The Intimacies Between Continents
The Intimacies Between Continents
Curated by Coleman Collins
Artists:
Sula Bermudez-Silverman
Danielle Dean
Africanus Okokon
New Opening Date:
Feb. 8-April 5, 2025
Opening Reception: Saturday, Feb. 8, 2-5 p.m.
Contemporary Arts Center Gallery
The Intimacies Between Continents brings together the work of Sula Bermudez-Silverman, Danielle Dean, and Africanus Okokon — three contemporary artists who work across video, sculpture, and installation to unearth the often forgotten material traces of the historical processes that produced global capitalism. The show borrows its title from The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015) by Lisa Lowe, in which she ties seemingly private, individualized domestic tranquility to broader systems of extraction. In contradistinction to the dominant notion of intimacy as “being personally intimate”, (i.e. an emotional, typically romantic relationship between two people within/and in relation to bourgeois domesticity and marriage), Lowe associates the word as “residual” and “emergent” forms of connection: implied but less visible forms of alliance and affinity among variously colonized peoples upon which that dominant mode depends.
We might think of the difference as a matter of distance. Seen from a certain angle, the story of modernity is one of distance, of vast distances being collapsed, a story of obstacles overcome: space and time gradually made irrelevant by technological progress. Past events rendered eternally visible on screens viewed from the comfort of one’s own couch. Goods—manufactured, assembled, and sold on disparate continents—delivered with the merest gesture, a flick of a finger. These activities necessarily occur within the home, the place where intimacy must occur, between two lovingly possessive individuals. They nestle against each other, satisfied.
All this is further structured by desire, an acquisitive desire: to have and to hold. To possess. To defend, because such bliss is invariably fragile. The artists in this show shed light on the ways in which these dominant forms of intimacy and their attendant comforts of consumption are materially reproduced. They re-enact the construction of trading castles and re-purpose the sea chests that conveyed goods from continent to continent. They index the raw materials—rice, salt, sugar, gold—whose fevered exchange ushered in the modern era. Collectively, the works in this exhibition scrutinize the racialized and gendered structures of economic power that undergird idealized domesticity—and in so doing, perform and instantiate an emergent intimacy.
Image credit: Sula Bermudez-Silverman, Detail of White Zombie, 2020, Image courtesy of the artist.
Learn more about the exhibition, including artist and curator bios, here.
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Gallery hours: Tuesday-Saturday, noon-6 p.m.
Free admission
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