As I enter the cube of the Westfälischer Kunstverein during a heat wave in Münster, a field of white noise composed from multiple, shifting inputs swallows me.
One layer stages a commercial bird deterrent device, The Bird Chase Super Sonic, which emits recordings of birds in distress as well as predator calls—primarily hawks—in short cyclical bursts. The signals are routed through filters and processing systems that extend and transform their duration and texture. Another layer enters the space from the city itself outside the building: a microphone placed in the plaza continuously transmits the ambient sound of the surrounding city into the exhibition in real time. Nothing is recorded; what is heard is always already in process.
Inside of “Augur”, Steffani Jemison’s first institutional exhibition in Germany, sound from radios, speakers, and a subwoofer distributed across the space overlap, creating a sculptural experience for the body as it vibrates within the sonic field. The bird calls, when they come, interrupt this field with particular force, but they do not stand apart from it. This configuration suggests a broader approach to the exhibition as a whole, as works manifest as elements within an environment that is continuously formed by technical setups, material surfaces, and forms of attention.
My conversation with Steffani Jemison unfolded from within this setup. It follows the same logic of distributed attention, moving across sound, surfaces, drawing, and spatial arrangement without consolidating these forms into a single interpretive frame. It ended with frozen yogurt on a sunny June afternoon…
María Inés Plaza Lazo: As we walk through the exhibition, I keep noticing how much the works change depending on where you're standing. The surfaces never seem to settle. A reflection appears, disappears, then turns into something else. I wondered if you could talk a little about that.
Steffani Jemison: The silvered glass works surrounding us really do change as you move around them. From one angle you see one thing, and then from another angle the image shifts completely. Sometimes what feels present suddenly recedes. That has a lot to do with the material process itself. The surface is never entirely stable.
The lenticular work outside of this room has a similar quality. As you move, the image changes. At certain moments it almost becomes a blue field. It can feel less like an image than a material surface. I find myself returning again and again to works that don’t fully resolve, works that keep changing with movement and attention.
One of the images visible in the lenticular is a tarp. I’ve been working lately with tarps and weatherproof fabrics. They’re such ordinary materials, but I think they're fascinating because they can function in so many ways. They can cover something, protect something, become a temporary roof or a temporary ground. In the United States they’re everywhere. You see them on trucks, at campsites, covering buildings under repair.
Lately I’ve been thinking about them in relation to student encampments at US college campuses as well. There, tarps became improvised architectures. They created spaces of shelter, but they also remained exposed. I think that’s part of what interests me. These materials seem to hold multiple conditions at once. The blue surface appears throughout this body of work. Sometimes it almost blends into the sky. It reflects the atmosphere around it while also asserting itself as an object.
From another angle, the lenticular exposes a collection of bird deterrent devices that shift and flicker as the light changes. They’re intended to distract and confuse flying birds. I find their weird surfaces strangely compelling (apparently so do birds: according to the online reviews, these are not at all effective deterrents!).
Steffani Jemison, Augur, 2026, installation view, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Photo: Thorsten Arendt
MIPL: Tell me about this white noise we’re hearing within the exhibition. Where is it coming from?
SJ: What interests me about sound is that it has a way of transcending any single origin. We listen to it, and we also listen through it. There isn’t a clear signal emerging from noise here. To borrow language from Roland Barthes: there’s more “grain” than “voice”.
One of the sources is a commercial bird deterrent device. It plays recordings of birds in distress as well as predator calls, mostly hawks. Normally it activates for about sixty seconds every ten or eleven minutes. I route those sounds through a series of filters and devices, which creates a continuous environment that keeps changing over time.
The other source comes from outside the Kunstverein. We installed a microphone in the plaza, and that live feed enters the exhibition as well. Nothing is recorded. Everything happens in real time. What you're hearing from outside is always the present moment.
The space is filled with radios, speakers, and a subwoofer. Different layers move through different parts of the room. And when the bird calls activate, you'll hear them immediately.
MIPL: [We listen to the sound of a bird call together.] I couldn't tell you which bird this is. Bird language remains largely mysterious to me.
SJ: Yes, this one is actually a pigeon. Have you ever heard of the app Merlin? If you hear a bird sound, for example when walking through a park, it identifies the bird for you. So useful for those of us who have a hard time distinguishing among bird calls. The device I use in the exhibition has settings for pigeons, starlings, woodpeckers, crows, gulls, and geese. Different environments call for different sounds.
