Numma Yah
Miatta Kawinzi: Numma Yah
September 28 - November 17, 2024
Solo Exhibition, Smack Mellon
Brooklyn, NY
For this exhibition, Miatta Kawinzi brings together immersive sculptural installation, soundscapes, and moving image projections to reflect on root systems materially and conceptually. Informed by Kawinzi’s Liberian cultural heritage, this work meditates on ideas around protection, inter-connectivity, embodied memory, and the lessons learned from plant life. The title is a Kolokwa (Liberianized English) phrase used to offer words of comfort, uplifting the necessity of creating spaces of soothing in the face of discord and disconnection. Born and raised in the US to a Liberian mother and Kenyan father, the work reflects the artist’s ongoing process of research and diasporic reconnection.
The central installation envelops visitors in softness and light from above and below. 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.
Echoes of memory embedded in geography extend to the gallery’s waterfront location which is connected to the same body of water that has witnessed centuries-long cycles of displacement and migration between the US and Liberia, intertwined with histories of enslavement, the American Colonization Society (ACS) project of re-settling African-Americans from the US to Liberia, Liberia becoming the first modern African republic in 1847 after declaring independence from the ACS, more recent decades of devastating civil unrest and civil war in Liberia, and the continued economic exploitation in Liberia by western corporations which keeps local economies under-developed during an ongoing process of post-war societal rebuilding. The artist asks: how might we sit with the harshness of history while feeling towards and imagining more balanced futures, recognizing our richness as deeper than that which has been done to divide us? (I will dig for you.)
Here the artist turns to the poetics of the verticality of trees and the horizontalism of roots to bridge realms. 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. In rhizomatic dispersal, they unite the singular and the collective, reflecting the transformative power in accumulation. To reach is to yearn, and in Kolokwa also means to arrive. Numma Yah uplifts the power of linkage and reconnection, cultivating a space of soothing and regeneration from the traces of ongoing colonial imposition that are present both locally and globally. In insistence as resistance, what wisdom might we absorb from the persistence of plant life in any environment and circumstance to find and feel towards sources of replenishment, soft tendrils delicately yet sturdily linked? 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.
Videos, Poetics, Sound, Composition, Vocals & Sculptures by Miatta Kawinzi
Gratitude to:
The Creator & The Ancestors
My Mama, Family & Friends
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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Virtual Panel 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."
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Exhibition Website | Press Release
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an offering for the ongoing reaching -