5TH ANNUAL
HOLDING WHAT CAN’T BE HELD

​GROUP EXHIBITION   October 9 – October 30, 2021
OPENING RECEPTION   Saturday, October 9th 7pm

ARTISTS   Teal Gardner, Pato Hebert, Saratops, Lara Almarcegui, Huma Aatifi, Jeremiah Day, Tim Andreae

Holding What Can't Be Held invites artists to contemplate the legacy of Idaho's involvement in the nuclear industry and the radioactive waste in our own backyard.
After a visit to the Idaho National Laboratory and after learning about the radioactive clean-up program, participating artists are showing work that came about as a byproduct of two years of holding this material in contemplation. 

MING Studios is pleased to present the 5th and now expanded edition of Holding What Can’t Be Held, unfolding throughout the Fall in a series of specific formats to offer a unique reflection from multiple points of view on our nuclear age, and how those lessons have broader meaning for ecology and public life. 
                                 
Over the years, this special project has become a Boise institution: bringing artists from Idaho and around the world together to engage, reflect and unpack the landscape of Idaho National Laboratories.  The INL as a site is home to the history of nuclear power’s development and also the waste from nuclear weapons production, saddling Idahoans with the radical dangers, the enormous expense and the geologic time-frames posed by radioactive waste. In collaboration with the Snake River Alliance, Tim Andreae has built Holding What Can’t Be Held as a civic / cultural project with the assumption that sometimes art can be the best way to ask questions that day-to-day life simply never makes space for.  
 
This expanded version also marks the moment of the INL's shift from cleaning up the waste that was buried above the Snake River Aquifer to producing more waste through the construction of new reactors, a project that enjoys almost total support from the political system, despite widespread public reservations.  In this sense HWCBH not only engages with the philosophical questions of nuclear technology, but it asks political questions of the first order - questions on the front burner for Idaho citizens of today and tomorrow.

HOLDING WHAT CAN'T BE HELD: ​EVENTS & EXHIBITIONS PROGRAM
 
Two Nights of Performance with Jeremiah Day: August 20th and 21st, 9PM
                              
Folk Night: A performance prelude to HWCBH: Friday, September 17th, 7PM 
Teal Gardner, Saratops and Tim Andreae will engage participants with original songs and dances in the folk tradition on topics and stories related to the INL.

GROUP EXHIBITION   Holding What Can’t Be Held: October 9 - October 30, 2021
Teal Gardner, Pato Hebert, Lara Almarcegui, Huma Aatifi, Saratops,
Jeremiah Day, & Tim Andreae
 
Local nuclear watchdog and clean energy advocate The Snake River Alliance presents: Our Radioactive Backyard: Thursday, October 21st, 7PM           
A panel discussion focused on the current projects and potential threats underway at the Idaho National Laboratory. 

SOLO EXHIBITION: BASALT, Lara Almarcegui
EXHIBITION   December 11 - January 28, 2022
OPENING   Saturday, December 11, 7PM
ARTIST TALK   Thursday, January 13, 5PM

HOLDING WHAT CAN’T BE HELD

Two Nights of Performance with Jeremiah Day 
Friday August 20th & Saturday August 21st, 9PM

​Berlin-based American artist Jeremiah Day (1974) re-examines landscapes of politics and civics, revealing their subjective contexts and traces. To do this, he Day has developed a narrative and choreographic form in which personal and political realities intermingle, thus offering a thoroughly singular vision of these at times forgotten moments of history.  Often working together with figures like dancer Simone Forti, the band Chicks on Speed, or thinkers and activists like Fred Dewey, collaboration and self-organization of cultural spaces and events are key aspects of Day's vocabulary.
 
Day's contribution to Holding What Can't Be Held brings the question of nuclear waste into the broader frame of preservation, political organization and our ecological crisis.  Day's first connection to Idaho was his longterm project on Idaho icon Frank Church, which Ming Studios will present in 2022.  These two evenings of performance will be Day's first presentation of his work in Idaho and will be accompanied by the launch of his new publication If Its For The People, It Needs To Be Beautiful She Said.
 
Day graduated from the Art Department of the University of California, Los Angeles and attended the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam. Day is represented by Arcade, London and Brussels and Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam.