Details

An accompanying brochure includes a conversation between the artist and curator Charlotte Youkillis.

Drawing on the legacy of Fluxus event scores and instruction-based practices, the exhibition positions the gallery as a spatial map. The sculptures are installed as floor-based works that invite particular comparisons, viewpoints, and pathways through the space. Through their individual designs, the sculptures further evoke a set of performance cues, suggesting functionality or bodily correspondence even as they remain static objects. Instructive texts written by curators, artists, and scholars accompany the works, calling on the viewer’s cognitive engagement to unfold and extrapolate from each work. Taking language as a form of notation, Dayal employs sculpture to communicate and confound acts of labor and performance, generating new associations with each encounter.

A selection of research materials from Dayal’s studio provide insight into the processes behind her sculptural “Language Objects” and contextualize her considerations of abstract topological space, grounded in diagrammatic and mathematical concepts as well as quotidian and art historical applications. The documents range from industrial conveyor belts modeled after the Möbius strip, to diagrams for the manufacturing of paper and steel, to artistic references like the work of the sculptor and architect Siah Armajani and the artist Diane Simpson. A triangular diagram made by Dayal reveals a vocabulary specific to her work that considers the relationships between categories of objects including props, desk sculptures, jigs and scale models. As part of her exhibition-making process, Dayal often creates scale models of the works within the space; encased below the wall of reference materials is a scale model of the ISOVIST exhibition space and the floor-based sculptures on view.

On the adjacent black-curtained wall of the gallery is a graphite drawing that Dayal made while preparing this exhibition: a to-scale tracing of Robert Smithson’s 1966 work A heap of Language. Originally presented on grid paper, the text-drawing reveals Smithson’s attentive spatialization of language, as he stacks words atop one another to create a pyramid. In relation to Dayal’s floor sculptures, her tracing studies the lineage and material parameters of language—and considers how our vocabulary for language has changed over the intervening sixty years, complementing the physical explorations that Dayal carries out with steel.

Together, these works and materials expand upon Fluxus legacies, looking at relationships between written and visual instruction, spatial relationships, and proprioception.

Pictured: Mira Dayal, Double-Stapled Möbius Strip, 2023, steel. Courtesy Spencer Brownstone Gallery.

About the Artist

Mira Dayal lives and works in New York. Her work has been the subject of solo and two-person exhibitions at ILY2, NY; Mehrab Bookshop, Kochi, India; Fuller Rosen Gallery, Philadelphia; Princeton University, NJ; Spencer Brownstone Gallery, NY; Kunstverein Dresden, Germany; Gymnasium, NY; Lubov, NY; NARS Foundation, NY; and Abrons Art Center, NY. Group exhibitions include: The Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Van Abbehuis, Eindhoven, Netherlands; Feral File; Barnard College, NY; Miriam, NY; lower_cavity, Holyoke, MA; Parent Company, NY; Apparatus Projects, Chicago; Artspace New Haven, CT; OCHI, Los Angeles; Hesse Flatow, NY; and NURTUREart, NY, among others. Her work has been covered in Afterimage, the Art Newspaper, BOMB Magazine, the Brooklyn Rail, the Chicago Reader, Frieze, Hyperallergic, and other publications. She has participated in residencies at Fountainhead, the Steel Yard, Ox-Bow, Art in General, and A.I.R. Gallery. Dayal is Senior Editor at Triple Canopy and has previously been an editor at Art in America and Artforum. She publishes the collaborative artist book series prompt: with Nicole Kaack. Dayal holds a BA in Visual Arts - Economics from Barnard College and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is on faculty at Barnard College and the School of Visual Arts.

CCAM ISOVIST Gallery

Read more here.

Admission

Double-Stapled Möbius Strip opens as part of CCAM Fest: Fluxus on Tuesday, February 24 from 6:30–8:30pm. The exhibition will remain on view until Friday, March 27.

ISOVIST is open to the public by appointment Thursday to Saturday from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM (email ccam@yale.edu), and to Yale community members Monday to Friday from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM. 

More Details

The following “instructions” are included as extended object labels within the gallery. The texts were originally commissioned for the artist book Instructions: 9 Sculptures, published on the occasion of Dayal’s exhibition “Steel Model of Paper Copy of Desk Top with Pencil Groove” at Spencer Brownstone Gallery, March 8–May 10, 2025, which included the sculptures on view.

