Cassils Cassils

Artforum Dec 01, 2025

Jean-Luc Nancy’s 1996 treatise Being Singular Plural suggests that “being is always ‘being with,’ that ‘I’ is not prior to ‘we,’ that existence is essentially co-existence.” Queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, in The Sense of Brown (2020), draws on Nancy’s notion of being and selfhood as essentially relational to articulate a sense of “a collectivity with and through the incommensurable.” For Nancy and Muñoz, the notions of “being with” and “being alongside” conceptualize a collectivity based not on singularity and homogeneity, but rather on multiplicity and heterogeneity. 

This vision of a collective rooted in the recognition of difference rather than in the comforting fictions of sameness is at the heart of the artist Cassils’s latest durational performance, Undersight, developed in collaboration with lighting artist Christopher Kuhl and curated by Renata Azevedo Moreira for the City of Toronto’s Nuit Blanche arts festival. 

Read more here.