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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1-54 FORUM New York 2019 will be curated by Black Chalk and Co., an artist collective and creative agency that brings together writers, artists, designers, academics, and technologists with a mutual interest in publishing, curating conversations and exhibitions, and facilitating teaching residencies. What animates all these activities is the effort to engender a new culture and new forms of publishing and creative production and the agency’s work has led to a run of synchronized events, screenings, and public talks. Founded by Tinashe Mushakavanhu and Nontsikelelo Mutiti in 2015, Black Chalk and Co. operates between Harare, Zimbabwe, and Richmond, Virginia.

Entry to all 1-54 FORUM talks is free with a 1-54 ticket. Due to limited seating, advanced reservation is highly recommended.

Why don’t you carve other animals

FRIDAY 3 MAY

14:00 – 14:30

The Queen Lozikeyi Lecture

In the late 1990s, Yvonne Vera initiated the Lozikeyi Series, a unique public lecture platform for artists and intellectuals from Zimbabwe and elsewhere to share their views on knowledge production and the creative process. Lozikeyi was a powerful Queen of the Ndebele, and an important advisor to King Lobengula. 1-54 FORUM curators BLACK CHALK & CO. (Nontsikelelo Mutiti, artist and Tinashe Mushakavanhu, writer and scholar) will introduce the 1-54 FORUM programme.

Register here

FRIDAY 3 MAY

15:00 – 16:30

Opening Spaces

“A woman writer must have an imagination that is plain stubborn, that can invent new gods and banish ineffectual ones” wrote Yvonne Vera in her anthology Opening Spacespublished in 1999. Our panelists discuss ways that they have innovated on the notion of spaces for viewing and engaging with art objects and audiences. CATINCA TABACARU (Founder, Catinca Tabacaru Gallery), STEPHANIE BAPTIST (Founder and Director, Medium Tings) and SANDRINE COLARD (Artistic Director, 6th Edition of the Biennale de Lubumbashi) join moderator ADEZE WILFORD (Curatorial Assistant, The Shed)

Register here

FRIDAY 3 MAY

17:00 – 17:30

Screening: KARE KARE ZVAKO – MOTHER’S DAY

A unique opportunity to watch award-winning film KARE KARE ZVAKO – MOTHER’S DAY (2005, 30′). Inspired by a Shona folktale and brought to film as a musical, KARE KARE ZVAKO – MOTHER’S DAY follows the fraught relationship between a mother and father as food becomes scarce in a period of drought. Directed by the renowned Zimbabwean author and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga

Register here

FRIDAY 3 MAY

18:00 – 19:30

From the Pavement, a Gallery: curator as broker

TANDAZANI DHLAKAMA (Assistant Curator and Education Manager, Zeitz MOCAA) and ASHLEY JAMES (Assistant Curator, Brooklyn Museum) are joined by moderator AMBER ESSEIVA (Assistant Curator, Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University) in a discussion around recent projects that extend the role of the curator into the realm of community builder and collaborator

Register here

SATURDAY 4 MAY

11:00 – 11:20

Screening: Afro Promo #1 King Lady

Nora Chipaumire made her debut as film director in 2016 with Afro Promo #1 King Lady, commissioned by Dance for Film on Location at Montclair State University. The award-winning short film is an Afro-feminist manifesto beautifying bodies to claim the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness

Register here

SATURDAY 4 MAY

11:30 – 13:00

Without A Name: On Living and Working Between Spaces

What are our notions of studio, home and identity in the global art world today? Artists RICHARD MUDARIKI, MIATTA KAWINZI, and LIZANIA CRUZ, will engage in a conversation drawing on their experiences of working across cultural and geographic boundaries. Panel moderated by SIDDHARTHA MITTER (Writer)

Register here

SATURDAY 4 MAY

13:30 – 14:30

A Treehouse in the City of Lagoons (2019)

A performative presentation by artist WURA-NATASHA OGUNJI. Located in a top flat of a seven-story building in Lagos, Nigeria and founded by artist Wura-Natasha Ogunji, The Treehouse is one of the city’s only art spaces dedicated solely to creative experimentation. In this performance presentation Ogunji invokes the artists and atmosphere of this dynamic place. Situated between creek and lagoon, prison and polo fields The Treehouse provides a perfect platform for thinking about how spaces, architecture, and community influence and inform how we move, feel, and imagine the world

