Descent animates alternative modes and materials of inheritance across generations of families, artists, and artworks. While inheritance, influence, and other acts of transmission often move down vertical lines of property and patrimony,
the works in this exhibition unsettle this passage with forms of heredity that are
often undervalued or unconventional: used or surplus possessions, intergenerational collaborations, maternal memories and matter, transatlantic journeys, spoken words, and sound waves. Descent will be on view from April 29 through August 14, 2016 in ICA’s Edna S. Tuttleman Gallery.

The distinct smell of cedar emanates from Virginia Overton’s work, composed of
wood planks harvested from the artist’s family farm in Tennessee. This raw substance infuses the space of the gallery with the sensuous specificity of Overton’s
inherited matter. Notes from Underground (2013), a video projection by Lisa Tan,
excavates the subterranean and sonic echoes between the artist’s and Susan Sontag’s experiences as expatriates in Stockholm. As the work unfolds, it thickens
with multisensory strata of various affective encounters with disruption and displacement.

Runo Lagomarsino’s video installation traces the shared transatlantic
journeys of the artist and his father through the illicit itinerary of a dozen eggs,
which travel from Buenos Aires to São Paulo to their final destination in Seville
before a statue commemorating Christopher Columbus’s own voyage. In many of
these works, maternal transmissions dovetail with questions around performance
and reproduction. Karina Aguilera Skvirsky’s Los poemas que declamaba mi
mamá (The Poems My Mother Recited) (ongoing) restages the Ecuadorian poetry
recitals of the artist’s mother, who became well-known for her dramatic readings.
Matriarch, comprised of artists Maren Hassinger and her daughter, Ava Hassinger,
will create new work out of used ICA office supplies and detritus from previous
exhibitions, arranging these site-specific residues into mandala structures in and
among videos. Both Aguilera Skvirsky and Matriarch will perform in their respective
installations on the evening of May 11.

Transmissions within and across artworks and artists reverberate throughout the
gallery as unexpected genealogies and unruly inheritance. This exhibition considers
the aesthetic, sensory, and social horizons when we dissent from traditional
lines of descent.