featured gallery for July 2020

Blesséd Are Those Who Remember: A Call to Cry, Feel and Mourn

Abdul-Aliy's curatorial note:

I compiled these varied pieces from Visual AIDS’ Artist+ Registry to form a conversation about our bodies, offerings, and death. Sitting with our bodies, memories, and intimacies must be at the forefront of our minds, especially in times of troubled waters. Reminding us to continue standing in front of mirrors or altars, seeing ourselves and giving nourishment to our ancestors. The gallery starts with One Way Empire and ends with Black Faggot #1. I hope this journey makes us remember and honors our past.

The goddesses of aftermath are pressing upon our times and imploring us to make offering to a world we collectively envision. In this futureHOOD—our pain—actionable—turns oppression into the fire of freedomS.

The fruit of our labor, no longer strange, the knee on our neck—shattered and the chokehold is on white supremacy.

We are in our deep water Baptism and we won’t be stolen away.

This is a call for beautiful cogitations of liberation, that is only true if we hold the most marginal in the middle. This calls for us to be uncomfortable for comfort is unattainable in a world where Black death is routinized. So, this world must be transfixed or we must begin to wail our demise.

In this moment, remembrance is an important tool, helping us shape the collage of our histories and ensuring we situate this in the movement of our ancestors, their literal movements around the globe, the ways they moved rage into action and the ways they moved their hips.

We must call in the work of the Freedom Riders, THE Ride or Die-ers for Blackness and the brick throwers, flame makers and our bulleted many.

So, the time behooves us to remember.

The wash of rebellion has always lived in our intimacies. The love we give makes balm for our wounds.

This is our coagulated blood pact:
Tender, our very soul, from which magic springs forth our aspirational glow. We are monuments to each other.

Ase

We hold space.