Mary Reid Kelley & Patrick Kelley, Aïda Muluneh

Episode No. 335 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artists Mary Reid Kelley & Patrick Kelley, and Aïda Muluneh.

The Baltimore Museum of Art is exhibiting "Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley: We Are Ghosts" through August 19. The exhibition features two new works by Mary Reid Kelley and her collaborator Patrick Kelley: This is Offal (2016) and In the Body of the Sturgeon (2017), as well as sets and costumes from the films and related lightboxes. The exhibition debuted at the Tate Liverpool before arriving in Baltimore, where it was curated by Kristen Hileman. Baltimore and the Tate produced a small catalogue for the show. As of posting time it's not available from the BMA's store. 

This is Offal debuted as a live performance at the Tate Modern on November 19, 2015. (The video from that performance is available below.) It was inspired by Thomas Hood’s 1844 poem "The Bridge of Sighs," in which a forensic pathologist (Patrick Kelley), is frustrated by the suicide of a young woman (Mary Reid Kelley) whose body is pulled from the Thames River.

In the Body of the Sturgeon tells the story of a fictional American submarine near the end of World War II and its learning of the American dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima via a broadcast from President Harry S Truman.

On the second segment Aïda Muluneh discusses her work, which is included in "Being: New Photography 2018" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibition, which was curated by Lucy Gallun, is on view through August 19. Muluneh is an Ethiopian photographer whose work is in the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art and the Hood Museum at Dartmouth.

See images of art discussed on this week's show.