Three in the Field, 2022
at FILET Gallery, London
Curated by Brenna Horrox
Three in the Field is a refusal to accept architecture as singular or stagnant. It is a recognition and a manifestation of the fluidity in which diasporic life has built into the spatial structures around us. Illustrated by a coming together of Issi Nanabeyin’s architectural, ancestral and digital practice to tell stories of and for the diaspora. The stories explore visual streams of representation that live within the contemporary experience and embodiment of ‘Black’ identities meeting ‘British’ ones. Focusing on the movement born out of a closeness within forgein spaces and distance from what you are told is home, there is a sense of learning, searching and being. It is in this in-between, that a third architectural reimagination starts to grow. The exhibition invites us to dream in rivers; celebrating translations, traversings and meeting points through curved bodies drawn dancing in graphite strokes. Through intertwining film, sculpture and drawings Issi Nanabeyin resists binaries and singularity for the creation of collective forms that feel familiar even if we have not encountered them before. The symbol three is ever present within the show; it is representative for the body in-between simultaneously holding together the meeting point of two, whilst also refraining them from becoming completely one.
at FILET Gallery, London
Curated by Brenna Horrox
Three in the Field is a refusal to accept architecture as singular or stagnant. It is a recognition and a manifestation of the fluidity in which diasporic life has built into the spatial structures around us. Illustrated by a coming together of Issi Nanabeyin’s architectural, ancestral and digital practice to tell stories of and for the diaspora. The stories explore visual streams of representation that live within the contemporary experience and embodiment of ‘Black’ identities meeting ‘British’ ones. Focusing on the movement born out of a closeness within forgein spaces and distance from what you are told is home, there is a sense of learning, searching and being. It is in this in-between, that a third architectural reimagination starts to grow. The exhibition invites us to dream in rivers; celebrating translations, traversings and meeting points through curved bodies drawn dancing in graphite strokes. Through intertwining film, sculpture and drawings Issi Nanabeyin resists binaries and singularity for the creation of collective forms that feel familiar even if we have not encountered them before. The symbol three is ever present within the show; it is representative for the body in-between simultaneously holding together the meeting point of two, whilst also refraining them from becoming completely one.
Photographer: Thomas Edward Moen
Inherited ancestries met by curiosities,
crossed the Atlantic seas
and bore ‘new’ ethnicities.
Taking on queer momentum,
encountering each and (an)other's realities,
we translated old histories into online identities.
Giving rise to future modalities,
those who move forward,
danced rather than walked,
until they found their own kind of flow.
feel the energy, forget to follow the planned.