Wants & Needs is co-presented by EFA Project Space and the MFA Department at the University of Pennsylvania. It features the work of Jane Fentress, Austin Fisher, Evan Curtis Charles Hall, Kyuri Jeon, David Johnson, Jessi Ali Lin, Rebecca Naegele, Emmanuela Soria Ruiz, Valentina Soto Illanes, Sonnie Wooden Jr., and Julian Zeidler. The exhibition is made possible by funding from The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, the Weitzman Graduate Fine Arts department, and the Weitzman Student Council at the University of Pennsylvania.
Have we established an appropriate sense of closure? Have the forces that structure our political subjectivities and circumscribe our social realities been thoroughly appeased? To what extent will our expressions of dissent and the forms of our acquiescence be legible and legitimized? And to what ends do our creative expression serve beyond our immediate spheres of influence?
These are the questions that animate this group exhibition of moving image, installation, and sculptural works that measure the weight of creative output against contemporary social and political strife, from surveillance capitalism to the racist gestures of white grievance politics, charting in their course the effects of such phenomena on the self and on society at large. From elegiac memorials dedicated to influential figures to material investigations into the hostility of the built environment and the historical echoes of colonial exchanges within the present, the exhibition is at its core concerned with the possibility of negotiating in real terms and real space the structural conditions that remain out of sight but nevertheless bear effects on how we come to understand relationships in the present.
Wants & Needs is on view at EFA Project Space at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (323 West 39th Street, 2nd Floor, Manhattan) from May 15 to May 30, Wednesdays through Sundays from 12–6pm. Visits are by appointment only.
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