A Net Made Of Individual Knots

A Net Made Of Individual Knots

Embassy Gallery is pleased to present ‘A Net Made of Individual Knots’, a solo presentation of new works by interdisciplinary artist Evan Ifekoya.

Preview: 19/05, 19:00-22:00

‘Dear Abiola,

How are you today? I hope this message finds you well and in good spirits. On June 20th 2016, I was invited to participate in a study day on the work of Lubaina Himid, at the Stuart Hall Library in London. During the day, participants were invited to handle works from her ‘Inside the Invisible’ series of paintings. If it is the space that we can’t see that needs examining, how do we move forward in this endeavour?

Later in the discussion Lubaina tells us that the works are about “how histories collide with the personal”. I have a feeling that it’s this unexplored space that we must strive towards, where the personal collides with the political. It’s an unknown space, a risk, a haunting. How does it manifest itself physically, if we can’t move through it. Is it a space we hear or taste?’

‘A Net Made of Individual Knots’ is an exhibition that explores the role of language in cultivating​ and nourishing spaces of belonging, whilst attending to the disparate nature of the people that make up a community – the communities we inherit, and the​ ​communities we create.

The myriad of voices that make up the body of the text invoke polyvocality as a strategy to decentre any singular authoritative position. By drawing on queer black archives of social space and nightlife, the exhibition considers darkness in abundance, spectrality, as site where knowledge is produced and social politics are formed. The exhibition forms part of Ifekoya’s ongoing project ‘A Score, A Groove, A Phantom’ which explores archives of blackness, sociality and inheritance as they diffract through queer nightlife and trauma in the present moment.

A narrative told through a multitude of perspectives and time zones inhabits the gallery, investigating the space between listening and feeling – demanding that we treat experience as
evidence. The mesh this creates offers us a series of proposals. In fictionalising histories past and present might we be better equipped to speculate on what is to come? What can be considered valuable in our recollections of the past and what could be useful about the use-less?

‘Chewing is an ambiguous activity, combining aggression and pleasure, destruction (of structures) and creation (of mash).Chewing is always already charged with expectations of incorporation or ejection, potential violence and/or desire. Thus, if we understand chewing as a form of perception and memorization—and a political practice—we must acknowledge its pleasurable and delightful dimensions as much as its reluctant, repellent, or nauseating ones. As a mode of approaching the scenery, chewing subverts the distinction between the individual and the social: while chewing places me within the scenery, it also places the scenery within me.​’

– ​Antke Engel ‘Queer Temporalities and the Chronopolitics of Transtemporal Drag’

Exhibition Open: 20/05 – 11/06, Thursday to Sunday, 12:00-18:00

evanifekoya.com

Photography by Eden Hawkins