Michelle Lopez, ??????? & ??????????, 2019. Photo by Constance Mensh.
“For a writer does but conjugate the tenses and ten – sions of time through verbal means, and his scope is dismally reduced if [they]… must keep step with the indiscriminant rush towards the future, disregarding the only fullness in time: the presents, where we remember and where we imagine.”
— Carlos Fuentes, “Remember the Future” (1985)
Banal Presents is the third and final chapter in the exhibition series Colored People Time, which has unfolded over the course of the past year through the presentation of two preceding chapters, Mundane Futures and Quotidian Pasts. Banal Presents stages a conversation between the artists Carolyn Lazard, Cameron Rowland, and Sable Elyse Smith. Through varying approaches, these artists examine the ongoing repercussions of chattel slavery with a focus on property, reparations, and the medical industrial and prison-industrial complexes. Across these themes, all three artists utilize the everyday as the site for continuing interrogation of systemic oppression. In Banal Presents the present serves as the grounds for critical intervention.
Colored People Time is organized by ICA Assistant Curator Meg Onli and will be accompanied by a catalog published in early 2020. A robust program and a collaboration with the quarterly literary magazine Callaloo will also support the exhibition.
Colored People Time: Banal Presents is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania (118 S. 36th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104) through December 22, 2019.
For more information, visit icaphila.org/colored-people-time-banal-presents/.
Major support for Colored People Time has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
