Listening for the Unsaid

Listening for the Unsaid is an online group exhibition curated by The Racial Imaginary Institute at David Kordansky Gallery in LA, USA.

Featuring works by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Anaïs Duplan, Nona Faustine, Jon Henry, Nate Lewis, Azikiwe Mohammed, Public Assistants, and Kiyan Williams.

This exhibition brings together a group of artists, activists, and writers who partake in the impossibility of reconstructing an archive, while trying to archive the impossible. Together, the works comprise a record that disorders, reroutes, and transgresses the protocols of the archive that Saidiya Hartman describes in her essay, “Venus in Two Acts.” How can we, as Hartman asks, “revisit the scene of subjection without replicating the grammar of violence?” How do artists adequately render precarious lives—specifically, Black lives—often made “visible in the moment of their disappearance?” In this time of acute precarity, we felt renewed urgency to gather Black artists, at various stages in their careers, whose work renders the multitude of Black life and engages strategies for imagining counterhistories. If history remains bound to “dead certainties...produced by terror,” these works gesture toward a mode of archiving that exceeds the limits of record and fact, producing instead a narrative track warped by the “keens and howls and dirges” of the unsaid.

• https://www.davidkordanskygallery.com/vi...