JULIE MEHRETU & JOHN JASPERSE AT MARIAN GOODMAN
WANDERINGS: MOVING THROUGH PARTIAL VISIBILITY By Lilas Privateer
Photographer : Helena Goñi
Makeup artist : Juan Jaar
Interview : Lilas Privateer
FOR HER LATEST EXHIBITION, OUR DAYS, LIKE A SHADOW (A NON-ABIDING HAUNTOLOGY) AT MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY IN NEW YORK, ARTIST JULIE MEHRETU INVITED CHOREOGRAPHER JOHN JASPERSE TO CREATE WANDERING, THE FIRST DANCE WORK CONCEIVED IN DIALOGUE WITH HER PAINTINGS.
Unfolding across the gallery’s three floors, the performance will guide seven dancers through interconnected spaces where architecture, movement and Mehretu’s translucent TRANSpaintings continually reshape one another. Structured as a vertical progression, the work is experienced sequentially rather than simultaneously – floor one, then floor two, then floor three – each level holding its own choreographic and sonic atmosphere. Composer Hahn Rowe shapes the sound across the first two floors, while Will Johnson scores the third, where Mehretu’s black paintings anchor the final space.
We first spoke with dramaturg and producer Ariel Osterweis, who has accompanied the project from its earliest conversations through to its final spatial choreography. She introduced her partner, the artist Julie Mehretu, to choreographer and longtime collaborator John Jasperse after recognising a shared investment in abstraction, and has since remained closely involved as the work took shape. “It is a project of intimacies,” they explain, built on trust, shared curiosity and time.
Less than an hour before Wandering premiered, dancers stretched quietly as Marian Goodman Gallery held the nervous anticipation of something about to begin. We met Julie Mehretu and John Jasperse in that suspended moment.
I’m lucky enough to catch you just before opening night, moments before the work is shared with the public for the first time. How are you both feeling at this threshold?
Julie Mehretu: I’m excited and a little emotional. I’ve only ever experienced the work through video, never as a complete installation in the gallery with the dancers, the audience and the sound. Tonight will be the first time I’ll see it as it was meant to exist. I think I might cry.
John Jasperse: This project has always depended on the audience. From the beginning, we imagined viewers not as spectators but as participants – people whose movements through the gallery shape the choreography just as much as the dancers do. The work only really comes into being once it’s inhabited. That’s what makes tonight so exciting. We’ve spent months imagining this encounter, and now we’re finally about to discover what happens.
Julie: Because of the scale of the space, the audience can’t help but become implicated in the work.
John: Exactly. The choreography isn’t only about the dancers; it’s also about how everyone shares the space. The way people circulate, what they choose to look at, how they encounter the paintings and one another – all of that becomes part of the piece. That sense of cohabitation, of existing and moving together, has been at the heart of the collaboration from the start.
You describe Wanderings as a work of cohabitation rather than coexistence. How was that way of working cultivated?
John: At the beginning, I was less interested in what Julie’s paintings would look like than in understanding how they come into being. I wanted to learn about her process: how a work begins, how ideas evolve through abstraction, and how a painting gradually finds its final form. Exploring that process revealed both striking affinities and profound differences with choreography.
For the collaboration to matter, mutual admiration wasn’t enough. The goal wasn’t simply to place painting beside dance, but to create something neither medium could produce alone – a third work that transforms how you experience both.
Julie: What struck me was John’s curiosity. He immediately wanted to understand the paintings, the space they would inhabit, and the relationships they might generate. At the same time, he began developing movement material in response – not to illustrate the paintings, I would say, but to think alongside them.
Watching those early choreographic phrases evolve was fascinating. Even within abstraction, my paintings often contain traces or suggestions of bodies, and seeing those echoes reappear through movement was expansive. It opened up new ways of thinking about themes already present in my work, like transience, statelessness, precarity, and the unstable conditions of the world we’re living through.
It’s also your first collaboration, a dialogue between a painter and a choreographer. How do you construct a dynamic when you’re working together for the very first time, and how does a shared language emerge?
John: One of the things that has been so fascinating – and that continues to unfold through the process – is discovering the touchstones we’ve each carried for years. Every so often we stumble across something that resonates immediately, something that has always felt like a beacon.
For example, there’s Walter Benjamin’s text on Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus and the idea of history as the accumulation of the wreckage of human action. I had no idea that one of Julie’s transpaintings carried a subtitle referring to that Klee painting, while Benjamin’s text had already served as the epigraph for one of my own works years ago. It’s been remarkable to discover things that feel like home in someone else’s imaginative world. That’s been the real surprise of this collaboration.
The audience also becomes part of that dialogue. Because of the scale of the gallery, nobody can ever see the whole work at once – you are always making choices about where to look. Early on, Julie pointed out the building’s original architecture, this former double-wide factory with its archways, and suddenly the space itself became another collaborator. It began to feel almost like an organism: doubled, stacked, compressing, almost undergoing mitosis. Those weren’t ideas I had initially, but they’ve become central to how I think about the choreography, the exhibition, and the relationship between them.
