“Dark Data,” with Gee Wesley and Bianca Dominguez, EFA Project Space, New York City, September 11- October 30, 2021
Artists: American Artist, Hannah Black, Stephanie Dinkins, E. Jane, Mimi Onuoha, Sondra Perry
Sondra Perry, IT’S IN THE GAME ‘17, 2017, digital video projection in a room painted Rosco Chroma Key Blue, color, sound (looped) - commissioned by the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo (HOK) and the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), University of Pennsylvania for the exhibition Myths of the Marble, 69 × 120 inches (screen),16:20 minutes, courtesy of the artist and Bridget Donahue, NYC. Still courtesy of Bridget Donahue and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.
Dark Data presents the work of six artists who explore pervasive forms of data collection, mass-surveillance, and hypervisibility visited upon Black life through technologies of predictive policing, data-mining, algorithmic violence, and artificial intelligence. The project situates these emergent data technologies within a broader lineage of anti-Black surveillance and quantification. Dark Data highlights a host of artistic and social tactics exercised by Black practitioners to actively respond to these conditions through experimental archival strategies, inventive modes of technological encryption, and gestures of digital worldmaking.
“A Thousand Secrets,” ApexArt, New York City, June 3- July 31, 2022
Artists: Beatrice Glow, Renee Green, Deborah Jack, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Trevor Paglen, Tabita Rezaire
Deborah Jack, Drawn by water: (Sea) Drawings in (3) Acts: Act Three: (…sinking), I remembered that the embrace of oceans is the love I know, and yearned for a familiar shore that…, 2018, Video installation, 5 minutes (still)
A Thousand Secrets is an immersive, multi-sensory exhibition that engages the sonic multiplicity and opacity of water as a provocation for alternative modes of collectively listening to a world in crisis. Dionne Brand (2002) describes the sound of the ocean as a "thousand secrets, all whispered at the same time." Inspired by Brand, A Thousand Secrets holds multiple registers of world-making in tense relation, and grapples with the ineffable stories of the sea that are, "inaudible to ordinary ears but still detectable with the right listening device, like the mother's ear" (Habila 2019). Working against the spectacle of human suffering, each artwork in A Thousand Secrets unsettles conventional listening devices to uncover entangled, nonlinear histories of extraction and whispered traces of the otherwise through the transformative properties of the ocean.
“Wade,” Visarts, RockVille, MD, May 31-July 21, 2024
Artists: Imani Jacqueline Brown, Jamilah Sabur, Dario Mohr, Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva, Sónia Vaz Borges and Filipa César, Karabo Likhethe, Sa Whitley, Ada M. Patterson
Imani Jacqueline Brown (2022), What remains at the ends of the earth. Install shot.
Jamilah Sabur (2019). Tidal locking. Install shot.
Drawing inspiration from the African American spiritual “Wade in the Water,” Wade foregrounds questions of Black lifeways and abolition geographies in the African diaspora. Through explorations of Black Atlantic cosmologies and political cultures, the exhibition develops ‘wading’ as a metaphor and world-making project that churns through the storied waters of rivers, oceans, marshes, and mangroves.
From baptism to biblical crossing, as survival strategy to evade colonial forces and slave patrols, and through practices of leisure and respite, the collective and creative acts of wading constitute a source of knowledge, sense of place, and struggle for global Black freedom. Wade “holds ground” within the Black geographies of Montgomery County, Maryland amidst the riverways, swamps, and “geographically difficult terrains” that have shaped histories of fugitivity, place-making, and community formation locally while unearthing parallel and interconnected modes of Black life across the African diaspora (Winston, 2023).
From elegy to energy source, the selected artworks unearth a multiplicity of offerings, (counter)mappings, and meditations on a “Black sense of place” (McKittrick, 2011). Featuring works grounded in the material histories, spiritual traditions, and speculative imaginaries of South Africa, Guinea Bissau, Jamaica, and New Orleans, among others, the exhibition asks: what emancipatory futures and intellectual itineraries emerge from the depth of Black aquatic knowledge?