Material Intimacies

Material Intimacies

Link: www.nxthvn.com/calendar/material-intimacies
Role: Co-curated with Michelle Phuong Ting
Dates: Oct. 18th, 2020 — Jan. 18th, 2021
Artists: Wesley Chavis, Natalie Diaz, Candice Lin, Stephanie A. Lindquist, Yvette Mayorga, Hương Ngô, Natani Notah, and Zina Saro-Wiwa

Material Intimacies features eight contemporary artists—Wesley Chavis, Natalie Diaz, Candice Lin, Stephanie A. Lindquist, Yvette Mayorga, Hương Ngô, Natani Notah, and Zina Saro-Wiwa—whose work materializes, or makes tangible, intimacies forged or ruptured by colonialism. Together, the artists put forth radical associations with desire, kinship, vulnerability, sensuality, land, and touch.

Through installation, video, sound, textile, and print, the exhibition examines intimacy as an encounter shaped by colonialism’s globalizing force, whereby white European settlers forced violent contact with Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian peoples and severed sacred ties to land and kin. Within a horrific web of enslavement, exploitation, and commodification, colonialism structured intimacy around the desires of white people. For those colonized and their descendants, the possibilities of intimacy remain restricted or out of reach.

The artists’ work prompts us to ask: How can the very materials commodified for the colonial project (e.g. porcelain, land, and bodies) 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?

Photographs by Chris Gardner.