New Red Order

The exhibition Civilization with No Secrets is showcasing five video works from the New Yorker collective New Red Order (NRO). In this semester’s collaboration students from Art history, Curatorial Studies and TFM have collaboratively curated the space, encompassing NRO’s artistic and political practice throughout the last 9 years: Never Settle: Calling In (2020), The Violence Of A Civilization Without Secrets (2017), Cultural Capture: Terminal Adddition (2019), What is Savage Philosophy? (2019), Never Settle: Calling In (2020), Give it Back: Stage Theory (2023).

Desire, appropriation, and the construction of Indigenousidentity are the center of New Red Order’s artistic practice. Contrary to historical private secret societies, which guardexclusive knowledge from the public, NRO works as a publicsecret society to expose uncomfortable truths, operating as an open network of informants and accomplices working tocreate better conditions for Indigenous futures. Rather thanapproaching Indigeneity as a fixed or static category, NRO examines the social, historical, and political structures thatcontinue to shape Indigenous and settlers’ imaginaries and representations.

The collective’s practice unfolds within the tensions betweenhistorical violence, cultural appropriation, and contemporaryforms of colonial afterlives. NRO consciously positions itselfin opposition to an American secret society known as the“Improved Order of Red Men.” Founded in 1834, thisfraternal organization appropriated Indigenous symbols and rituals, revealing a fundamental paradox of settler colonialsocieties: the simultaneous desire for Indigeneity and theviolent displacement of Indigenous land, life, and presence. Their practices trace back to the protests of the “Sons ofLiberty”, a network of British colonists resisting British rule, who disguised themselves as Mohawks during the Boston Tea Party protest of 1773. Through this symbolic performance, theappropriation of Indigenous identity became embedded withinnational self-fashioning and political imagination.

NRO revisits this historical image production and shifts itsterms. In disrupting colonial representations, the collectiveasks how enduring settler desires for indigeneity might beredirected toward productive and sustainable ends. Oscillatingbetween activism, performative strategy, and institutionalcritique, NRO opens a space in which history does not appearto be a completed past. The collective exposes thecontradictions of colonial narratives and holds up a mirror toongoing mechanisms of cultural appropriation in the present. They question what forms of collective futures might emergefrom the ruins of colonial structures.

The Art Collective New Red Order (NRO) is a public secretsociety  facilitated by artists Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys that collaborates with informants to createexhibitions, videos, and performances that question and rechannel subjective and material relationships to indigeneity. In their multidisciplinary work they engage with rematriation, the reconstruction of silenced histories and the violent displacement of Indigenous people. Their work has appearedat Artists Space (New York), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Kunstverein in Hamburg, Museum of Modern Art (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art (Detroit), theToronto and the Whitney Biennial and Film Festivals like Sundance.

Text: Zeynep Sude Duyar, Florian Ney, Amelie Zuber, Anna-Maria Dergay

Aufbau: Carla Schuld, Michael Jekel

Kuration: Emma Tomberger