Jill Magid: Tender: Presence 

Production | Exhibition Grant

Tender: Presence is a documentary and an elegy that poetically reflects on the intertwined tragedies of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Limning the dynamics of circulation, value, and exchange that shape our collective social fabric, the film mediates the various conceptual threads of the project’s first chapter: Magid’s 2020 Creative Time-commission of the same title, for which she laser engraved the appropriated phrase “The body was already so fragile” onto 120,000 pennies—the equivalent of a $1200 COVID-19 stimulus check—and distributed them to bodegas in every NYC borough. Magid initiated the first chapter of the project in September 2020 and the pennies continue to silently circulate throughout the US economy. Documenting this dispersed monument to the intertwined nature of the human body and the body politic, Tender: Presence combines footage from the Federal mint in Pennsylvania, drawing parallels between the whirring minting machines and the hum of hospital ventilators, between the armored trucks that deliver coins and the refrigeration trucks that stored bodies in New York City in the spring of 2020. Scored by composer T.Griffin, the film will premiere in a multi-media, immersive and publicly accessible installation in the grand hall of the iconic Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower. This site-specific event brings Tender: Presence from a conceptual, dispersed monument into an embodied, experiential memorial.