Exhibition

Victoria-Idongesit Udondian: How Can I Be Nobody

5 Mar 2022 – 10 Apr 2022

Regular hours

Monday
Closed
Tuesday
10:00 – 18:00
Wednesday
10:00 – 18:00
Thursday
10:00 – 18:00
Friday
10:00 – 18:00
Saturday
10:00 – 18:00
Sunday
10:00 – 18:00

Free admission

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How Can I Be Nobody is a site-specific solo exhibition combining elements from Udondian’s recent collaborative projects that include woven textiles, sculptures, and sound, the artist’s first major solo exhibition in New York City.

About

Continuing her recent exploration into the links between bodies and transit within global labor economies, the installation connects Smack Mellon’s Dumbo gallery, a former industrial site, to the foundational role of immigrant labor in capitalist production. 

Udondian conceived of this project as an opportunity for individuals from marginalized subcultural groups to construct a shared understanding of their historical past to resist systems of domination. Starting with an initial call for collaborators in 2019, Udondian has developed relationships with various local immigrant communities, including a partnership with Stitch Buffalo, a textile center near the artist’s studio that facilitates refugee and immigrant women in creating handcrafted goods to find economic empowerment. She has collaborated with and compensated community members, weaving with them and creating sculptural casts of their hands while collecting their stories. 

At Smack Mellon, the cast hands reside in and around a suspended ship rib, constructed to reference the eighteenth-century diagram of the Brookes slave ship as well as countless boats carrying migrants who have crossed the Mediterranean Sea. The large-scale collaborative weavings are primarily composed of repurposed black fabric in acknowledgement of the black and brown lives lost in search of better conditions. The exhibition also includes performance footage from Udondian’s ongoing project The Republic of Unknown Territory, begun in 2017 during her own naturalization process, in which she required gallery visitors to undergo rigorous immigration processes in order to gain access to the space. 

The exhibition’s title is a quote from one of Udondian’s collaborators who, while struggling to divulge her personal history fearing that it would put the community in her home country in danger, asked, “How can I be nobody and tell you my story?” Her sentiment elucidates anxieties of persecution that many immigrants and refugees carry with them into unfamiliar places due to the lack of protection available to them. As a project, How Can I Be Nobody asks viewers to consider the myriad societal contributions of immigrant populations in the face of growing intolerance and nationalism across America and Europe. By bridging direct engagement with these communities and contemporary art audiences, Udondian facilitates individuals from marginalized subcultural groups in constructing a shared understanding of their historical past to promote re-empowerment.

Exhibiting artistsToggle

Victoria-Idongesit Udondian

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