NYAB Event - Leslie Hewitt, Karel Martens and Zia Haider Rahman “Power Structures”

Leslie Hewitt, Karel Martens and Zia Haider Rahman “Power Structures”

P!

This event has ended.

P! presents Power Structures, a three-person exhibition featuring Leslie Hewitt, Karel Martens, and Zia Haider Rahman. Additive and exponential, the show offers an oblique look at acute questions troubling our political moment.

Leslie Hewitt exhibits three works: a black horizontal line bisecting the viewer’s gaze and the space it circumscribes; a color photograph that collapses archival documentation and personal memory; and a white sheet metal sculpture from her current project at the Studio Museum Harlem, which evokes paper through its planar folds.

Printed on discarded Belgian identity records, a new body of letterpress monoprints by Karel Martens extends his signature technique of overprinting metal forms on found materials. Through this combination of figure and ground, past and present, Martens’ layering reactivates the remainders of a vast bureaucratic archive.

Zia Haider Rahman’s remarkable novel, In Light of What We Know, resonates throughout the exhibition. A meditation on colonialism, epistemology, friendship, mathematics, and more, the book will be on sale here at cost. Through this economic gesture, the space reframes itself as a distribution point without profit, a single position from which timely ideas may multiply their dividends into the world.