Alia Ahmad, Hameel - Morning Rain (2022)
Alia Ahmad’s Abstract Paintings Reflect Saudi Arabia’s Ever-Changing Capital
Alia Ahmad, من الحلم .. . روضة (A meadow … from a dream), Kohn Gallery, Artsy Editorial, Dec 2, 2022
In Conversation with
Mark McKnight & Paul Mpagi Sepuya
Hunter Fashion Magazine,
Issue 39 Spring Summer 2022
04.17.22 / RE:RESEARCH
Silvi Naçi
queerness and craft on X-TRA
My research and practice over the last couple of years have focused on weaving voices like mine into a culture that has historically erased and ostracized LGBTQI+ people. In confronting the history of my birth nation, Albania, while grappling with assimilation as an immigrant in the United States, I seek to build bridges between place and time while simultaneously disrupting existing conventions. For me, this liminal space of double consciousness, a sense of belonging to either land, runs through each thread of each qilim. Work from this series appeared in Biddy’s Garden at Transformative Arts in Los Angeles from February 18–April 9, 2022.
Kyungmi Shin at Various Small Fires, on Carla
December 8, 2021 | URL
Text by Silvi Naçi
Kyungmi Shin’s father was a Christian minister in South Korea before the family immigrated to the United States—the religion was a colonial import to Korea in the late 1800s, replacing shamanism and Confucianism, which quickly became othered with the introduction of the Westernized religious practices. Shin’s exhibition, citizen, not barbarian, at Various Small Fires, takes this inherent contradiction as its starting place and weaves in other personal stories that create transportive poly-narratives, redirecting the white gaze and offering alternative ways of seeing.
Artists at Work: Candice Lin by Silvi Naçi
East of Borneo, Los Angeles, CA (2020) | URL
Candice Lin is an interdisciplinary artist whose research-based practice lends itself to sculpture, drawing, video, ceramics, and installation. She is co-founder of Monte Vista Projects, an artist-run collective and space in Los Angeles, and an assistant professor in the Department of Art at the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture. In her work she offers a number of windows through which to encounter the colonial histories embedded deeply within her often living and organic materials. A multi-sensorial endeavor that allows for animate and inanimate bodies to co-exist, living beside and within one another, Lin’s work further expands the idea of panpsychism. In the following interview, we discuss her past and current projects as well as her upcoming exhibitions.
Magda Fernández: Look Me in The Eye
Massachusetts College of Art and Design | URL
Arnheim Gallery, Spring 2020
Catalog Essay Contribution.
Courtesy the artist and Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York
RICO GATSON: POWER LINES, POWER MINDS
NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY (2019) | URL
“Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder.” – Franz Fanon
When I think of Rico Gatson’s work, the piece Family #3 (2013) comes to mind. There are many other drawings, painting, and sculptures which are so powerful and captivating, but there’s something so simple and eloquent about this photograph. A woman sits on what appears as a hallway, leaning on a desk, wearing a white apron, she looks right at you–colorful aura brilliance surround her, purple, red, yellow and green surround her body – leading you back to her eyes filled with wisdom and power – this power and light is the spine to Gatson’s work, old and new respectfully.
© The Artist, 2019. Photo by Melissa Blackall
Dell M. Hamilton: All Languages Welcomed HERE
NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY (2019) | URL
The wounds of the Spirit heal and leave no scars behind. —G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Dell Marie Hamilton is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, scholar, and independent curator. Working in the intersection of performance, video, painting, and photography, she uses the body to investigate the social and geopolitical constructions of memory, gender, history, and citizenship. Her lectures, solo performances, and collaborative projects have been presented to a wide variety of audiences as catalysts for social justice and equity. With roots in Belize, Honduras, and the Caribbean, she frequently draws upon the personal experiences of her family, as well as the history and folkloric traditions of her homelands, in the research and conception of her work.
© The Artist, 2018. Courtesy of Meliksetian | Briggs, Los Angeles
Artists at Work: Todd Gray
East of Borneo, Los Angeles, CA (2019) | URL
I met Todd Gray in 2015 when I served as assistant curator at Samson (Boston, MA) and presented his solo exhibition: Caliban in the Mirror 2.0: Exquisite Terribleness. Gray’s studio practice, which extends across continents, is fueled by cultural hybridity, body politics, and utilizing pop-culture to comment on culture at large. Working with his extensive archive photographs of Michael Jackson, West and South Africa, and his personal archives, Gray produces temporal and sculptural photographic works, which juxtapose decontextualized images and offer, reconstructed histories. In combining photography and sculpture, Gray presents us with the multiplicity of perspectives that rethink issues of singularity.
![Installation view[s], Nari Ward: Sun Splashed, The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, 2017. Photo[s]by Charles Mayer Photography. © 2017 Nari Ward](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52af11c6e4b01acd47156e18/1559186038503-OEV91JQSB06DGWE0CWIX/NariWard_SunSplashed_3345-1024x683.jpg)
Installation view[s], Nari Ward: Sun Splashed, The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, 2017. Photo[s]by Charles Mayer Photography. © 2017 Nari Ward
Nari Ward: Neutralize Naturalization
Big Red & Shiny, Boston, MA (2017) | URL
Sun Splashed: Nari Ward, the artist’s largest survey to date, is now on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Associate, this show couldn’t have come at a more appropriate socio-political time while our country is being separated. The monumental works presented here investigate social justice, immigration, memory, oppression, and power while engaging in local sites, history, and many different communities. The exhibition, comprised of works spanning across 20 years, has traveled the last three years, first at the Perez Art Museum, then at the Barnes Foundation, and finally at the ICA Boston.
“The Shape of Things” from the Africa series (1993) Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
ISSUES OF POWER: The Space Between Ignorance & Acknowledgement
Big Red & Shiny, Boston, MA (2016) | URL
“I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.”-Zora Neale Hurston
As a byproduct of a conversation with my dear friend and fellow artist Chanel Thervil, this essay grapples with issues of power presented within Carrie Mae Weems’ exhibition “I once knew a girl...” at the Cooper Gallery at Harvard University. Entering the exhibition, it feels like you are walking through halls of Nefertiti’s tomb, with offerings and images for an afterlife and sounds that guide us through history.
Throughout her work, Weems queries how power is propagated by and relates to architecture, gender, and race in Western art practices. Weems disrupts the divisions caused by being ignored, acknowledged, and being the frontrunner in her tableaus exploring black womanhood and femininity. Here, Thervil and I discuss Weem’s work in connection to our experiences and art making. --Silvi Naci