It is fitting that the archive serves as a starting point for many of Adili’s works, given that her practice centers largely on the exploration and translation of materials. You can see the influence of Fluxus on her works; like Fluxus, her multidisciplinary practice privileges process over the end product and radiates playfulness, even when kneading through loaded concepts like diaspora, familial longing, and loss. Cast in a visual vocabulary of poems, letters, and the Persian alphabet, Adili’s solo exhibition at the CUE Art Foundation yokes together her investigation of the Persian language with her long-standing interest in geopolitical displacement.
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"Emerge as it must." by Bryn Evans
Danielle Deadwyler [she/her/they] is an American-born multidisciplinary performance artist, filmmaker, and actor. Deadwyler’s award winning experimental film work has been presented at the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, Atlanta Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, Cucalorus Film Festival, and Oxford Film Fest. She has exhibited with MAMBU BADU collective, Mint Gallery, Whitespace Gallery, The Luminary, Atlanta Contemporary Museum, and Spelman College’s Museum of Fine Art Black Box Series, among others. Numerous grants have supported Deadwyler’s works, including IDEA CAPITAL, ELEVATE Atlanta, Living Walls, Synchronicity Theatre, WonderRoot Walthall Fellowship, and Artadia. She is a former Atlanta Film Festival Filmmaker-in-Residence, MINT Gallery Leap Year Fellowship Recipient, a 2020 Franklin Furnace Recipient, and a 2021 Princess Grace Award Winner.
Read More"Retooling the Systemic" by Kinaya Hassane
James Maurelle’s artistic practice eludes categorization. Maurelle, who initially studied filmmaking before embracing sculpture and installation, crosses mediums and subject matter through repurposing ordinary found materials. As a result, each object forms part of a lively ecosystem, resisting the logic of a commercial art market that places outsize influence on the singular work of art, particularly in its reactionary embrace of Black artists. Through this wide-ranging oeuvre, Maurelle confers familiar objects with new meanings that express radical visions of Black agency and self-determination.
Read More"Archival Irreverence" by Alex Santana
In a recent lecture, Lizania Cruz explained––with a smile on her face––that as an artist, she intentionally relinquishes control. It is not a factor she is particularly interested in because control does not serve the function of her work. Instead, she thinks through modalities of agency and intent. Her practice is grounded in the notion that participation is a tool that should always center people first, and not the art. Noting this careful distinction, I cite Cruz’s own words: “Art can be a catalyst for change, but there are material conditions that art can never really provide for.” Participation in art encourages critical thought, action, and change, slowly seeping from the symbolic realm to lived, material realities.
Read More“Pitch Imperfect” by Tiana Reid
In Longing attempts to reckon with a loss of communion, but not one that is a direct result of the pandemic. The curator, Anna Cahn, tells me the idea for the show began before March 11, 2020, the day the World Health Organization declared the Covid-19 outbreak a global pandemic. The works that comprise the exhibition are mainly non-studio-based art practices: installation, movement, performance, video, text, and touch. All around the color palette is muted, but the feeling is resplendent, a repetition in open air. Put together, perhaps non-studio-based art is something like public sex: illicit, queer, without a requirement for delimitation.
Read More"To Allow for Tenderness" by Adeola Olakiitan
Miatta Kawinzi’s artistry is attuned to the pulse of their inner life, and often holds diverse states of being together with precision, through a complex and wide-ranging poetics. In the exhibition, Soft is Strong, a strain of this poetics works through fragmentation and articulates a sense of being while Black, which is extended through the exhibition’s highlighting of softness, fragility, and multiplicity. These modes of existing are still often deemed weak by a heteropatriarchal order, and derided as feminine, self-indulgent, or not worthy of emulation. Counter-notions to this order have, however, long existed in Black feminist thought, whose literary and aesthetic references resonate in this exhibition.
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