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Slice of Third Rail
2025
Steel

Begin at “I” 

It is a vanishing point

It is the end of a line of infinite length 

Draw four lines around it 

Extrude them into planes 

into walls that hedge it in— 

to a place that is both inside and outside 

Now, stand where all other lines converge at this point 

Now, walk over to it so you are the vanishing point 

—Sreshta Rit Premnath

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Unfolded Map Fold
2024
Steel

A map is a kind of manual. It provides instructions on how to navigate a place but also how to see it. How to see it in relation to other places. How to see it as a history of places and of people traversing those places. What is a blank map then? A map with no names, no locations, no borders—just a suggestion of place. 

Let this no-place map become the topography itself. Leave it outside, like an unhappy readymade. Wait for the rain, for the anticipation, charge, and release of a thunderstorm; then evaporation, like fading ink. Watch the water bead on the slick metal, slide across billowing curves, and spill into furrowed valleys. Let the water form rivers that course through the creases and rush to the edges. Flood the land. 

Think of how this metal mimics paper and how paper is formed when liquid pulp is lifted and sifted from a body of water. Think of the folds that got us here, that create their own lines on the map—invisible, unacknowledged borders. A gridded overlay. Think of how hard it is to reverse or undo the folds in a sheet of paper. Let alone a sheet of steel. Try to press these folds out. Imagine spreading the sheet atop a car’s warm hood. Rigging it up to the battery. Jumpstarting the topography. Let it bake in the sun. Rub with salt or sand or earth. Allow it to collect—or breed—dust. 

Wash clean, start anew. Allow yourself to be seduced by the sculpture’s already lustrous surface, the way it simultaneously absorbs and reflects light. Maps are, after all, as alluring and elusive as places themselves. 

—Chris Murtha

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Six-Part Separation of Inner Profile of Detached Ferrule in the Style of Bi Discs
2025
Steel

​​Instructions for Flattening Metal Objects:

Find a metallic item in your daily life. Place it upright on a clean surface. 

Look at the object from directly above. 

Move your gaze sidewards ever so slightly, so that the bottom of the object creeps into view. Perhaps squint your eyes. 

Mentally slice the object into three fine planes: fore, middle, and background. 

The object is now flat. 

Alternatively, gnaw on the end of a pencil until the metal ferrule becomes flat in your mouth.

—Sophie Rose

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Double-Stapled Möbius Strip
2023
Steel

• Cut a strip of paper that is 10 times longer than it is wide 

• Twist the paper so its underside touches its topside, in the form of a loop 

• The edges of the ends should not overlap 

• Staple the paper with two staples equidistant from the top and bottom edges of the paper, equidistant from each other 

• The staples should be inserted so one punctures the top side; the other should puncture the bottom side 

• Remove the staples and unfold the paper 

• Trace the contours of the paper and scale it to 8 times its original size 

• Transfer this drawing to a sheet of steel 

• Cut the steel along the edges of the drawing 

• Twist the steel into the same form as the paper; repeat the same exercise so that the top side touches the bottom side, but the shortest edges of the paper do not overlap 

• Puncture two holes into each end of the steel 

• Cut two pieces of thick steel into strips, 30 times longer than they are wide 

• Score the edges of the strips twice, a quarter of the length of each strip from the end of the material 

• Fold the strips at 90 degrees inward from each score line 

• Insert the ends of one strip through the holes that were punched in the thin sheet 

• Fold the ends so they lie flat against the thin piece of steel 

• Repeat this action again with the second strip, but this time the 90-degree ends should be inserted through the punched holes in the opposite direction of the previous strip 

• Fold the ends of the second strip so they lie flat against the thin piece of steel

 —Ella den Elzen

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Sreshta Rit Premnath is a multidisciplinary artist and the founding editor of Shifter. Based in Brooklyn, Premnath is Associate Professor of Art at Williams College.

Chris Murtha is a writer and curator based in Brooklyn, NY. His writing has appeared in Artforum, Art in America, ArtReview, Cultured, e-flux, Frieze, Mousse, and elsewhere.

Sophie Rose is a curator and arts writer working on Gadigal Country. She is currently Assistant Curator, International Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Ella den Elzen is a curator based in New York.