7 Works to Bend Time
The artists in this exhibition- Mercedes Azpilicueta, Free Yannoh Bangura, Madeleine Hunt Ehrlich, Marcella Ernest, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, and Nalo Hopkinson- repair the damage wrought by colonial models of time. As they conjure forth the future they need, they can be said to bend time, reaching backwards to the strength and wisdom of ancestors to craft a better future. The exhibition asks what practices and ways of being opposed settler-colonial temporality in the past- and what new forms of non-hegemonic time might emerge? It refuses to craft yet another plea to the dominant culture for justice, and instead offers windows into worlds where time is not a colonizing device.
The artists offer multiple viewpoints on what scholar Kinitra Brooks has called conjure feminism – the political, social and spiritual practices that marginalized women have developed in the face of discrimination and adversity. According to Brooks, conjure feminism “liberates the diasporic knowledge and folkloric practices of spirit work. Its cosmological framework provides Black folks with the fluidity necessary to survive and thrive in a constantly shifting, perilous world.” The work presented here opens portals to the past while affirming another future is possible.
Mercedes Azpilicueta (b. La Plata, Argentina) is a visual artist, poet and performer currently based in Amsterdam. Referring to herself as a “dishonest researcher,” Azpilicueta explores topics from art history to popular music, and from literature to street culture. She falls in love with dissident figures- those feminist, queer, migrant, and exiled individuals- who appear in her performances and videos. Her work has been exhibited at CAC Brétigny (Brétigny-sur-Orge, 2021), Museion (Bolzano/Bozen, 2020), van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, 2019), CentroCentro (Madrid, 2019), MACBA (Barcelona, 2018), Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (Móstoles, 2017), Onomatopee (Eindhoven, 2016), TENT (Rotterdam, 2015), Móvil (Buenos Aires, 2015), Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin, 2014) and Het Veem Theatre (Amsterdam, 2014). She received the Pernod Ricard Fellowship in 2017 and was artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie van de Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam in 2015-16. She has an MFA from the Dutch Art Institute/ArtEZ, Arnhem (2013), and a BFA from the Universidad Nacional de las Artes, Buenos Aires (2007).
Free Yannoh Bangura is the founder of Untold RVA, an organization dedicated to commemorative justice and the abolition of white supremacy. Rooted in activism, she creates art installations that celebrate ancestral wisdom in the present. Untold RVA is dedicated to making visible the rich yet often unseen history of Richmond, Virginia. She founded the organization in 2013 with the goal that Richmond become a replicable prototype for other southern cities struggling to address the negative effects of toxic narrative exclusion and racist public art. Through commemorative justice projects such as the 11:11 Portal, she incorporates the unique ancestor stories of marginalized communities into the front lines of our most important social movements. Bangura’s work for racial justice, belonging and repair incorporates precolonial West African ancestral remembrance traditions, such as those from Sierra Leone, from where her ancestors originated and where she currently maintains dual citizenship. According to Bangura, “the magnificence of today’s collective work will one day become the crowning legacy of our ancestral connection to those who will stand on our own shoulders, both rooted and rising.”
Madeleine Hunt Ehrlich is a filmmaker and artist who has completed projects in Kingston, Jamaica, Miami, Florida and extensively in the five boroughs of New York City. Her work has screened all over the world including at the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of Art in New York and in Film Festivals such as New Orleans Film Festival, Doclisboa and Blackstar Film Festival. She has been featured in Essence Magazine, Studio Museum’s Studio Magazine, ARC Magazine, BOMBLOG, and Guernica Magazine, Small Axe journal among others. She was named on Filmmaker Magazine’s 2020 “25 New Faces of Independent Cinema List” and is the recipient of a 2020 San Francisco Film Society Rainin Grant, a 2019 Rema Hort Mann Award, a 2019 UNDO fellowship and grant, a 2015 TFI ESPN Future Filmmaker Award and a 2014 Princess Grace Award in film. Her work has been recognized by the Time Inc. Black Girl Magic Emerging Director’s series, the National Magazine (ELLIE) Awards and she has received grants from the National Black Programming Consortium and Glassbreaker Films. Madeleine has a degree in Film and Photography from Hampshire College and has an MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University. She is currently an Assistant Professor in film and television production at CUNY – Queens College in New York City.
Marcella Ernest is an interdisciplinary Ojibwe artist and scholar. Her abstract filmmaking employs soundscapes, rhythm, multi-media installations, large-scale projections and experimental aesthetics to address critical issues of gender, sexuality and history. She examines how film and photography – historically used as a tool of colonialism – are being reclaimed in the visual and sonic scholarship of contemporary Native artists. As an artist and scholar, she examines how Native art makes critical interventions that are aesthetically and intellectually arranged with the intention of displacing master narratives. She received a PhD in American Studies at the University of New Mexico in 2020 and an MA from the University of Washington’s Native Voices program. Her award-winning pieces are screened and exhibited in museums, fine art galleries and film festivals globally.
Naomi Rincón Gallardo’s home base is in Mexico City and she currently lives between Vienna and Berlin. She has a BA in Visual Arts from “La Esmeralda” in Mexico City. She received her MA at Goldsmiths University of London with a focus on culture, language, identity and community arts. She was a candidate for the Ph.D. in Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. In her artwork, she connects “fact, fiction and friction in order to create a place between radical utopian experiences, fantasy and crises of beliefs. She integrates her interest in music, literature, theater games, feminisms, queer theory, and critical pedagogy into her work. Her latest work addresses initiatives related to the creation of counter-worlds within neo-colonial settings.
Nalo Hopkinson (b. Jamaica) is an award-winning fiction author who also makes art. In 2021, she became the first woman of African descent to win the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award, a lifetime honour from the Science Fiction Writers of America. She says of her art practices that manipulating physical materials is a welcome break from typing black letters on a white background. Her work in the exhibition, Triomphe, celebrates the conjuring effect of self-healing. Made of fabric, doilies, wire, and the artist’s own hair, Triomphe is wearing a hat in the form of a ship, reminiscent of that created and worn by Joe Johnson, a 19th Century Black man who left American slavery behind by letting himself be recruited into the British navy to fight for England’s side against America. Wounded during the war, he nevertheless remained ineligible for a seaman’s pension as he wasn’t of English nationality. He created his famous “ship hat” and performed in the streets with it, crutches and all, to support himself. As Hopkinson notes, “in other words, he survived by the work of his own hands and his ingenuity.”
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Spring Semester 2021
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