Language Object Index: Book Launch and Discussion

Join artist Mira Dayal and media scholar Shannon Mattern for a launch of Dayal's risograph artist book Language Object Index (2024–25), produced alongside a new body of work on view in conjunctions at Fuller Rosen Gallery, curated by Laurel V. McLaughlin and up through March 16th. 

The exhibition, and Dayal's practice at large, engages with "language objects"—vernacular tools, furniture, and materials associated with writing, narrative, and textual processing. The steel sculptures of conjunctions abstract and alter the functions of these more malleable source objects—usually used to gather, to write, to record, to make an image or story. In the artist’s hands, components are reattached, bent, doubled, solidified, scaled up, and reoriented. This formal play creates ambiguity, heightens emotional tension, and encourages associative readings.

Dayal’s artist book Language Object Index serves as an index for this body of work. After creating steel plates with plasma-cut drawings of key works in this series, Dayal scanned and reprinted the metal “pages” on a risograph machine, compiling a more materially ambiguous counterpart to the represented sculptures. Language Object Index elucidates formal relations and gestures toward narrative structures while embracing distortion and technological breakdown, processes at the root of Dayal’s artistic inquiries.

(she/her) is an artist, writer, editor, and educator based in New York. She produces systems of sculptures that respond to a site’s architecture or history, involve subtle but laborious uses of everyday objects and materials, critically reflect on changing technologies, and expand the limits of language and image. Dayal has held solo and two-person exhibitions at Princeton University, NJ; Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York; Kunstverein Dresden, Germany; Gymnasium, Brooklyn; Lubov, New York; NARS Foundation, Brooklyn; and Abrons Art Center, New York.

Dayal has participated in group exhibitions at the Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Feral File; Barnard College, New York; Miriam, Brooklyn; lower_cavity, Holyoke, MA; Parent Company, Brooklyn; Apparatus Projects, Chicago; Artspace New Haven, CT; OCHI, Los Angeles; Hesse Flatow, New York; NURTUREart, Brooklyn; and other spaces. She has participated in residencies with Ox-Bow, Art in General, and A.I.R. Gallery. Dayal recently co-edited Track changes: a handbook for art criticism (Paper Monument, 2023) and co-publishes the collaborative artist book series prompt:. As an editor and writer, she has contributed over the past decade to numerous art magazines and museum exhibition catalogues. Dayal is on faculty at Barnard College, Parsons School of Design, and the School of Visual Arts, and has previously taught at Hunter College and the International Center of Photography.

Shannon Mattern (she/her) is the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania; the Director of Creative Research at the Metropolitan NY Library Council; and, in 2025, the Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress. From 2004 to 2022, she served in the Department of Anthropology and the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York. Her writing and teaching focus on media architectures and information infrastructures. She has written and (co-)edited books and digital collections about libraries, maps, and urban intelligence; she contributes regularly to public design and interactive projects; and she writes a column about urban data and mediated spaces for Places Journal. You can find her at wordsinspace.net.

Host or Publisher Ray Philly