BLACK PHENOMENA: On Afropessimism & Camp by Hafizah Geter “Me, we,” Steph says, quoting Muhammad Ali. She points her finger from me to her, turning the history that daisy-chains us into shorthand. We gaze out from Prospect Park’s highest pinnacle. Like the frogs chameleoning in the pond two hundred feet below us, our sentences leap from one conversation to another—art, ancestors, this Hunger Games called America. Gulps of white clouds hover at our waist level, pressed like pennies between a gentrifying Brooklyn…Read More
Critique and Care: Sheida Soleimani Interviewed by Cassie Packard Photomontages that expose power and brutality. Sheida Soleimani’s collapsed images teem with signification. The Iranian American artist, who lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, constructs elaborate tableaux that incorporate an array of symbolic objects (bubble gum, toilet paper) and found source imagery (aerial views of oil fields, crooked politicians’ gesturing hands). Compressed into two-dimensional photographs with the seductive gloss of an internet aesthetic, these scenes deliver searing critiques of global systems…Read More
