Projects

Sensing Our Relations; Choral Registers

“Sensing Our Relations” and “Choral Registers” were a series of public programs accompanying This Unfathomable Weight at the Blackwood Gallery. In the first instalment of this series, “Sensing Our Relations,” writer and artist SA Smythe lead a writing workshop interrogating regimes of meaning-making in the context of ongoing catastrophe, and the relationship between language, violence, and possibility. The second instalment, led by curator Sarah Edo, took the form of “Choral Registers”– a reading group on repetition, gesture, and the haptic in Black diasporic cosmologies.

Refiguring the Future

The Refiguring the Future conference, co-organized with Lola Martinez, kicked off the opening weekend for the exhibition of the same name. Presented in partnership with the REFRESH collective, Eyebeam, and Hunter College Art Galleries, the conference convened artists, educators, and writers to think through concepts of world-building, ecologies, disability and accessibility, biotechnology and the body. Participants included: Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Zach Blas, Morehshin Allahyari, Ruha Benjamin, micha cárdenas, Taeyoon Choi, Bojana Coklyat, Sofía Córdova, Hayley Cranberry, Jaskiran Dhillon, Shirin Fahimi, Kadija Ferryman, Shannon Finnegan, Aljumaine Gayle, Anneli Goeller, Kathy High, shawné michaelain holloway, In Her Interior (Virginia Barratt and Francesca da Rimini), Cori Kresge, Yo-Yo Lin, Claire Pentecost, Rasheedah Phillips, Legacy Russell, Tiare Ribeaux, Ladan Siad, stud1nt, Sofía Unanue, Alexander Weheliye, and Pinar Yoldas.

somehow i found you: on Black Archival Practices

somehow I found you was a working group initiated with Whippersnapper Gallery at The ArQuives, on Black archival practices. The group traces how histories of Black queer and trans art acts require queer engagements with the archive. In lieu of the empiricism/recorded evidence that could never account for Black life, the group takes up oral histories, zines, and internet ephemera, all to ask: what happens when we look at our absence from the archive not solely in terms of loss/erasure, but also as providing new modes of archiving/”storying” Black queer and trans histories? When our lives are on the line, how are we to find out about each other? What if we were to consider our selfies and 3 A.M. social media posts as a different kind of Black queer/trans archiving? Examining the politics of canonization (who gets to be archived and why?), and what it means to be archived in institutions that collapse “diversity” into the settler colonial project, the group asks: who is listening to us, and how do our works reach one another?

recurrence

recurrence is a group exhibition exploring the strategies we use to confront both current and inherited historical violence. How do small acts of resistance make for queer wiggle room within the constraints of existing power structures? Collectively, the works in the exhibition offer playful takes on everyday queer life, femme intimacies, camp aesthetics, rewritten colonial archives, and Black trans refusal. Featuring the work of Adrienne Crossman, Alli Logout, Kim Ninkuru, and Fallon Simard.