ART-PRESENTATION: Miatta Kawinzi-Soft is Strong

Born in the Southern United States to a Liberian mother and Kenyan father, Miatta Kawinzi’s work explores cultural hybridity, motifs of doubling, and linguistic experimentation in conversation with Black feminist literary traditions, uplifting a poetics of liberation that simultaneously holds space for loss while imagining paths towards reparation and renewal. This is the artist’s first institutional solo show in New York.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Cue Art Foundation Archive

Miatta Kawinzi grew up moving through various geographic, cultural, and linguistic spaces that inform their work and interest in hybridity and layered imagery and content, in her solo exhibition “Soft is Strong” employs multimedia installation, video, and prints to consider conditions of fragmentation, multiplicity, and softness within the African diaspora as sites for belonging, possibility, and regeneration. In the main gallery is a large-scale installation of Kawinzi’s experimental film, “SHE GATHER ME”, titled after a line from Toni Morrison’s novel “Beloved”. The film uses analog and digital footage recorded in Detroit, Johannesburg, New York City, Santo Domingo, and Tulsa combined with concrete poetry and an original electronic score to meditate on both existing and imagined internal and external landscapes of the African diaspora. The immersive environment includes a silver mylar-covered floor, blue lights, and wooden rocking chairs. A series of sculptural  works hung across the gallery walls weave together dark blue cotton threads with cowrie shells, historical signifiers of value in both East and West Africa. Elsewhere, Kawinzi’s two-channel video installation, “A(f)mrka”, situates an experimental dialogue across two CRT television monitors in which fragments of text on a blue background draw attention to the intersections between imaginings of “Afrka” and “Amrka.” For the soundtrack, the artist riffs off of the Liberian and Black American national anthems, alluding to their entanglement. Across the front wall and hallway, Kawinzi has installed colorful Kente cloth-inspired original wallpaper on which a photographic print, “The fragrance of our blooming” is installed. This image is part of a series of black and white photographs displayed throughout the gallery that depict the artist’s unanchored arms holding sunflowers against white backgrounds, gestures that reference the poet Nikki Giovanni’s musings on the ways in which flowers speak to the dualities of “mourning and rejoicing”. The color blue echoes throughout the exhibition, evoking the West African Mami Wata, the Black American blues tradition, and waterways, as well as serving to reclaim the color from its contemporary connotations of policing by inserting it into a context of softness and possibility.

Photo: Miatta Kawinzi, SHE GATHER ME (Video Still), 2021, HD color video, 16mm color film transferred to video, two-channel audio: vocalization, cassette tape recordings, synthesizer, original electronic score, 10 minutes 50 seconds, © Miatta Kawinzi, Courtesy the artist and CUE Art Foundation

Info: Curator-Mentor: Ronny Quevedo, CUE Art Foundation, 137 West 25t-/h Street, Ground Floor (Between 6th and 7th Avenue), New York, Duration: 8/4-12/5/2021, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 12:00-18:00, https://cueartfoundation.org