The audience’s movement changes my experience just as much as my actions shape theirs. A genuinely dialogic space emerges, where our actions reverberate through one another’s experience. We’re not occupying separate bubbles – we’re cohabitating in the construction of the work.
Julie: We kept realizing we were returning to shared references without ever having planned it. Caravaggio, for instance, has become such a touchstone for both of us.
But what feels genuinely new is the way this collaboration has opened up a different understanding of space. As John mentioned, I keep thinking about a sense of doubling: echoes, reverberations, the way something happens and then happens again. The paintings already play with those ideas in an oblique way, asking how we perceive something from the corner of our vision as much as head-on. Working with choreography has made that way of seeing much more tangible.
I’d like to dig into how working together influences each of you. Julie, what does the presence of live movement in the space might have opened up in your reading of the paintings? And John, what do the paintings reveal or intensify in your own choreographic practice?
John: The first time I encountered Julie’s work – it was at MoMA in the early 2000s – I recognised something immediately that felt almost choreographic. Even though I was looking at painting, there was this sense of energy, vector, organisation and mapping across the pictorial space. It felt very close to my own choreographic concerns. It was as if she was drawing energy itself.
Julie: That’s interesting, because similar readings started happening around the paintings I made for Documenta*. Jason Moran* once saw them and called them a score – he literally said, “This is a score.” He then brought another collaborator into the space and used them as a way of thinking through performance.
That idea of working alongside, rather than merging practices into one object, really interests me. When you are in conversation or proximity, something starts to bleed across practices even if you’re not making the same work.
And I also see a lot of Renaissance painting in John’s work. Caravaggio in particular feels relevant, because those images are already highly choreographed – yet they also exceed their structure. They’ve shaped so much of how we understand visual culture, from painting to contemporary media.
Even journalistic photography often carries that same inheritance: the way bodies gather, the way scenes are composed, the way narratives are staged. It’s all coming from a longer history of image construction that keeps circulating and reappearing in different forms.
There’s something cyclical about it – the way images we produce today are still structured by earlier ways of seeing, and then reprocessed again through contemporary life.
And with John’s work, what strikes me is this sense of an invisible space being activated. You feel as though the dancers are negotiating forces you can’t see – pulling against something architectural, like tension lines or invisible structures.
The bodies shift between being sculptural and being individual, then they dissolve again into collective form. That movement between states – between presence and abstraction – is what feels so compelling to me. It’s something I’m really excited to see unfold in the space tonight.
Julie, you’ve often spoken about opacity – the idea that a work shouldn’t fully explain itself or fix identity into language, so that it can remain partially illegible or untranslatable. How do you navigate the tension between the impulse to communicate your references and ideas – to construct meaning, not necessarily a story, but some form of narrative – and, on the other hand, this commitment to opacity and openness in the work, both in the paintings and in the choreography?
Julie: For me, the work has to do its own work, you know ? Everything I can say about it – whether I’m talking about process, references, or how I arrived at it – exists alongside the work, not in place of it. The work itself is the primary project.
Making art is the place where I feel most free. It’s a liberatory process, especially in a world structured by expectations and language. Language inevitably falls short of the work. It can open another layer of conversation, but it can never replace the visceral experience of encountering the work itself.
What interests me is that people can have a complete experience of the work without ever knowing its references. I can explain where a photograph came from or what I was thinking in the studio, but once those elements enter the painting, they become something else. Whether someone knows those origins or not doesn’t fundamentally change the encounter.
Years of making have taught me how to pay attention- to the work, to subtle shifts, to intuition. That’s what I can talk about: the process of becoming attentive. But the meaning of the work ultimately belongs to the experience itself.
It’s the same when I encounter John’s work. I leave with thoughts and associations that emerge afterwards, but those aren’t necessarily where the work began. They’re my own references, activated through the encounter. That’s what the most compelling art does, whether it’s painting, dance, music, literature or film. It pushes beyond explanation and reaches a point where it affects you viscerally. For me, that’s fundamental.
John: Aha, I have a lot to say about that. I think it comes down to the relationship between understanding and poetics. I’m not interested in creating a passive audience – I want to activate the audience. That means inviting people into a dynamic relationship with the work rather than telling them what it means.
If I simply say, “This is what the work is,” it’s very easy for someone to settle into that interpretation. But I’m interested in asking: how are you making connections? What associations are you bringing? Julie won’t experience the work in the same way as someone else, and that’s precisely what makes it alive.
So opacity isn’t about refusing communication. It’s about creating a space where meaning is produced through the encounter. Every viewer brings their own history, memories and ways of thinking, and those experiences refract through the work differently.
That’s why I don’t feel the need to explain everything that informed the process. I trust that some of those currents will come through, while others may remain subconscious – even to me. There are logics at work beneath the surface that intuition understands before language does.
For me, leaving that space open isn’t an act of withholding. It’s the opposite. It’s about creating a work that remains dynamically alive, where discovery continues not only for the audience, but also for the artist.
Returning to Wanderings and, somewhat counterintuitively after our discussion of opacity, I want to turn to its material dimension. In images from the work, dancers engage with a large cardboard structure and a mattress. Rather than asking what these objects mean, I’m wondering whether they function in any way as spatial or perceptual anchors for the viewer.
