“We Are Beside Ourselves” Exhibition

“We Are Beside Ourselves” Exhibition

CUNY Graduate Center/ The James Gallery

This event has ended.

With intensifying systemic inequalities around the world materializing as global pandemics, accelerating climate change, food and energy bottlenecks, escalating refugee crises and rising race and religion-based violence, the idea of any singular, national “we” has never been more contested. And yet is there the possibility of another we?

“We Are Beside Ourselves” is a collaborative exhibition that brings together a group of artists who explore new ways to form a “we.” They look at our most intimate and most political rifts up close: where we sleep, whom we love, whom we create with, and spend leisure time with. Can working with instances of misunderstanding and contradiction transform injury and pain? If our bodies are living archives, how do we make selves, communities, and legacies by bringing heritages forward to build futures through lived experience? How do these practices open doors for visibility and legibility, affinity and connection, and furthermore offer methods for protective boundaries and navigating consent?

This exhibition is part of the The Racial Imaginary Institute multi-year residency collaboration with the James Gallery CUNY Graduate Center, which also include public discussions, performances, seminar, and publications. Founded in 2016 by the author Claudia Rankine, The Racial Imaginary Institute seeks to change the way we imagine race in the United States and internationally by lifting up and connecting the work of artists, writers, knowledge producers, and activists with audiences seeking thoughtful, innovative conversations and experiences. The members of TRII believe that “the work of defining and changing culture is all of ours.”

Artists:

Jacki Apple
Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.
Maria Hupfield
Huong Ngo
Claudia Rankine and John Lucas
Kimberly Tate
Mercedes Teixedo
Hong-An Truong
Mariana Valencia

Media

• Photography
• Installation

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