UNTITLED 20

And a huge thank you to our Untitled 20 Juror, Tamara Khasanova, who is an independent curator, researcher, and writer based in Brooklyn, New York, originally from Ukraine and Uzbekistan, for their thoughtful work.

Tamara Khasanova selected 27 artists from 254 submissions. And the following is a statement from Tamara about her selections:

My first visit to Minnesota was in December 2024, and since then I've been welcomed back to the Twin Cities a few times now. On these short trips, I've had the chance to meet incredible artists, thinkers, students, and people whose generosity, in ways small and big, made my urge to return even stronger. So I am deeply thankful to the SooVac's team, Carolyn and Alison, for entrusting me with the opportunity to jury the 20th Untitled show this year. As I spent time with the artists and their work, one question I found myself returning to was one’s relationship to land and its powerful pull everywhere one looks, seamlessly threading in and out of the focus. From the subtle signifiers traced across paintings, drawings, and sculptures to horizon lines, indefinite fields and shifting perspectives explored in moving image works and animation, all seem to revolve—whether intentionally or not—around one's being with the land. We encounter it through roads paved by ancestral knowledge, memories of no longer living, outlines of more-than-human companions, traces of words and objects deeply inscribed in our psyche, and environments and devices concocted from elements belonging to places disturbed by human interventions. Reflecting on this is inescapable as our bodies and movements are shaped by the pressures so incessantly and violently imposed on us and as our need to resist them only mounts. Thank you so much to all the artists in this exhibition for offering us multitudes of ways of reckoning with these urgent questions.
-Tamara Khasanova

About This Year's Juror:
Tamara Khasanova is an independent curator, researcher, and writer based in Brooklyn, New York, originally from Ukraine and Uzbekistan. She was a 2024-25 Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program (ISP) and holds an MA degree in Curatorial Practice from the School of Visual Arts. Her research and curatorial work center on emergent aesthetics, pedagogical and discursive practices, and forms of collective knowledge production, oriented toward questions of language, ecology, nuclear legacies, and colonial histories. She has curated exhibitions, organized screenings, lectured, and contributed to projects across cultural, publishing, and educational institutions, including e-flux, Protocinema, Davra Curatorial Lab, White Columns, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, The Clark Art Institute, the Queens Museum, and TransitoryWhite, among others. She currently serves as Studio Director for the artist duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme and is part of the a multi-disciplinary publishing platform Bilna’es.

Untitled 20 Artists:
Morgan Barrie, Elea Besse, Aja Bond, Kristen Brown, Monica Brown, James Byrne, Lulu Luyao Chang, Madelyn Churchill, Kelly Clare, Isabella Covert, Dane Cree, Mike Davis, Emily Dzieweczynski, foxes, Andy Holliday, Emma Ming Kayhart, Delaney Keshena, Meher Khan, Hakeem Martins, Carley Schmidt, Anda Tanaka, Roberto Torres Mata, Genie Hien Tran, Emma Ulen-Klees, Michon Weeks, Ivonne Paulina Jasso Yáñez, and Yasmin Yassin.

Image: Dane Cree