An essay for the complementary publication of the exhibition Remaking the Exceptional: Tea, Torture, & Reparations | Chicago to Guantánamo at the DePaul Art Museum

Edited by Amber Ginsburg and Aaron Hughes with Aliya Hussain and Audrey Petty
August 2022

Created as part of the exhibition Remaking the Exceptional: Tea, Torture, & Reparations | Chicago to Guantánamo, this publication brings together activists, artists, poets, and torture survivors to investigate and resist the ecosystems of violence that connect Chicago to the US military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The aim of the publication is to uncover moments of beauty, poetry, and shared humanity within and despite the traumas of state violence.

Excerpt from “A Prelude and Postscript to Finding Liberation in the Night’s Sky, or Before and After Remaking the Exceptional”:

”…every voice, memory, experience, gesture, image, and object in this project’s orbit is asking us to do the individual and collective work of articulating, questioning, and attempting to define the aesthetics and creative practices of liberation. To open ourselves up to the pathways and tools that lead to deeper embodiment.

Generally, when I explore this for myself, I almost always end up in the same place–looking to the sky above me and the ground beneath my feet, but also to Black abstraction. No matter what I do, I find my way back to Black abstraction and its direct relationship to the past, present, and future phenomenologies of Black people. I’ve found this to be a consistent and sturdy container for these questions and a playground for the kind of experimentation that gets us closer to answers. I find this, too, to be the stomping grounds of artists, organizers, writers, record-keepers, and freedom architects because it is a territory defined by no restraints but also anchored in the realities of body knowledge (pleasures and traumas), testimony, and experience.

What Black abstraction and its art forms can provide is a momentary respite from the mental and physical blocks created by the world’s most oppressive systems and structures, and a way to process their harms. It presents an environment where it’s possible to dream of, unravel, and construct things we haven’t seen or felt we haven’t had access to. It reconnects us to things that have been taken from us, such as prolonged mental and spiritual freedom, and sometimes even a slice of what physical freedom can be. It is both familiar and unfamiliar territory.

‘There is fertile soil on the edge of unknowing. Abundant are the fruits that sweeten the tongue.’ - Damon Locks

Black abstraction also makes room for multitudes. It can be a collective portrait and include all of our insights, tactics, struggles, and expressions. If we sit with it, spend time with it, Black abstraction can make a way for entropy, manifestation, and a connectedness to ourselves and the worlds around us. When I look at the work of freedom fighters who are battling on mental, spiritual, and physical fronts, it’s clear that they knew and know Black abstraction as a superpower. They’ve harnessed it, shared it, and encrypted their work with it, creating writings, artworks, and actions that are embedded with slow-releasing, slow-burning instruction manuals, weapons, historical contexts, and wellsprings.

Remaking the Exceptional isn’t a show of only Black abstractionists, but it is, at all levels, in conversation with the technologies of Black abstraction.”

Photo Credits:
[1] A tea time spread from a 2015 iteration of Tea Project, a performance by Amber Ginsburg and Aaron Hughes. Photo by Beatriz Meseguer, courtesy of DePaul Art Museum website.

[2] Detail from the cover image of the publication.