SOIL: RADICAL EMPATHY IN THE ACT OF REMEMBRANCE
FEATURING WORK BY: Tony Bingham, Soynika Edwards-Bush, Darius Hill, Vincent Lawson, June Reddix-Stennis
This community has known great violence. We see it everyday in our geography, in our family trees, marred by broken branches representing a life not lived, snuffed out by the atrocities of others, neighbors. This exhibition is not about telling you what you already know, what you’ve always known, or what can be felt in your bones. This exhibition is about reclaiming human dignity.
The legacy of racism in the South is fundamentally dehumanizing. History reduces the story to names and dates, confirmable facts that leave a gaping hole in what can be known from such a distance. Deeper than that, the horrific, violent act of lynching not only destroys a life, but devalues that life’s story. We are left years later with an incomplete account of what happened, and a profound deficit of meaning. Our futile history leaves us with a collective story of helplessness and powerlessness, personal histories and futures erased.
What does it mean to remember?
Our goals in this exhibition are to lift up the lives that were taken, confront Mobile’s history of violence, own it, and create a space for remembrance and a new imagining of who we can be moving forward. These five artists have been commissioned to make new work that grapples with not only the remembrance of those lost but the ways these losses carry forward. Knowing history does not suffice in making real change. This is a history that is incomplete, that marks the perspective of those in power at the time of recording, and has all but erased the human dignity of those most affected. This is a history that has left us dismembered. We carry our brokenness. Art, here, has the ability to take a broken and incomplete history and infuse empathy, or deeper perspective. Filling the gaps of history, mapping out new meaning, allows us to traverse trauma, acknowledging the full impact. Art creates space for a deeper level of knowing, it can empower, speak to the unknown agency of strangers, and help us transcend grief into a new place of power. It is only by reckoning with missing pieces that we can create a new whole.
This is not easy work, and this is not easy to witness. The lift mounted by these five artists is heavy. For those up to the task, we are here to re-member. By honoring the deep humanity of the victims of racial violence, past and present, we endeavor to provide a space for healing, where the community can reclaim our story.
CONTENT WARNING:
Please be aware that we did not edit or hold back these artists from directly addressing words and images of violence. In asking them to mount new work that addresses trauma, there was a conscious choice to acknowledge each artist's power in selecting their own depth of engagement. There is work in this exhibition that might cut deeper than you are willing to go. This exhibition will trigger. Some of this work hurts to witness, and intentionally speaks to the hurt that is still felt. Some of this work will offend. The truth of this history is offensive.
Please be compassionate with yourself in engaging with this work. We believe that by acknowledging the racial violence that has scarred this community, we might move toward healing. Not everyone may feel they need that acknowledgement. That’s okay too.
SOIL: Radical Empathy in the Act of Rememberance was on view at Alabama Contemporary Art Center April 14, 2023 - July 15, 2023.
In curating, a common misconception is that what we hang is based on what we “like”. All of culture has trained us to look to art for beauty, for respite, or for escape. There are a great many masters of those things, and a great many exhibitions directed at those goals. This is not one of them.
Our choices here are not about liking, or about providing respite from the struggles of life. If any exhibition could illustrate the point I regularly try to make it is this one. Although there is great beauty in the resilience of these artists, and beauty in the care and attention to detail they’ve shown, this is a body of work that gazes directly on the ugliness of our lived experiences. Art, here, is a transportation device. It gives us a view into a world where traumas are evidenced. Art allows us to externalize and acknowledge a loss, and assess an aftermath. We so often don’t have that luxury.
Although this work is painful, this is not an exhibition about despair. Acknowledging the wounds is fundamentally an act of great hope. We acknowledge the great losses and the legacy of lynching because we know that no evil survives the sunlight, and that it is only by understanding what has been taken from the Black community that we can hope to make reparations. In re-membering, we begin the process of repair.
I don’t think this exhibition will solve racism. I do think here we have the opportunity to bear witness as these artists have done.
“If, as a culture, we don’t bear witness to grief, the burden of loss is placed entirely upon the bereaved, while the rest of us avert our eyes and wait for those in mourning to stop being sad, to let go, to move on, to cheer up. And if they don’t — if they have loved too deeply, if they do wake each morning thinking, I cannot continue to live — well, then we pathologize their pain; we call their suffering a disease.We do not help them: we tell them that they need to get help.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Brave Enough
The power of witness here, tonight is a powerful tool of reclaiming the human dignity lost to spectacle violence. We have the opportunity to rewrite the corrosive narratives that justified these heinous acts, to acknowledge the true harm and to invite empathy, and a deeper understanding of what already lives in us. We know that understanding and empathy is carried the way pain is carried— and it will have a ripple effect on the world.
I want to applaud the courage of the artists, for the very difficult task we laid out for them 2 years ago. They have lived in the belly of this beast, and waged their own battles with it. They have done this work on behalf of you all, and I hope you see the great generosity in what they offer, and understand the sacrifices they made to offer it. And i want to end by offering a prayer:
Tonight is a heavy night. Let our pain be holy. Let it not be in isolation, but shared across a community. And let our shared pain be a kindling to the fire of change. Let empathy and love burn through us and consume the fear and old ways of being. Let that fire consume the ways we’ve been afraid to change, and paused in facing the world saying ’it cannot be changed’. Let this change us and cause us to change the world. Let us be remade by it– more whole and fuller than before.
- e. elliott