This is what summons me
"I think my job is to make them curious enough, or to persuade them, willingly or unwillingly, to get to know themselves better and to be aware of where they come from, their interests and what's already available to them, and to simply bring it all out. That's what I'm summoning them to do, and I'll do it by any means necessary.
Voilà ce qui me somme à les sommer is a group show that invites us to explore what we can draw from our inherited experiences of dislocation and displacement to form affinities. The selected works demonstrate the urgency we feel towards weaving community ties that resist the motto of death, the one that fuels, above all, our fixations and aspirations to ownership.
What motivates us to cultivate an aesthetic that focuses on the still-existing rhizomes of uprooting as fertile ground for our collective permutations? Esther Calixte-Bea, Clovis-Alexandre Desvarieux, Eddy F., Stanley Février, G L O W Z I, Anick Jasmin, Mallory Lowe, Schaël Marcéus, Oski, Stefani Saintonge and Michaëlle Sergile share a critical curiosity: to converse and transform, rather than regurgitate, narratives of identity. Their visual formulations offer convergences of fantasy and reality that challenge us to concretize evolving visions. Visit
artists bring new clarity to the delicate threads of past, present and future that we weave together to manifest ourselves in sovereign fashion.
While we live with the violence of having to justify and actively fight for recognition of our humanity, we do miraculous work as providers and creators of our future. These works, which are not at all seduced by the power of visibility, offer spaces to immerse oneself in the visual, material and cultural codes that establish commonalities between the social experiences of black people. This is what summons me to them has taken shape by revering the intimacy and indiscipline that characterize the practices of the artists presented. They each have a unique propensity for unraveling the integral and transformative knowledge and experience we hold dear. Deciphering the narratives that expand our definitions of freedom is relentless work. And yet, by engaging in artistic practices dedicated to the materialization of our desires, our position is affirmed. If this work is testing, it is also enriching and necessary to the construction of our world. This is what summons me to summon them is an offering - a reminder - of the innate poetics that make our desires possible.
- Joséphine Denis Commissioner