Zişan. Felaket (Catastrophe), 1923. Reproduction of an original work of an ink on paper.Courtesy of the İz Öztat and Zilberman Gallery, Istanbul.

The aspirations of language often leave words skirting around the edges of emotions, grasping at their depth. What fuels the demand to decipher as a measure of value or the foundation of understanding? This exhibition disturbs the expectations from artworks and artists to “demonstrate,” “elucidate,” or ‘’bear witness’’ to the fraught conditions of our world. Amid multiple ways of knowing and forms of communication, not everything has to be given or shared.

The artists gathered here circumvent and interrogate the expectations placed on them by overdetermined categories (race, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, geography), reorienting towards the self and those with shared experiences. In doing so, they complicate histories of past and present genocide, logics of anti-Blackness and settler colonialism, and gesture to concealed structures of control, including those imposed by the State, the law, and the archive. Through practices of withholding and self-articulation, they interrupt linear narratives using forms of coded communication, experimenting with strategies of obscurity and material form while affirming the poetics of mythmaking and fiction and underscoring the fragility of subjecthood. 

As curators, we reckon with the urge to respond to the pervasive and gratuitous violence that is foundational to the world we live in and extends to the history of exhibition-making. Holding these tensions, we suspend the need to comprehend to consider alternative social and political modes.

Niloufar Emamifar. Three Inches And A Half, 2018. Pigmented hard plastic, paint, clay, dirt. Collection of Gabriel Catone, New York.

Charisse Pearlina Weston. diaphanous envelop of the object side, 2024. Slumped and etched mirropane, lead and concrete. Courtesy of the artist; PATRON gallery, Chicago; and Jack Shainman Gallery.

Shala Miller. The Makings of a Supervillain, 2023. Archival pigment print on William Turner paper, hand engraving on plexiglass. Courtesy of the artist.

Ebun Sodipo. Prosthesis for freedom - Mary Jones' piece of cow leather pierced and opened like a woman's womb. Piece of cow leather pierced and opened like a woman's womb. 2022. Courtesy of the artist

Naomi Rincón Gallardo. Resiliencia Tlacuache (Opossum Resilience), 2019. Single-channel HD video, 16 mins 01 secs. Courtesy of the artist and Parallel Oaxaca, Oaxaca.

Ebun Sodipo. Celeste, 2023. Single-channel video, 6 mins. Courtesy of the artist.

Charisse Pearlina Weston. diaphanous envelop of the object side, 2024Slumped and etched mirropane, lead and concrete. Courtesy of the artist; PATRON gallery, Chicago; and Jack Shainman Gallery.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed. ,they feed on the altitude of our afterlife, 2024. Vinyl. Courtesy of the artist and Nome Gallery, Berlin.

From far left: Charisse Pearlina Weston, Niloufar Emamifar, Shala Miller, Diyar Mayil and Charisse Pearlina Weston.

Aziz Hazara. Takbir, 2021. Single-channel video, 5 mins. Courtesy of the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata.

Diyar Mayil. Mop, 2022. Glass, metal. Courtesy of the artist.

Noor Abed. our songs were ready for all wars to come, 2021. Single-channel video, 19 mins 50 secs. Courtesy of the artist.

BAÇOY KOOP. Birding, 2016. Reproduction of mimeograph printed flyers.Courtesy of the artists.

Taqralik Partridge and Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory. Inissaliortut: Making Room, 2022. Two-channel video, 19 mins; plywood panel

Charisse Pearlina Weston. that old saying is true: you’ve got to weep what you sow, 2017. Inkjet print on Hahnemuhle canvas etched with replacement frame glass from collapse, glass, canvas, glass shards.

Joyce Joumaa. Hallab Bldg, 2024. Inkjet on archival vellum paper, breaker box, stainless steel, computerized timer, light. Courtesy of Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and Galerie Eli Kerr, Montreal

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Contours of the Interior