Tschabalala Self’s presentation inaugurates a new series of exhibitions entitled RESPONSES. The series attempts to bring established contemporary artists into dialogue with the two solo exhibitions presented, through the presentation of a small selection of works.

Self’s powerful works combine fabric collage, printmaking, and painting into a distinctive visual language that brings the lived realities of contemporary Black life to the fore. The compositions she develops create spaces in which her two-dimensional figures seem to live and breathe. Her practice moves between artistic and craft-based traditions, addressing questions of identity, self-determination, and collective memory.

Self’s work enters into an expanded dialogue with themes that also shape the practices of Melvin Edwards and Tuli Mekondjo: the material and symbolic conditions of Black life across the African and American continents; the entangled cultural legacies of colonialism, slavery, the Plantation and equally the resistances that emerged; through political movements and currents such as the civil rights movement to the more recent Black Lives Matter.

Tschabalala Self (*1990) lives and works in the Hudson Valley, New York. Her work emerges from a layered combination of painting, collage, printmaking, and sculpture. Through this practice, she explores the complexity of the Black body and its cultural as well as personal inscriptions—always situated between individual experience and societal perception.