A sorrow song
A fugitive space
The quiet of our interior sovereignty
Francheska Alcántara and kara lynch invite you to Strange & Oppositional, a collective meditation on Black feminist fugitive aesthetics, mourning, and liberation. This exhibition presents a critical, reflective political art practice that considers generations and histories of Indigenous, Black and Brown migrations. Strange & Oppositional honors where we come from, and is a deep listening to where we are. It is an offering.
Strange & Oppositional draws its name and inspiration from feminist scholar/bad-ass bell hooks’ 1990 essay “An Aesthetics of Blackness – Strange and Oppositional.” In this essay, hooks states: “Black Aesthetics is more than a philosophy or theory of art and beauty; it is a way of inhabiting space, a particular location, a way of looking and becoming.” This way of seeing and knowing emerges from African Indigenous legacies and life-ways that honor objects as sacred and animate while at the same time reckoning with the persistent purview of racial capitalism – a system of relationships where objects, people and land are understood as property – bought, sold, kidnapped, sequestered, and stolen. Strange & Oppositional points to aesthetics that draw the beauty, terror, and celebration of our lives as African diasporic people.
The exhibition comes out of our desire to reflect on our experience living and learning in Tulsa, Indian Territory. We arrived in the summer of 2020 on the wave of uprisings collectively honoring Black Life while mourning Black Death. We landed in the midst of the historic McGirt decision and debates around Indigenous sovereignty and calls for land back. We actively witnessed the centennial commemorations of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre and show up for local movements for “generational vision, justice and liberation.“ The legacies of stolen land and labor on Turtle Island are in full relief in Oklahoma.
To live and work in Tulsa incites a different sense of time-passing as many buried histories are coming into the light to be contested and rectified. The vastness of the open blue sky, the progressing of light, the sunsets, the weekly tornado siren, the resolute freight train and tracks separating North and South – the contradictions of politics and liberties here bring about a strange sense of being. Things have a patina; there’s a contradiction of time and space where physically constructing buildings and metaphorically constructing histories on top of something that already exists is a common practice. Meanwhile, vestiges of the ruins remain vividly alive or are erased in the memories of locals.
Our hope is to create a site of cross-pollination and a space where communities that live and cross each other meet. Strange & Oppositional presents our practices through the rework, repurposing, and transformation of artifacts and ideas that combine storytelling, sewing, documenting, weaving, folding, building, listening, cutting, moving, and layering. Strange & Oppositional stands firmly on methods of research and play and ideas of collectivity, queerness, claiming space, anti-colonial African diasporic liberation, abolition, reparations, land back, the wisdom of our ancestors, and the beauty of the everyday – that can feel foreign in this context, yet that make a case for engaging questions that others do not dare to ask.
This exhibition is generously sponsored by the Flint Family Foundation, Tulsa Artist Fellowship and Tulsa Community College.
Free and Open to the public.
More exhibition information: https://108contemporary.org/event/strange-and-oppositional/
All participants are welcome. For disability-related accommodations, please call +1 (918) 895-6302 or email info@108contemporary.org.