This exhibition offered a provocative meditation on the meanings of the “resistant” Black body.
In her three-part exhibition project The Visible, the Laughable, and the Invisible, Afro-Colombian artist Carmenza Banguera explored tropes of Blackness and belonging, conjoining perspectives across two multicultural democracies, Colombia and the United States. Banguera’s works were partly based on observations drawn from an exploratory trip to Chicago in the spring of 2019 and reviewed through the lens of the Afro-Colombian experience in her hometown of Cali. Informed by the “racial reckoning” taking place in the United States following the murder of George Floyd, the exhibition offered a compelling meditation on the transnational meanings of the “resistant” Black body as invulnerable and thus capable of arduous and unsafe work. Banguera offered a striking critique of this gendered and racialized notion of bodily resistance, baring the contradictions of such embodied citizenship as they subtend Black Americans’ daily dealings with pervasive state violence and constrained labor markets. Conceived in close collaboration with the Contours of Black Citizenship in a Global Context research project at the Neubauer Collegium, this exhibition compelled us to imagine new ways of being and seeing.
Curated by the Contours of Black Citizenship in a Global Context research team in collaboration with Dieter Roelstraete
Installation photography and video by Robert Heishman. Event photography by Max Herman. All rights reserved.