John: The starting point was very practical. We’re working in a gallery with concrete floors, and I needed to think about how the performers could have physical vitality without injuring themselves. So the idea of padding came first.
From there, we were looking at source imagery connected to Julie’s work* – photographic material that isn’t directly legible in the paintings but still leaves a trace. One image that stayed with me was of displaced people in a shelter space, where mattresses are laid out in rows. Each one becomes a kind of temporary home, almost like a raft or a surrogate structure of safety.
That led me to think about the mattress as a threshold object: something that creates a private zone inside a shared, exposed environment. And then, almost immediately, the question of the rectangle appeared – because the mattresses are rectangular, and so are the paintings, and so is the gallery space itself. Those formal correspondences start to generate meaning, but not in a fixed way.
The cardboard emerged alongside that as another material with a different kind of haptic and somatic quality. It’s fragile, protective, improvised. And yes, it also carries associations with how unhoused people use materials to shield themselves from environments that are not built for them.
But I’m careful here, because the moment you name those associations too directly, the work risks being fixed into a single reading. That’s not what we’re doing. There are associative threads, but they remain light and non-insistent.
So for me, it’s always both: material structure and formal relation – rectangles within rectangles – but also these wider resonances that are allowed to hover rather than resolve.
Julie: Yes, and I would agree. It is all of that, but it is also purely formal and material. The cardboard doesn’t function as a literal substitute for a dwelling, and the mattress doesn’t operate as a representation of housing either.
They become something else in the space – another body among bodies. The dancers fold into them, move with them. At the same time, of course, they still carry those wider social realities. We cannot completely separate them from what we see and experience in the world.
John: One thing I should say is that from the beginning I was aware of the risk of over-determining what these objects “mean.” The paintings are the primary visual field, and everything else has to remain careful not to overwhelm that.
What has been exciting in working with Julie is the openness – this sense of “let’s see what happens,” without needing to stabilise the work too early. That kind of trust is rare.
Julie: Yes, and it’s been very generative. Neither of us is interested in repeating what we’ve already done.
Returning to the title of your exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery, Julie: Our Days Like a Shadow: A Non-Abiding Hauntology, I wanted to ask how you understand the figure of the ghost within your practice. You’ve previously described your work as a way of exploring the self at a given moment, and I was wondering how the ghost image relates to self-exploration in your work, if it does.
More broadly, does hauntology function for you as a kind of evolving grammar – something that moves through time rather than fixing it? And in relation to choreography, where movement is always carrying traces of prior bodies, I wonder whether this notion of the ghost is also embedded in the way you think about embodiment and performance.
Julie: The idea of the ghost really emerged for me after 2016 – after Brexit, Trump’s election, and the resurgence of nationalist and fascistic politics. In the United States especially, those histories of slavery, segregation and colonialism are not distant. They’re close enough that many of our parents lived through them. When you hear certain political rhetoric return, you realise how present those histories still are. That’s what feels haunting: the past isn’t over.
That led me to thinkers like Derrida, Mark Fisher and Avery Gordon, who all ask how the spectres of history continue to shape the present. The “non-abiding” part of the title is important to me too. Even ghosts are transient. Nothing remains fixed – not history, not identity, not ourselves.
We’re living in a moment of extreme polarisation, where everything is reduced to certainty and moral absolutes, yet lived experience is full of contradiction, ambiguity and complexity. Hauntology offers another way of thinking about time: not as something we leave behind, but as something continually accumulating inside the present. Like Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, we’re propelled toward the future while facing the past. We’re always participating in that movement.
John: None of us is ahistorical. Whether we’re conscious of it or not, we’re shaped by the conditions we inherit, and those conditions continue through us into the future. That’s where I think the idea of ghosts becomes productive – not as something supernatural, but as a way of understanding transmission.
Somebody who I worked with very early on, in New York City, a dancer for Trisha Brown, who was just such a huge figure in my imaginative consciousness when I was a young maker. She came last night to the dress rehearsal, and just watching her as somebody, you know, who’s 20 years my senior, you know, and realizing that so much of who I am as a maker and as a dance artist is due to those really formative experiences that I had with her, . In a way she was a ghost in the room. And there is also a ghost in me that is being transmitted to this younger generation of dancers.
That’s what interests me about haunting. We don’t simply inherit history; we also decide how we’ll carry it forward. Every artistic gesture participates in a larger unfolding. The question becomes not only what we make, but what kind of haunting we want to leave behind.
*The “Documenta paintings” refers informally to Julie Mehretu’s large-scale works presented at dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel (2012), most notably the Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts) series. Named after the Al-Mogamma administrative building in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, these works engage with sites of political unrest and collective gathering, layering architectural plans, mapping systems, and gestural abstraction into complex fields of marks.
*Jazz pianist and composer who collaborated with Julie Mehretu on MASS (HOWL, eon) (2017). The work developed in a decommissioned church in Harlem, which functioned as a shared studio space where Moran composed in direct response to Mehretu’s painting process.
