Tour: crossed kalunga by the stars & other acts of resistance

Virtual Exhibition

Click the image below to be taken to the gallery. For a guided tour, click the play button on the bottom left corner of the window after the tour has loaded. Descriptions and photos of each item are available by clicking the icon above each item. The tour can be paused at any time by clicking anywhere in the window. A highlight reel is also available by clicking the other icon next to the play button. A downloadable PDF with photos and descriptions is available here. We hope you enjoy the tour.

► crossed kalunga by the stars & other acts of resistance

crossed kalunga by the stars & other acts of resistance features work by seven contemporary artists who evidence transformative and contested circumstances in their production. Art by José Bedia, Athlone Clarke, André Leon Gray, Esmerelda Mila, Rex Miller, Marielle Plaisir, and Renée Stout navigates awareness and adversity in conversation with nature and memory. Each shares a distinctive perspective on how art can speak provocative truths amidst a sea of mutable facts. In her/his own way, each artist gathers and weaves real and imagined histories – past and recent – to embed their art with layers of creative, ancestral, and spiritual DNA to elucidate possible features in formation.

In the Kikongo language of the Congo-Angola Basin, kalunga means, “threshold between worlds,” but often refers to the Atlantic Ocean, reflecting a belief that the souls of the dead follow the setting sun to a land beyond the horizon. During the three and a half centuries of the transAtlantic trade in enslaved Africans, this belief was affirmed. Whether the people who made this journey endured the entire Middle Passage or died along the way to become ancestors in the ocean, those who saw anyone from family to friends to their own enemies forcibly transported could come to believe that the departed had been taken to the realm of the dead, and that perhaps these ancestors may return to life, in time, in other forms.

Virtual Tour by John Starbuck