Numma Yah
Miatta Kawinzi: Numma Yah
September 28 - November 17, 2024
Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY
Multi-disciplinary artist and writer Miatta Kawinzi presents an immersive installation unfolding across Smack Mellon’s gallery through soft sculptures, soundscapes, and projected moving images. This exhibition meditates on ideas around protection, inter-connectivity, embodied memory, and the lessons learned from plant life.
Informed by the artist’s Liberian cultural heritage, the exhibition’s motif centers on root systems. Strong and often hidden from view, roots serve as support, central nervous system, and vibratory life force across place. As metaphor, they are ancestral connectors and have the capacity to reveal the embodied traces of a history’s emotional landscape. Here the artist explores roots as a container for diasporic solace while engaging the ongoing reach towards liberation – a concept deeply embedded in Liberia’s history as the first modern African republic after declaring independence from the American Colonization Society.
A three-channel video installation unfolding across Smack Mellon’s floor displays intimate looping footage of plant roots dancing and criss-crossing through overlapping projection beams. Overhead, a network of delicate sculptures made from hand-wrapping copper grounding wire in cotton thread cascade and weave between the gallery’s historic columns. Four channels of sound play simultaneously in the space, reverberating and establishing a rhythm of holding through an original score of humming, thumb piano instrumentation, synthesizer, and song. The installation invites visitors to move through and experience it from multiple angles and vantage points, becoming part of its sensorial web and energetic flow.
The gallery’s large wall hosts a single channel video, to trust the ground might free us (begin again), that meditates on the reach towards liberation as an ongoing process through the language of landscape and the body. Here the artist brings together still and moving imagery of New England forests, Liberian cotton trees and historic sites such as Dozoa (Providence Island) and Unification Park, the Atlantic Ocean, bodily gesture, sun beams, poetics, color fields, historic Vai language logograms, and archival findings,
engaging the multiple resonances of landscapes as sites of refuge, sites of violence, sites of reparation, and sites of healing.
“Numma yah” is a Kolokwa (Liberianized English) phrase used to offer words of comfort, and the installation underscores the necessity of creating spaces of soothing and regeneration from societal discord and disconnection as the roots trace lines of physical and psychic diasporic reconnection. Rootedness can be a balm to fortify and nourish the mind, body, and spirit from an internal space through external tumult, illuminating rhythms of restoration and renewal.
Curated by Rachel Vera Steinberg. The research, development, and production of this exhibition was supported in part by artist grants from the Jerome Foundation, ARTNOIR, and Harpo Foundation, and artist residencies at MacDowell, ISCP, Residency Unlimited, and Smack Mellon.
Gratitude to:
The Creator & The Ancestors
Mah Pepo & Liberians Everywhere
Earth, Wind, Water, Trees
Smack Mellon
Archive Liberia
Jerome Foundation
Harpo Foundation
Residency Unlimited
NYSCA/NYFA
ARTNOIR
MacDowell
ISCP
Filmed & recorded in:
Monrovia, Liberia
Dozoa (Providence Island)
Careysburg
Unification Park
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Peterborough, New Hampshire
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Brooklyn, New York
Works Cited:
Historic Vai language logograms from Vai script recorded by Momolu Duwalu Bukele in the 1830s, Jondu, Liberia.
J.H.B. Latrobe and New York State Colonization Society. Excerpt, “Colonization and Abolition,” 1852. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.
Loring Whitman, Photograph, “Alternate view of Du River, Liberia,” 1926. Retrieved from A Liberian Journey <https://liberianhistory.org>.
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Exhibition Website | Press Release
Recording, 9 November, 2024 - "On Memory & Liberia: A conversation with Miatta Kawinzi, Bilphena Decontee Yahwon & Essah Cozett Díaz."
Press: Hyperallergic, 15 October, 2024: Numma Yah in "Six New York City Art Shows to See Right Now."