Conversations

On the Blue Stage

Read “On the Blue Stage”, a conversation between Rashid Johnson and the exhibition’s curator, Hendrik Folkerts. The conversation revolves around Johnson’s views on abstract art, his practices with various media, and how the different exhibition spaces are intertwined into a surface where the visitor becomes a witness.

On the Blue Stage: A Conversation between Rashid Johnson and Hendrik Folkerts (pdf)

When you see certain actions in space, sometimes they are inherently abstract. Whistling is abstraction, clapping is abstraction, crying is abstraction, laughing is abstraction. Those are all gestures that don’t specifically communicate to their intention, but we understand them.

Thinking-in-action

In “Thinking-in-action: A Conversation between Rashid Johnson and Kevin Quashie”, artist Rashid Johnson’s short film “Black and Blue” (2021) is a point of departure to discuss the home as a space of creativity and intimacy.

Central in the conversation is the notion of “quiet,” which writer Kevin Quashie theorized in his book “The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture” (2012) as “a different kind of expressiveness, one which characterizes a person’s desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, and fears.”

“Thinking-in-action” connects Johnson’s film as well as the exhibition Seven Rooms and a Garden as a whole to these new possibilities of resistance, based on interiority and quietude.

Thinking-in-action: A Conversation between Rashid Johnson and Kevin Quashie (pdf)

Artist talk

Listen to Rashid Johnson and curator Hendrik Folkerts in the artist talk, held during the opening day of the exhibition “Seven Rooms and a Garden”.