The Los Angeles premiere of Abattoir, U.S.A.!, and the book launch of Bad Infinity: Selected Writings, with an introduction from Kyle Thomas Hinton.

Please note that after its initial presentation, Abattoir, U.S.A.! will screen on loop throughout the evening.

Drawing from her long-term research on agricultural and industrial architecture, Dean presents a new film surveying the interior of an American slaughterhouse. The work considers the importance of these structures in the development of modernist architecture and urban design, influencing the work of a generation of European architects such as Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier. The omission of the slaughterhouse, or abattoir, from this narrative leads to questions about the relationship between modernism and death, as Dean engages with one such site and its entanglements with fundamental questions of humanity.

Compiled here for the first time, the selected writings of Aria Dean (b. 1993, Los Angeles) mount a trenchant critique of representational systems. A visual artist and filmmaker, Dean has also emerged as one of the leading critical voices of her generation through a body of writing that maps the forces of aesthetic theory, image regimes, and visibility onto questions of race and power. Dean's work across media has long been defined by what she calls a “fixation on the subject and its borders,” and the texts collected here filter that inquiry through digital networks, art history, and Black radical thought. Equally at home discussing artists who embrace difficulty—from Robert Morris to David Hammons, Lorna Simpson, and Ulysses Jenkins—and conceptual frameworks such as Afropessimism, Dean often contends with how theoretical positions brush against the grain of lived reality: how the Structuralism handed down from the academy, for instance, can be commingled with critiques of structural racism, or how Georges Bataille's notion of base matter transforms through an encounter with Blackness.