Every time I’m asked for a bio for some thing or other, I begin to question what this 300 words or so signifies via its evolutionary history. Performative Instagram profiles tell a lot with little. Mine currently stands with a dEUS lyric “Just a lonely boy… Would you be my enemy?” from a song named “Pocket Revolution”. In art college, when first confronted with the artist statement, which gets conflated with the bio when you venture out into the real world later on, you fill the lone paragraph with context & theory. You feel, or are told, that you need to be verbally situated in the present, the now, but to also exhibit & reference the past, so you are not floating without a leash or standing on thin ice. Over time you erase most sentences & retain the few that sound good rather than mean anything really. The words exhibit what is relevant today & what won’t be relevant tomorrow. You will change & the world will change too. And yet words have a tendency to typecast the artist when institutional recognition comes your way. When you stop writing your artist statement it means you have settled in, become the 300 words you had written 5,10, more years ago, embalmed in the letters of other people’s appreciation. The artist’s bio, in which the professional artist largely lists their institutional achievements & attachments, is more machine than meaning. When, or if, you catch that wave of institutional recognition, which happens all at once rather than incrementally, the list of awards & institutions will amass hedonistically to leave no room for the artist. You will be more institution than words. As the years pass, & the wave crashes to shore, petrified achievements will be replaced with new lively ones over time. And when your footsteps inevitably disappear from view or withdraw, replaced by the new, words won’t matter anymore, except for “archive”. I was asked to submit a bio the other day. So I rewrote it. I began the steady process of institutional erasure. It felt good. Freeing. As one artist said to me recently after deciding to withdraw: “I’ve decided to take art back for myself.”