Beginning in 2017, Level Ground’s Artist Residency is one of our favorite annual programs, offering dedicated mentorship, training, and production resources to a cohort of emerging, underrepresented artists who each work to create a new project exploring the multiplicities of identity. This program, led by our Director of Artist Residency Leslie Foster, culminates every year in each artist’s first solo gallery show.

In this series of posts, you’ll read interviews with each of our 2020 resident artists: gabbah baya, Emmet Prieto Webster, and Coffee Kang. Having been notified of their acceptance in February, we were fortunate to meet with each of the residents in person before the pandemic. We’ve postponed their solo shows, which were initially scheduled for fall 2020, until (fingers crossed) summer of 2021, and all shows will be conducted in gallery spaces that have strict physical distancing guidelines and COVID protocols in place.

It is with huge admiration for the resilience, patience, and creativity of these three artists that we invite you to delve deeper into their artistic practices and residency projects.

gabba baya (they/them) works with experimental game design to create hyperreal spaces in which they address gender, race, and international politics. They chatted with Art & Practice curator and community lead Joshua Oduga (he/him) and associate editor of PIN-UP Drew Zeiba (they/them) about their Level Ground residency project, Ein Karem, which seeks to preserve and recontextualize Palestinian locations, buildings, and artifacts.

Artist portrait by Tina June Malek. Images provided by gabbah baya. Interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Joshua Oduga: One of the things that I admire about you is your commitment to leveling up your skills, so I want to start by asking why, and what new skills you’re applying to your work?

gabbah baya: Yeah, I love learning new things, and I guess that’s because I have a vision of where I want to be, and that vision just requires a lot of skills, so I have to learn them. If I want to get to that point where I can make a multilevel, virtual or augmented reality video game, I’m going to do everything I can to eventually get to that level.

Recently, I’ve also been prioritizing sustainability and learning how to do things for yourself in general. I’m teaching myself things like soap making, things that would save the environment if we just made them ourselves. I think it's really helpful. The more you know about every single thing, the more you can create. That's the great thing about technology: it's constantly updating. I feel like if I were a 2-D person, I'd get frustrated sometimes by the lack of experimentation. 

JO: In the commercial gaming world, mistakes are unwelcome, but in your work, you're interested in disrupting that very idea. How do error and mistake play into the creative and cultural aspects of your work?

GB: I just don't see a purpose in making everything a perfect, scalable size and proportion to the player. I don't see a purpose behind why the building has to be relatively sized to what it would be in real life. It just doesn't make sense to me. If you have a world where you can truly do anything, why can't the building be not a building, but a thing that represents something else?

I think I've always embraced all of my mistakes because when you teach yourself how to make video games, you're going to end up making a lot of them. I came to a point that instead of trying to fix my mistakes or make them perfect, I kind of liked them the way that they were. So sometimes in my work, you see something looking really cool and different, and it was really just improperly attached. I just thought it was more interesting.

How does that speak to cultural practices? When I think about my work, it's about Palestine, and I'm never trying to make it accurate. I'm trying to create something different out of it—not just a historical analysis but also a fictional one. A mistake that I make can sometimes end up fitting better for the whole concept, rather than making it “perfect.” It just works better somehow.

Drew: Can you speak more to your views of inaccuracy? How do you blend real images and history of Palestine with your disinterest in accuracy and then represent it all in your project?

GB: I've always really liked the concept of absurdity—the absurdity of things, of comedy, absurd visuals and things like that. That's why the inaccuracy or sometimes the scale is just so absurd: I'm not trying to convince you that this is real. Rather, I'm trying to convince you that maybe we could create this or something like it.

On the flipside, preservation is really important to me because I plan to end up documenting all of Palestine. Eventually that will be my entire project. It's important to me because right now, if you're trying to search objects or images of Palestine online, there’s a lack of resources. It's not in the self-interest of Israel to preserve Palestinian history, so we have to do it. We've taken it on as individuals in all of our different ways. I'm making sure that I'm able to conserve something digitally, and that someone else is able to experience it, because not only is there a cutoff from reality when you're watching or looking at something, there's also a disconnect from, like, the physical bricks. For example, the village I visited in Palestine, a lot of Palestinians can't physically access that space. They're not allowed to leave the West Bank, or they're not allowed to leave Gaza, so this is also a way to make sure that people have a chance to see Palestine themselves.

I don't think it's important to be accurate in showing how we get to these objects that actually exist somewhere else in space. What I think is important is the object itself, because we're already so removed. So many of us from Palestine are removed from these places, and they're not existing in the context that we would even want for these places. I went to find a cemetery that was in a book called All That Remains. I was following the directions trying to find the cemetery, but I couldn't see anything because it was now a park in a Hasidic neighborhood. There was no sign to say that it was a Palestinian grave, cemetery or anything. Things like that are already being subsumed by contexts where they're not being appreciated or cared for, and they are often demolished. If a place exists in a context that doesn't even feel like it's ours, then why recreate that in a video game? Might as well make our own whole damn thing.

Drew: Where do you see yourself as the creator of these environments and games, and where do you see the viewer or participant in how you think through the bigger themes of power and access that your work is often grappling with?

GB: I try as a creator to think of myself as just that: a creator. I'm trying to create something as open and free as possible but also impressive in its own right. Technology for free and for freedom. In trying to think as a creator, I also try to encourage other women of color especially, to show that it’s possible for them to do these things, too. It's not all just in the hands of white men. A lot of times, people don't think I make my own work, so as a creator that's something that's super important to me. Showing people that you can make this work, for free, and you can make amazing work for free.

In terms of the player, I think about that a lot. It's important for me to kind of write a story but let someone else experience it. A way to preserve history and expose this history that is inaccessible for other Palestinians. I got into this when the whole ISIS Syria thing was happening. I just blew up a bunch of old pre-Islamic architecture, then so did a bunch of other 3D artists that day. We built the architecture and then made them free to download online. It's just really important to me to preserve our history, to read the things I can and try to pass it down to other people playing the game. The only way that we can preserve the history of Palestine is to say its name as much as possible, to make work about it, write about it, talk about it. experience it, to show it to other people who don't know a lot about it, to hear it from a different voice.

As an interdisciplinary worker – using sound, video, and 3D animation – gabbah baya develops a world where multifaceted, sometimes contradictory, realities exist simultanesouly. Find more of gabbah Baya’s work on Instagram @gabbahbaya.

Joshua Oduga is a first generation Nigerian American independent curator, artist, and community organizer based in West Adams, Los Angeles. Find Joshua on Instagram @tundeoduga.

Drew Zeiba is a New York-based writer of art criticism, cultural journalism, and fiction. Find Drew on Instagram @drewzeiba.

You can learn more and support gabbah baya’s Level Ground residency project here.