The bird calls mingle with sounds coming from the plaza, which should be familiar. They’re simply the sounds of the city. But once they enter this space, something shifts. They become harder to place. You begin paying attention differently.
MIPL: The installation feels physical. It seems as if the sound waves change the density of the room. It’s a fairly minimal installation in material terms, but it can feel unexpectedly heavy.
SJ: As we’re talking, I’m remembering a connection that I hadn’t consciously thought about while making these works. One text that has stayed with me for a long time is The Confessions of Nat Turner, published in 1831 after Turner and his community of free and enslaved black Virginians successfully rebelled against slaveholders. Turner describes receiving signs and seeing forms of writing in the landscape itself: hieroglyphs that appear in leaves and marks across fields.
I’ve always been fascinated by that image. Partly because it raises questions about legibility. What becomes readable, and under what conditions? But, also, it suggests that language might exist beyond the systems that claim authority over it.
In many narratives by formerly enslaved people, literacy isn’t described as something simply handed down by those in power. Language appears as something encountered through multiple traditions, forms of knowledge, and experiences of the world. I reference Turner’s Confession often, but until this moment, I had forgotten how much the image of language in leaves, specifically, has stayed with me.
MIPL: Listening to you, I found myself thinking about trees. Trees are constantly moving, but much of that movement escapes our attention. Looking at the drawings, they reminded me of roots, branches, veins, pathways. Could you tell me a little more about them?
SJ: I love that observation. When I made these drawings, I was thinking about roots and branches, yes, in relation to feathers and their veins. Through gesture and scale, I was searching for connections between these similar forms.
Leaves and feathers arrive through different evolutionary histories, but sometimes they look remarkably similar because they perform related functions. They distribute movement and energy in related ways. That repetition across scales was very much on my mind.
The works on the wall are a series of more than ninety drawings. Each sheet of glass is silvered and then etched individually, so every drawing is unique.
I spend a lot of time thinking about drawing and writing as related practices. Both begin with movement. Both leave traces.
Steffani Jemison, Augur, 2026, installation view, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Photo: Thorsten Arendt
MIPL: The drawings appear almost like a means of navigation. Not a map exactly, but something that allows connections to emerge.
SJ: I like that. For me the drawings remain quite open. That’s one reason they're leaning rather than being fixed to the walls. They could always be arranged differently. Sometimes I think about them as a constellation. Or perhaps as a scatter plot. There are many possible pathways through them.
Someone might notice a formal relationship between two drawings that I never considered. Someone else might connect works that are far apart in the room. What matters to me is not establishing a single route through the work. I’m interested in creating conditions where relationships can emerge in multiple directions.
MIPL: Earlier, we were talking about maps and constellations. I don’t necessarily see them as opposites. What interests me is that both depend on relationships. A constellation only exists because we decide to connect certain points.
SJ: I think that’s true. My relationship to maps has changed enormously over my lifetime. I grew up before the internet. If you were planning a road trip in the United States, you might go to AAA [the American Auto Association] and ask for a route. They would print a map for you and highlight the journey. Then there was MapQuest, remember? You could generate directions online, but you still printed them out and followed them step by step. Now we move through the world with constantly updating navigation systems at the tips of our fingers.
Mapping systems powerfully shape how we visualize and understand space, power, and control. We move between being immersed in a place and imagining it from above. Between experiencing a landscape and seeing it rendered as information.
My recent performance Cynosure (2026) touches a bit on this question of how it feels to navigate something, make connections, from the inside out and the outside in.The performance unfolds through a sequence of words. Someone says “floor”. Someone else says “ceiling”. Then “gravity”. Then “push”. Then “pull”. The associations keep expanding.
Sometimes they remain abstract. Sometimes they become very specific. Sometimes they become funny. The structure is extremely simple, but what interests me is how meaning develops collectively. The performers create a framework together, but that framework is always changing as they move through it.
MIPL: So performance for you has a defined duration?
SJ: It has a beginning and an end. It’s not “durational” in the strict sense. But because it’s structured as a game, it can be activated again in different contexts. The rules remain recognizable, while the experience changes each time.
MIPL: It’s interesting that the word “play” can refer both to a game and to a performance. That makes me think of the backdrop, a night sky.