Register here

SATURDAY 4 MAY

15:00 – 16:30

Milk and Moon: Black aesthetics, essentialism and futurisms

A conversation about technology and representation with KANEZA SCHAAL (Theatre Artist); AYODAMOLA OKUNSEINDE (Artist and Interactive Designer) and SALOME ASEGA (Artist and Researcher) moderated by NONTSIKELELO MUTITI (Artist and 1-54 FORUM Programme Curator). Panelists will discuss formal aspects of their work in relationship to cultural heritage, identity formation and presentation beyond the 21st century

Register here

SATURDAY 4 MAY

17:00 – 18:00

To Exhibit Means to Show: the making of an artist’s book

STANLEY WOLUKAU-WANAMBWA (Photographer) and DEREK FORDJOUR (Artist), draw on their publications One Wall a Web and FORDJOUR with GEE WESLEY (Co-founder and Co-director, Ulises). The presentation investigates notions of display and the role of publishing artist books from the perspective of the artist

Register here

SUNDAY 5 MAY

11:00 – 12:30

In the Courtyard: a space for Black art

MARIO GOODEN (Principal, Huff Gooden Architects), MABEL WILSON (Associate Professor of Architecture, Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation) and EMANUEL ADMASSU (Founding Partner, AD-WO architectural practice) explore the specificity of architecture as a framing device, a marker of time and a space to hold cultural heritage, past, present and future

Register here

13:00 – 14:30

Butterfly Burning: Performativity and Aesthetics

PALOMA MCGREGOR (Artist and Founding Director of Angela’s Pulse) and MK ABADOO (Choreographer and Assistant Professor, Department of Dance and Choreography, Virginia Commonwealth University) speak to RASHIDA BUMBRAY (Curator and Choreographer) on their movement practices and research

Register here

15:00 – 16:00

The Zulus of New York

ZAKES MDA (Writer, Poet and Painter) reads from his new novel The Zulus of New York(2019) with TINASHE MUSHAKAVANHU (Writer-Scholar and 1-54 FORUM Programme Curator) as respondent. The novel, based on historical events in the 1880s, follows Mpiyezintombi, a Zulu, as he is taken to England and later America as a performer

Register here

16:30 – 17:00

Screening: nora

Through performance and dance, award-winning film nora (2008, 35′) follows the life of Zimbabwean dancer and choreographer Nora Chipaumire. Directed by Alla Kovgan and David Hinton

Register here

17:15 – 18:00

Some Writers Can Give You Two Heartbeats

NONTSIKELELO MUTITI and TINASHE MUSHAKAVANHU (Founding Partners, Black Chalk & Co. and 1-54 FORUM Programme Curators) discuss their recently released publication, Some Writers Can Give You Two Heartbeats (2019). This experimental publication is a thoroughly useful guide to the critical and historical texts on the literary culture of Zimbabwe. It has the advantage of being well focused on the topic and thus serves as an essential point of departure to celebrate notions of beauty as they relate to the literary and the visual, a product of Black Chalk & Co.’s preoccupation with the archive

Register here

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1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, the international art fair dedicated to promoting contemporary art from a diverse set of African perspectives, which will take place May 3-5, 2019 at Industria in the West Village, with a press and VIP Preview on May 2. This year marks the fair’s fifth anniversary in New York, and celebrates the fair’s move to a new Manhattan venue.

With editions in London, New York and Marrakech, 1-54 is an international art fair, initiated by Touria El Glaoui in 2013 is dedicated to contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora. Drawing reference to the 54 countries that constitute the African continent, 1-54 is a sustainable and dynamic platform that is engaged in contemporary dialogue and exchange. The 2019 New York edition of 1-54 will welcome 24 galleries from Belgium, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ethiopia, France, Ghana, Kenya, Martinique, Morocco, Nigeria, Portugal, Senegal, South Africa, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States, collectively exhibiting the work of more than 65 artists. Each year, 1-54 aims to welcome a diverse and global mix of galleries that are dedicated to supporting and promoting African art and artists from across the world.

1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair
Industria, 775 Washington St, New York, NY 10014, USA
May 3rd -5th 2019

http://1-54.com/

The post The 1-54 FORUM , the fair’s program for the New-York City edition May 3rd-5th 2019 appeared first on Artskop.