions between the fields of institutional critique, memoir and theory. The following document employs the date as a mechanism to support the fluidity of this practice, treating the written document as a ‘memoir on the move’, within which pre-existing material forms found within the institutions that formulate citizenship and sociality, (law, religion, identity, being in public) are encountered, examined and experimented with. 

The practice of this project is set in motion by a combination of writing, public reading, exhibition making and gestures of hosting, fugitivity, restitution and communion. These practices and behaviours provide the fundamental framework for a methodology called Lamentology, which seeks to expand on the lament contained in the Shiva by blending art praxis and theoretical exegesis to examine questions contained within the address, the wound, the code, the conversation and modes of being, with a particular concern and understanding of these questions in relation to contemporary Jewishness. These questions are used to formulate a fluid theory on how to be a peripheral and transitory being, in particular within an art context. Deploying language as a tool and material, exchange as a medium, the proposal as form, collection as a method, and performative gestures.