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May 31 – June 14, 2023
Curated by Ellada Evangelou & Keith Miller
An art that is able to deconstruct oppressive relations of “othering” installed by discourses of racism has the capacity to open a critical space in which the reconstruction of relations among selves and others along more equitable lines is brought within reach.
– Kobena Mercer, Travel and See: Black Diaspora Art Practices Since the 1980s
A diaspora is a displacement. It is a break with a place and also with a temporality. This separation can be understood as a trauma,1 a rupture from what is known, understood in new and unknown territories. It is a movement of bodies in time and space that yearn to be reconfigured, simultaneously here and there.
Diasporic Tremors, an exhibition of video and performance art, curated by Ellada Evangelou and Keith Miller, begins with this break and the impossibility of being in two places and times at once and with this idea of the origin of trauma as embedded in diasporas. The artists participating in the exhibition are suspended between these two realities, which they have deconstructed through their work:
Trauma
The exhibition centers firstly on the origin of trauma as that which is experienced by diasporic groups -and by extension these artists. How these transitions from one place to the other are made, what is the importance and gravitas of geography (through which we can see spatial trajectories), and that of the relationship between past+present+future (through which we can see temporal trajectories)? And, how have diaspora artists moved, and how have they created through and beyond them?
The exhibition attempts an extended reflection on the origin of trauma, this rupture/chasm brought about by the violent break. In reference to the population group, Walker Connor, defines diasporas as “that segment of a people living outside the Homeland”,2 whereas Kobena Mercer relates diasporas to “the spaces into which a population is forcibly scattered and dispersed as a result of involuntary migration”.3
In this exhibition, we host artists that actively explore the tremors produced by diasporic movement, the real, physical bodily process related to an inherently violent practice. Where the artists are called to respond is what happens in the process of adapting to a new space, where we often witness the nurturing of an imagined/ir-real present, taking shape from within the schism between the here and now, and the there and then there and then.
Utopias and Imaginaries
As the Old world and New world generate a new dialogue between the two, a brand new reality emerges and the family unit inevitably comes into focus. How is the New world perceived through the eyes and the relationships of the Old world? What are the mechanisms through which we understand (and practice) the im-balances brought about by the ‘ontology of strangers’ as Sara Ahmed writes,4 the New and Old people we meet, and how do we engage with an/the other within a social context.
In considering twentieth and twenty-first century diasporas, we anticipate the more creative manifestations of this dialogic, in the form of utopias that emerged from these mobilities and the new imaginaries, as per B. Anderson’s (1983) theories rooted in the birth of nationalism,5 perhaps created. As we engage with identity politics, we find connections of this discussion also in postcolonial thought, and that inevitably comes with the realization that these potentialities are pregnant with class. The exhibition proposes that the investigation happens free of the ‘fixity’, as described by Homi K. Bhabha:6 the works do not adhere to stereotypes produced and propagated by and about colonialism.
Curators Ellada Evangelou and Keith Miller, with artists Suneil Sanzgiri, Tara Homasi, Argyro Nicolaou, Ibi Ibrahim, Margaux Fitoussi, Myriam Amri, and Anooj Bhandari, Chan Lin and Val Ramirez, invite you to diasporic experiences from Iran, India, Cyprus, Tunisia, Yemen, China, and Mexico.
CURATORS BIO
Ellada Evangelou was born and raised in Cyprus. She has studied in Cyprus and the United States and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship for graduate study.
She has worked as a dramaturg, theater director, workshop facilitator, and independent consultant, in collaboration with theater companies, NGOs, and international organisations. She teaches theater and dramaturgy courses in higher education in Cyprus and the United States. She is interested in the relationship between theater/dramaturgy and identity, and works in the intersection of aRtivism and scholarship in post-colonial, post-conflict communities. She is co-founder of Rooftop Theatre, a 2020-21 Global Fellow of the International Society for the Performing Arts, as well as the Artistic and Cultural Director of the Buffer Fringe Performing Arts Festival from 2019 to 2022.
Keith Miller has been the curator of the Gallatin Galleries since it opened in 2009. Prior to that he was the founding curator of the SAC Gallery at Stony Brook University from 2001 to 2008, and has curated over forty thematic gallery and museum exhibitions. His curatorial practice begins from the premise that the gallery is a site for engaged political conversation. He has been a part time professor at Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU since 2006 and was awarded the Gallatin School Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2014. He is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2014 Jerome Fellow and works as a filmmaker, artist, and curator. His paintings and videos have been shown in various solo and group shows throughout the world.
Footnotes
- Ionescu, Arleen & Margaroni, Maria (Eds). Arts Of Healing: Cultural Narratives Of Trauma. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2020.
- William Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return”, in Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, Volume 1, Number 1, Spring 1991, pp. 83-99,
- Travel and See: Black Diaspora Art Practices Since the 1980s, Duke University Press, 2016.
- Strange encounters: embodied others in post-coloniality, Routledge, 2000.
- Benedict Anderson (1983) in his seminal work Imagined Communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism.
- The Location of Culture, Routledge, 1994.