SJ: Yes. It’s a found theatrical backdrop that circulated for many years as a rental object. What attracted me was the sense that it carried traces of all those previous uses. You can see the folds, how it has been handled repeatedly.
MIPL: The wear almost becomes a record of movement.
SJ: Exactly. [Pointing to a handwritten portion of the backdrop] And I love that it contains all this practical information as well.
Steffani Jemison, Augur, 2026, installation view, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Photo: Thorsten Arendt
MIPL: Oh, it’s the paint formulas!
SJ: Yes, it’s a recipe. Instructions for how the surface might be produced again.
I’ve never shown the backdrop as an autonomous artwork. It always serves another function. It operates as a support.
MIPL: So, in a sense, it travels with you.
SJ: It does. And what I find compelling is that it seems to do several things at once. It marks a boundary, but it also opens onto something. It’s a surface that suggests depth. It indicates an edge while pointing beyond itself.
MIPL: That seems connected to the lenticular work’s nature. When I first saw it, I thought of a pigeon’s eye.
SJ: The image does resemble an eye, doesn’t it? As I mentioned earlier, this lenticular print emerges from my research into bird deterrent systems. Shiny discs often hung outdoors to create flashes of reflected light. Sometimes people use commercial versions like the one pictured in my work. Sometimes they simply hang old CDs.
I began working with these as an extension of my broader investigation into flight. Flight appears in many different traditions and histories. In Black Atlantic thought, it can represent escape, transformation, possibility. It can also carry associations with disappearance, loss, or death. I don’t think those meanings ever settle into a single interpretation. I’ve also spent time looking at modernist paintings where figures appear suspended, floating, falling, or hovering. I’m interested in those moments where orientation remains uncertain. Perhaps that’s another reason I keep returning to reflective surfaces. They never allow perception to become entirely fixed.
MIPL: Which brings me back to the sculpture at the entrance of the exhibition. At first glance it resembles a tree, but at the same time it feels slightly defensive. I wondered whether it is a readymade?
SJ: Yes! The sculpture is made from commercially produced bird deterrent spikes. I became interested in them after reading about birds incorporating spikes like these into their nests. What was designed to exclude could become part of a shelter. I kept returning to that reversal, not because it resolves anything, but because it reveals how materials can exceed, or even reverse, their intended purpose.
As a sculpture, the system is modular: the elements can be expanded, compressed, rearranged. From a distance you see a larger form—actually two forms, two distinct trees that mingle at the crown. Up close you see many individual components. I find that movement across scale throughout the exhibition. You find it in the drawings, in the sound installation, in the way small gestures accumulate into larger structures.
MIPL: And perhaps also in Broken Fall (Organic) (2008-2009).
SJ: Yes, I think so. Broken Fall is a reenactment of Bas Jan Ader’s work with the same title [from 1971]. I first made it quite early in my practice, and I’ve returned to it in different ways since then. In my version, a young man appears in a very tight frame. He is holding himself up, or trying to, with his arms raised. There is a sense of strain, of trying to maintain position. Then he turns, loses balance, and eventually falls. The sequence is very short, but it repeats continuously.
What changes for me in the reenactment is not only the structure of the gesture, but the body that carries it. In Ader’s work, there is already this language of suspension, of failure, of inevitability. When I restaged it, I was also thinking about what it means for that kind of gesture to be held by a different figure, and how differently vulnerability is read depending on who is seen to be in that position.
The performer in my version is a Black man, opening new questions about the possibility of play, and the uneven distribution of risk and interpretation that attach to certain bodies in space, especially in relation to ideas like falling, failure, or accident.
MIPL: The act of repetition matters for this atomizing historical reflection. It takes something that might otherwise be read as a singular event and holds it in a loop where it no longer resolves into an origin or an end. It becomes a condition that returns without closure.
SJ: I’ve never wanted my practice to settle into a single emotional register. At certain moments it can feel very exposed, almost fragile. At other moments, it can feel oddly neutral, or even detached.
I love it when something that looks like falling can also look like holding, when something that looks like failure can also look like persistence. And none of those readings stay fixed for long. I think the exhibition as a whole moves in that way as well, through changes in register that feel almost stable, but unresolved and unresolvable. For me, this evokes the complexity of our ongoing entanglement with one another, our endurance in the face of structural violence, our persistence within a past, present, and future defined by antagonism.
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- Cover Image:
Steffani Jemison, Augur, 2026, installation view, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Photo: Thorsten Arendt
