Chris Kraus, Relational, and the Moon
The acclaimed writer sits down with artists Shirley Tse and Dana Berman Duff for a dialogue on breath, the universe, and the ephemeral forces that carry us.
You may know Chris Kraus for her 1997 epistolary novel I Love Dick and other cult classics, or for her experimental films and incisive cultural criticism. For the last two decades, she has also followed and written about the work of Shirley Tse and Dana Berman Duff, and after reading Kraus’s interview with the artists — who collaborate under the name “Relational” — it’s plain to see why their work had such a pull on the writer. Lunar power and tidal waves are among the elements of their video-photo-sculptural exhibition The Universe Breathes Us, a poetic manifesto on the ephemeral forces that carry us.
Speaking of unseen energies, artist Lauren Farkas's whimsical maps trace Knoxville, Tennessee's art ecosystem in felt, wire, animation, and watercolor. Also today, Staff Writer Rhea Nayyar on a new digital archive rooted in oral histories that honors the journalists killed in the Gaza genocide.
—Valentina Di Liscia, senior editor
Shirley Tse and Dana Berman Duff’s Breathing Moons
When sculptor Shirley Tse was invited by her former student Anna Hrund Másdóttir to produce an original exhibition at her cooperative gallery King and Bang in Reykjavik, her first thought was to invite her friend and former teacher, the film and video maker Dana Berman Duff, to collaborate with her.
Geography, landscape, desire and time are some of the interests these two artists shared. The result is an extraordinary manifestation of physical elements — breath, moon and tides — that bind us and the universe.
Working under the name “Relational,” their exhibition The Universe Breathes Us was exhibited at Kling and Bang in 2025, and again this summer at Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles. Both iterations included a live choral performance of an original song by Berman Duff and her husband, the composer-musician Alan Duff Berman. Seeing it for the first time, I was struck by the deceptive simplicity of each of the elements and the subtly seamless ways that they animate each other. | Chris Kraus
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