Ancestral Futures

Rodell Warner is a Trinidadian artist working across new media and photography. Augmented Archive plays with existing and non-existing narratives in found photographs. The work speaks to Saadiya Hartman’s critical fabulation in that the sitters—“unknown”—are introduced to a new space in which alternative meaning can be made. The technological marks on the images feel like interventions for imagining what can exist in the gaps. The mineral-like animations become question marks hovering above them, encouraging us to see the individuals beyond colonial curiosity. In colour, movement, and audibility the work invites us to listen rather than look at images.

Ode is a Brazilian artist, curator, and writer. Notes on Travecacceleration layers research, writing, and moving image to create a collection of provocations about the refusal of translation and consumption in favor of mistranslation and being anti-human to advance through modes of repression and cisheterocapitalism that seeks to devalue, dehumanize, and extract from Black, queer, travesti bodies.

Adama Delphine is an American artist of Sierra-Leonian and Equatorial Guinean heritage, interested in “bending the imagination into new dimensions” and thinking through Afrofuturism, decolonization, and memory. In this work, water is a source of movement and stillness, meditation and presence. The figure is our guide, looking outward. We feel their breath animated by tiny movements and sonic contemplations. Rippling water, sound waves, intergalactic frequencies, come together through this collaboration between artist and sun/son.

Novissimo Edgar is a Brazilian artist described as a creative force in both the immaterial and the material. This work combines digital collage and prose to talk directly about the socio-political realities of labor, extraction, and capitalism in Brazil. The use of emojis emphasizes the absurdity of violence and our desensitization to it on a consumerist scale. Bíblia, boi e bala I feels like a vital confrontation or call to action about a reality that we are all connected to, whether in Brazil or not. The question is then, where do we go from here?

Hexocismos is a Mexican artist working across digital media and sound.This work explores the intersection of ancient mesoamerican sculpture, mysticism, and AI. It disrupts linearity by creating new links and connections between ancient and contemporary, calling forth the politics of colonization, capitalism, ancestral and folk traditions. As an infinite loop, linearity and time is further obscured through the use of AI, what we might consider a form of contemporary alchemy.

This work comes from a collection by photographer Fernanda Liberti and indigenous artist and activist Glicéria Tupinambá. Glicéra is the first person in 300+ years to make a Tupinambá cape. In this piece, Glicéra and her son wear the sacred pre-colonial garments which are a central part of community and spiritual power. Here we consider the legacy of connection to community, nature, indigeneity, and spirituality.

Arclight is a Nigerian artist who combines collage, digital media, and photography to archive his experience. His work considers how and what is remembered of us. The work is filled with social, political, and cultural clues about a specific moment in time. It blurs documentation with fiction and imagination. The version of reality shared with us comes directly from the artist and how he pieces together fragments of himself and his environment. The spaciousness of the work speaks to the fluidity of his process and the agency of the subject.

Suzannah Pettigrew is a British artist whose work explores generative systems on and offline through sculpture, performance, moving image, digital media, and installation. The End (For Now) explores the personal passing of time through technology and mediums of storytelling. In this work, Suzannah establishes new connections and rhythms between a collection of stills from her family film archive, augmenting them further into a single-channel video. The work considers what types of moments we choose to document and how this changes over time in relation to society and technologically. Furthermore, what happens when these fragments of time and technologies come together to form a new work entirely?