Although a number of the photographers have worked on assignment for major publications such as the New York Times, Vogue, Vanity Fair and Time, the exhibition offers a rare opportunity to see their artistic and personal work in their first museum exhibition. The photographers showcased in INWARD: Reflections on Interiority use a range of manual and digital image-making tools in their individual practices — for this exhibition, they have created the photographs using iPhone. The resulting images move beyond the endless scope of the constructed selfie to examine the intimate interactions and inner thoughts that make up their daily experiences as artists in a time of Covid-19, Black Lives Matter, and the 2020 U.S. election.

“The five artists featured in INWARD provide a thought-provoking window into their interior lives,” said curator Isolde Brielmaier. “The revealing new photographs explore intimate thoughts and personal relationships with great honesty, as the artists delve deep into the new reality and challenges of our contemporary lives at a time of global introspection.”

Exhibition Overview

Smartphones have often been used to generate images of public space and events in the broader outside world. iPhone has democratized image-making, and more recently, has been widely utilized as an impactful outward-facing tool to capture the human side of this particular moment of upheaval and turmoil. In INWARD, the artists reverse the focus to document their inner lives, and in the process show the full potential of iPhone in a fine art setting.

Revealing deep self-reflection, the work of Djeneba Aduayom explores her inner thoughts and subjectivity. As an introvert, she was at ease at home, sitting still, and being quiet in the company of herself during the pandemic. This quiet confidence can be seen in her self-portraits, in which she poses for the camera and directly gazes at the viewer. These images are punctuated by smaller, more abstract “studies” of objects and the human form of the artist’s own body.

Much of Arielle Bobb-Willis’s work is born out of her experience battling depression from an early age. She manipulates color, shape, form, and light, giving way to abstract images that reference ideas of the beautiful, the strange, isolation, and belonging. Influenced by painting, her use of bright colors speaks to the artist’s desire to claim power and joy in the face of confusion, sadness, and uncertainty.

Quil Lemons presents self-portraits from his series entitled Daydreams, 2021, which document his very personal journey, a process of self-exploration and self-validation: “As a Black queer man, there is no space for me, so I constantly carve one,” he states. He confidently defines his racial and gender identity in ways that allow for the intertwined, co-existence of both. His work visually articulates both self- assurance and the ongoing vulnerability with which he contends.

The work of Brad Ogbonna is comprised of a broad series of portraits of family, friends, and himself. In the style of some of the most important historical West African portrait photographers, such as Malick Sidibé, Meissa Gaye, Seydou Keïta and others, he has created, in collaboration with his friends and family members, a series of intimate portraits that underscore family history and relationships with a strong reference to the artist’s Nigerian culture as well as his late father. “I didn’t think much about the past until my Dad died,” said Ogbonna. “Shortly thereafter I inherited his first photo album filled with photos from his youth spent in Nigeria. At the time those images felt like a portal to the not-so-distant past and left me with many more questions than answers. I was enthralled by the mystery of it all.”

Isaac West is inspired by his girlfriend Naima in his series entitled Love, 2021. He focuses on the small ways in which human interactions, gestures, and expressions both encapsulate and demonstrate larger ideas about love, intimacy, and care. Through his strikingly bold colors and stark lines and use of light, as well as the strong articulation and centering of Blackness, he highlights everyday acts of kindness— grooming, eating, playing—in order to underscore these ideas.

INWARD: Reflections on Interiority 

Sept 24 – Jan 10, 2022

International Center of Photography

79 Essex Street, New York, NY 10002

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Adam Pendleton’s (American, born 1984) paintings, drawings, and other works use linguistic, political, and historical material in unlikely forms and configurations to explore the relationship between Blackness, abstraction, and the avant-garde. Who Is Queen? questions the traditional notion of the museum as a repository, and addresses the influence that mass movements, including those of the last decade, such as Black Lives Matter and Occupy, could have on the exhibition as a form. Drawing on the work of figures as disparate as pianist Glenn Gould, political philosopher Michael Hardt, and activist and public theologian Ruby Sales, this monumental installation sits at the nexus of abstraction and politics.

