It is mine to give or withhold

Essay for Not Everything is Given-Whitney Independent Study Curatorial Exhibition

Information on the exhibition and the artists

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

“Through all of time, I will be holding you,” Ebun Sodipo recites in the end of her film Celeste: She of the Sea. Her meditation traverses temporal boundaries, a sustained aspiration to be with her sisters, even when they are not all known. Sodipo juxtaposes poetic verse over a video montage that references the sea as a site of both loss and connection. Her own body is central to the piece, intimately intertwined with others through weighted histories as she moves across a reflective scene of mirrors and mylar. Her eyes are often closed, her focus turned inwards as she writhes. Sodipo speaks first and foremost to those with whom there is a shared recognition of Black trans femme sisterhood. 

I return to the term meditate as a call to linger in immersive contemplation. It is difficult to maintain a sustained presence with this realm of self relation while constantly negotiating overstimulation and the demands of living. The curatorial process for Not Everything is Given aroused my own introspection as I faced the questions that undergird my desire to bring specific artists into conversation. Curation is entangled in a struggle with the anxieties to justify through explanation or highlight conceptual aims. A balance between facilitating an open-ended encounter for the visitor while igniting discussions that are always relatively informed by subjective sentiments. And yet this exhibition interrogates the urge to understand, upending the search for context within categorization that increasingly overdetermines artistic practice. The singular drive towards comprehension flattens the nuances of lives that permeate the bounds of discourse. Nevertheless, our internal worlds are rife with potential to imagine otherwise and evolving dynamics of being.1 I turn to the work of several artists in the exhibition who orient towards the self and affirm landscapes of interiority, through forms of meditation which I consider broadly as modes of withholding. For not everything needs to be shared. 

Ascending the staircase into the exhibition, Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s textual installation ,they feed on the altitude of our afterlife requires pause as you inch nearer to the constellation of texts across the walls. What is read may not infer discursive meaning, evading the metrics of literacy as Rasheed retreats into the spacious promises of a sentence. The words, drawings, and symbols printed on vinyl have no designated method of approach,so the thoughts they provoke are distinctly personal to each visitor. Texts hold multitudes, but so much will always escape the grasp of a word. Rasheed’s piece is textured by Shala Miller’s voice in the sound piece Obsidian Theme (Edition Three) as she recounts her experience of heartbreak, “They’ll be surprised I had a heart at all.” Her words are a reminder that interiority for many, and in this body of work Black femmes specifically, is not assumed. Miller constructs a multi-layered narrative that forges distance between the artist and the character of Obsidian, allowing for self preservation while simultaneously positioning the vulnerability of her body as a main focal point in the photograph The Makings of a Supervillain. 

Both Niloufar Emamifar and Charisse Pearlina Weston probe structures of value that shape an enmeshment of physical and psychic societal realities. The artists grapple with what is held in interstitial space; the regions of the self not meant for others or the architectural loopholes that interrogate the built environment. Employing mirropane, with a mirrored surface on one side and translucent glass on the other, Weston’s sculpture diaphanous envelop of the object side underscores the power dynamics of surveillance deployed onto communities of color. A writer, Weston often etches text into sculptures, either her own words or citing those she thinks with. Amidst the reflective surfaces of the sculpture the writings are obscured, sometimes redacted, indicating an internal dialogue. Assembling sculpted glass, lead and concrete, Weston’s work beckons attention to the crevices within and between the materials. Under hypervisibility, what, if anything, remains concealed? 

Molding the cast for Three Inches and a Half in the tight space between two walls of Palestinian owned mechanic shops in Los Angeles, Emamifar complicates the demarcations of property. These miniscule building zones become devoid of value, and stir questions regarding what is available to be owned. Perhaps the seeming insignificance of the three and half inch gap, a space overlooked beyond a cursory glance, is a reminder of opportunities to elude the prevalence of capitalist capture. 

The material intricacies in Diyar Mayil’s domestic sculptures stir the impulse to decipher how an artist makes their work, fostering an atmosphere of uncertainty in the mundanity these household objects generally convey. Mop evokes undercurrents of fragility, while Sitting Through disconcerts the viewer on closer inspection with faintly visible raised mounds in the fleshy silicone of the table top. Through quiet articulation, Mayil ruminates on the perpetual discomforts that persist below the surface. 

A lamentation of mourning, stemming from the loss of ways of life and relationships to land that remain threatened, conjures an atmospheric melancholy in Noor Abed’s film our songs were ready for all wars to come. Abed centers the collectivity cultivated through Palestinian folklore and the embedded knowledge gained from social choreographies, emphasizing the tonal affects of lyrics that won’t be known to most. In one scene, two young women jump closely together, eyes locked on the other in an intense co-witnessing not easily accessed . 

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

Our emotional lives are a topography of contention, and withholding is essential to safeguard a semblance of self from the continuous extraction of forced transparency powered by colonial logics. [2] We grasp at the enormity of violence that shapes the worlds we navigate, even as it surpasses qualification. This ineffability echoes in the sound of the slap that emanates from the young man repeatedly hitting his chest in Aziz Hazara’s film Takbir. It references a mourning ritual of self-flagellation, sometimes practiced during the day of Ashura. Does mourning ever cease in the face of indefinite imperial occupation? The haunting black square in Zişan’s Felaket (Catastrophe) also reckons with the immeasurability of genocide, past and continuing. The entangled circumstances of living, and the meditative states through which we endure, will always be in excess of what can be named. 

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