Give it Back: Stage Theory

New Red Order is a public secret society of rotating membership, including core contributors Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys, that collaborates with informants to create exhibitions, videos, and performances that question and rechannel subjective and material relationships to indigeneity. Through their ongoing project, Give it Back, New Red Order investigates, presents, and promotes actualized gestures of land being “voluntarily” returned.

For Give it Back: Stage Theory, New Red Order approached the archives of St. Louis institutions, investigating the city’s role in histories of loss and Native dispossession along multiple timescales from ancient Cahokia to modern genocide—from St. Louis operated as the premier site of deployment for the Indian Wars to the razing of Mississippian mounds to clear space for the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair—including the present-day occupation of contested Indigenous lands. Reviewing these cases as a collection agency which pursues debts due, they consider what might be positioned as cures for St. Louis’s historical and ongoing engagement with Indigenous peoples.

Give it Back: Stage Theory is presented in partnership with the St. Louis Art Museum where it is on view as a part of the museum’s New Media Series. Give it Back: Stage Theory is supported in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.