NXTHVN is thrilled to announce the opening of Material Intimacies, organized by 2020-2021 Curatorial Fellows Michelle Phương Ting and Claire Kim. The exhibition features eight contemporary artists: Wesley Chavis, Natalie Diaz, Candice Lin, Stephanie A. Lindquist, Yvette Mayorga, Hương Ngô, Natani Notah, and Zina Saro-Wiwa. Their work makes tangible the intimacies forged and ruptured by colonialism in order to put forth radical associations with desire, kinship, vulnerability, land, and touch.
Through installation, video, sound, textile, and print, the exhibition examines intimacy as an encounter shaped by the globalizing forces of colonization, whereby white European settlers forced violent contact with Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian peoples and severed sacred ties to land and kin. Within this horrific web of enslavement, exploitation, and commodification, intimacy became structured around the desires of white people. For those colonized and their descendants, the possibilities of intimacy remain restricted or out of reach.
Located on Quinnipiac land, NXTHVN acknowledges what Layli Long Soldier calls “the break.” Colonialism’s ruptures are not distant, but here—felt within our bodies, families, and communities. As a means to subvert this constricting power, the work in the exhibition prompts us to ask: How can the very materials commodified for the colonial project (e.g. land, bodies, sugar, and porcelain) enact beauty, while disrupting the violence of bondage, exotification, and displacement? How do artists use materials to assert new terms of being seen, wanted, and touched? What might liberatory intimacy look like, one that frees us from racist, capitalist, and misogynistic structures of communal life?
A full-color catalogue will accompany the exhibition and include essays from the curators, in addition to a note from NXTHVN’s founders and an introduction by curatorial advisor Kalia Brooks Nelson.
Material Intimacies, NXTHVN, New Haven, CT (curated by Michelle Phương Ting and Claire Kim)