Kenneth Tam
Silent Spikes
July 17—November 16, 2025
Silent Spikes reflects on the entangled histories of Westward expansion and Chinese immigration, examining how they shape cultural myths and collective memory. Through a two-channel video installation and accompanying photographs, Kenneth Tam explores the performance of masculinity—how it is constructed, codified, and mythologized in iconic tropes like the cowboy.
The video references the 1867 strike by Chinese railroad workers in the Sierra Nevada Mountains—one of the largest labour actions in U.S. history. Between the 1840s and 1870s, Chinese workers played a critical yet often overlooked role in constructing two transcontinental railways: the Central Pacific in the United States and the Pacific Railway in Canada. These histories are evoked through interpretive narration and filmed sequences shot in the abandoned tunnels of Northern California—monumental voids carved into the landscape by these workers, now haunting symbols of erasure and endurance.
In the making of Silent Spikes, Tam worked with a group of untrained Asian American men, inviting them into a collaborative and unscripted process. Some don cowboy attire and echo the gestures of rodeo riders, while others engage in loosely scored solo and group activities that blur the boundary between roleplay and self-expression. Through this process, new and expansive expressions of male identity emerge—shaped by tenderness, resistance, and emotional complexity. Through their unscripted collaboration, the artist and his participants honour inherited struggles while centring vulnerability and connection as reparative forms of male embodiment.
Curated by Kanika Anand
Upcoming Programs
Program Archive
Photo by: Shane Lavalette
About the Artist
Kenneth Tam (he/him)
Kenneth Tam was born in Queens, NY and attended the Cooper Union. He is based in Houston, TX and is an assistant professor at Rice University, as well as faculty at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. He has had solo exhibitions at Bridget Donahue, NY; ICA LA, CA; Queens Museum, NY; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), CA; Cantor Arts Center, CA; Ballroom Marfa, TX; and MIT List Visual Arts Center, MA. He was previously a Core Fellow at the MFAH, and is a recipient of grants from Art Matters, the Jerome Foundation, NYFA and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He is represented by Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles
Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Kenneth Tam uses video, sculpture, installation, movement, performance, and photography to examine themes including the performance of masculinity, the transformative potential of ritual, and expressions of intimacy within groups. Tam often implicates the male body in his projects, using humour and pathos to reveal the performative and unstable nature of identity, and often creates situations that foreground tenderness and vulnerability within unlikely settings.
About the Curator
Kanika Anand (she/her)
Kanika Anand is the Senior Curator at Contemporary Calgary, Canada and co-curator of the Indian Ceramics Triennale, India. Her curatorial approach focuses on placemaking and social practices that interrogate structures of power and modes of engagement. Through a lens of interstitial discourse, constructs of time, social space, and traces of mobility remain a keen area of interest and research.
She holds a Bachelor’s degree in History from Delhi University and a Master’s degree in Art History from the National Museum Institute, India. She has been curatorial fellow at the Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble, France (2012-13) and fellow at the Global Cultural Leadership Programme, organised by the Cultural Diplomacy Platform and the European Cultural Foundation (2018). She has worked extensively with galleries and institutions across North America, France and India and has worked on major exhibitions of work by Yoko Ono, Chitra Ganesh, Diane Arbus, Marcel Dzama, Paola Pivi. She has written for art journals like Ocula, Art India, and Art Basel and has contributed to several books on contemporary art.
