Artist: Jonathan Ojekunle

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The Immigrant Artist Biennial – In Dialogue

Portraiture, Archives, and Representation: Golnar Adili, Erika DeFreitas, and Jonathan Ojekunle

Oftentimes, in thinking about the representation of the human form in art, people can get very attached to the ‘abstraction’ versus ‘figuration’ binary. These respective styles frequently get coded as opposites, and certain kinds of politics are ascribed to each. For example, ‘figuration’ is coded as a kind of politics of representation, whereas ‘abstraction’ is a politics of refusal or resistance to legibility. However, the work of Golnar Adili, Erika DeFreitas, and Jonathan Ojekunle, all on view in The Immigrant Artist Biennial 2023: Contact Zone, functions beyond this binary in fresh ways. We interviewed the artists about portraiture and its relationship with archives and representation.

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The Immigrant Artist Biennial Names 48 Artists and Art Spiel as Media Partner for their 2nd Edition

The second edition of The Immigrant Artist Biennial, titled “Contact Zone”, will showcase the work of 48 artists at seven locations across New York and New Jersey from September to December 2023. The curatorial trio adopted the biennial’s theme from a term coined in 1991 by linguist and critical theorist Mary Louise Pratt, which she used to describe “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations.” Katherine Adams, co-curator and an affiliate of EMPAC, explains in a statement how this concept guided their curatorial research: “It allowed us to work with a productively fractured relationship to place. It also encapsulates our attempt to find an organizational concept for artistic infrastructures that are diasporic in form and not only content—that can deal with effects of situations such as exile, alienation, or simply the elusive concept of home.”