Developed over the past decade, Who Is Queen? transforms the Marron Atrium into an monumental floor-to-ceiling installation consisting of three vertical, black scaffold towers that each span five stories. This construction, visible from every vantage point within the Museum that overlooks the Atrium, extends outward into the Museum and reframes visitors’ experience of the space. The modular scaffolding systems are built from four basic units designed to resemble the balloon framing typical of American domestic buildings, and they serve as supports for layers of exhibited artwork: paintings, drawings, a textile work, sculptures, moving images, and a sound piece. Forming an alternative structure for the examination of history as an endless variation, the installation is a Gesamtkunstwerk—a total work of art—for the 21st century.

“Who Is Queen? is undergirded by a kind of Afro-optimism balanced by an abiding Afro- pessimism,…It is optimistic in a deeply American sense of the word, and pessimistic along those same lines. That is to say, it is not black or white, and locates each within the other. It articulates the ways in which we simultaneously possess and are possessed by contradictory ideals and ideas.”

—Adam Pendleton

“Who Is Queen? is Adam Pendleton’s most ambitious project to date, interweaving the many strands of deep research and experimentation that have distinguished his career,” said Stuart Comer Stuart Comer, The Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance at MOMA. “Working across poetic, spatial, architectural, linguistic, painterly, sonic, cinematic, and political means, this ‘total artwork’ reverse-engineers the idea of the museum, breaking down entrenched models of history into building blocks that can be remixed into new possibilities for the future.”

The artwork hanging on the scaffolds—on the front, in between, and jutting out from the sides—form a spatial collage. In his paintings, Pendleton creates layered fields of unresolved text, marks, and gestures, built up from spray-painted and brushed “originals” that have been photographed, photocopied, and enlarged for screenprinting. His drawings feature sketches and visual “notes,” as well as images of African art and other reproductions from books in his library. The artist’s visual language challenges legibility and sense-making, continuously writing and overwriting itself.

Sculptures composed of simple black lines and shapes, as well as three moving-image works, are also installed on the scaffolds. The moving-image component directly integrates the aesthetics and architecture of protest into the installation, including: footage of the embattled Robert E. Lee monument in Richmond, Virginia; depictions of scenes from Resurrection City, the ad hoc protest site built in 1968 on the National Mall in Washington, DC, dedicated to freedom and the elimination of poverty; and a new video portrait of the queer theorist Jack Halberstam.

A sound collage incorporating speech and music plays throughout the space. The collage functions like a “machine,” regulated by an algorithmic score that collects, digests, and recombines fragments from the past to generate new forms. The work is anchored by recordings of Amiri Baraka, Hahn Rowe, and a 2014 phone recording of a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Manhattan. These excerpts are interwoven with music by Jace Clayton, Julius Eastman, Laura Rivers, Frederic Rzewski, Linda and Sonny Sharrock, and Hildegard Westerkamp.

A series of conversations organized and moderated by Pendleton will be published on moma.org on a monthly basis. Fragments of these dialogues will be introduced iteratively into the sound installation, periodically renewing the combination of looped tracks and sound fragments playing simultaneously. In so doing, the audio component places the formal mechanics of musical counterpoint—the folding and unfolding of simultaneous voices—at the heart of the installation. Counterpoint, for Pendleton, is a means to affirm complexity and invent a space for aesthetic and political experimentation rooted in difference.

Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen? is organized by Stuart Comer, The Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance, with Danielle A. Jackson, former Curatorial Assistant, and Gee Wesley, Curatorial Assistant, and with the support of Veronika Molnar, Intern, Department of Media and Performance.

Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen?

Sept 18 – Jan 30, 2022

The Museum of Modern Art

New York City (USA)

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