Stringing
words together while working on this exhibition at the Arts Club of
Chicago, the
needle, the haystack, the thread made
a certain sense, made a certain space for Britta
Marakatt-Labba and Lala
Meredith-Vula and Aboubakar
Fofana and
the late Maria
Lai.
If
these artists and the fruits of their labors cannot be easily
summarized, thematized, named, tamed, or otherwise put in a
proverbial drawer of available artistic or geographic or cultural
criteria, their shared story is telling and wants to be told.
It
speaks of a free association that keeps the society of things and
thoughts and animals and plants and minerals and materials together.
Humans take part. Yet they are not necessarily the center. There is
no center. There is rather an invitation to connect and consider what
is sometimes called traditional work or farm work or craft work anew.
Imagine
between these artists, between their works, something like the red
thread handed by Ariadne to Theseus to get him in and out of the
Labyrinth.
Tending
to their integrated ways of working and living [grounded in distinct
traditions, advancing techniques shared across continents, and
resistant to the soul-draining transformations of their communities
wrought by violent histories of division and conquest] becomes our
common task, however temporarily.
See
it also as the seed of a sur-rural imaginary in an urban context
Curated
by Monika
Szewczyk
The
Arts Club of Chicago
March
15th- May 19
