Exhibition

Steffani Jemison | clear skies / troubled water

n her solo exhibition, Steffani Jemison invites us to decipher omens. On 12 February 1831, Nat Turner, a man enslaved on a plantation in Southampton, Virginia, witnessed an eclipse, seeing in it the hand of a black man covering the sun. He interpreted this as a sign, heralding an uprising that he would come to lead. In November of the same year, he was arrested along with the other rebels and sentenced to death. clear skies/troubled water examines the stirrings of revolt and vicissitudes of suppression - from the uprisings in 1831 to the riots that arose in the cities of Boston, Detroit, Cincinnati and Newark in the summer of 1967 - through the prism of natural phenomena (eclipses, wind patterns, variations in light and gravity). The movement toward emancipation appears here not as a linear path, but rather as an uncertain journey, comprising setbacks and revivals. The artist Steffani Jemison explores flight as a creative and political gesture: a way of plotting alternative coordinates, improvising new forms of presence, and marking out futures that the body can bear. Here, "atmosphere" goes beyond a simple question of climate. It acts as a sensitive power, charged with memory and invisible tensions. It conceals structures that influence our trajectories and limit our path. Like the verse of a ruttier - poems that sailors learned by heart to navigate no matter the weather the exhibition invites us to pay attention to imperceptible currents.

Steffani Jemison uses movement and language as tools for material and spiritual research, operating in the seam between conceptual and embodied knowledge.

Steffani Jemison uses movement and language as tools for material and spiritual research, operating in the seam between conceptual and embodied knowledge. 

Her work is often rooted in the contents of the archive and encompasses a variety of media, including video, sculpture, drawing, and live performance. 

In her work Jemison addresses African-American culture and vernacular as well as the tensions between the private, social, and political spheres through a variety of means, examining the structures and testing the limits of narrative storytelling and linear time. 

Jemison’s interdisciplinary practice explores themes of possibility, perspective, proximity, and understanding, in an ongoing body of work anchored in insights that cross boundaries of time and space. 

Steffani Jemison has taken part in numerous solo and group shows at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Genève, CH (2024); Greene Naftali, New York, US (2024; 2021); Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, NE (2022; 2020); Madragoa, Lisbon, PT (2021); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, NE (2019); De Appel, Amsterdam, NE (2019); Jeu de Paume, Paris, FR (2017); CAPC, Bordeaux, FR (2017); MASS MoCA, North Adams, US (2017); Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK (2017); RISD Museum, Providence, US (2015); The Museum of Modern Art, New York, US (2015); Whitney Biennial, New York, US (2019); and Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, US (2019–2020), among others. 

Solo screening programs include Art of the Real at Lincoln Center, New York, US (2018) and Conversations at the Edge at the Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago, US (2018).

next media
/