PROJECTS
Past Presence: Indira Allegra & Christopher R. Martin
Curator
2017
An exhibition exploring Black grief and collective memory through the material language of weaving
The exhibition responds to politicized trauma in Black contemporary life through the medium of weaving, both literal and figurative.
Allegra presented an iteration of Open Casket, an immersive digital weaving installation that combines abstract compositions with cacophonous audio recordings of grief-stricken families who have lost loved ones to police violence. Within Open Casket, Allegra explores the structure of crepe, a textile historically associated with mourning and commonly used to line the interior of caskets—reimagining it as a digital mourning cloth. Both visceral and elegiac, the work reflects on digital memorialization and the materiality of Black sadness and Black life.
Martin exhibited a series of large scale tapestries depicting objects and symbols of state violence, slave labor, and resistance stitched into cotton-based textiles. With visual language reminiscent of activist banners, his work draws on the legacy of cotton in the American South and fiber-working techniques passed down from his mother, a seamstress.
Past Presence considers how fiber can stand in for the body and bear the weight of collective grief. Through overt visual tools, Allegra and Martin interroagate the psychic and material toll of racial violence and open space for mourning, memory, and embodied witnessing.
LEARN MORE
RELEVENT LINKS