May 4 - June 1 

Opening Reception: Saturday May 4, 3-6 PM 

Anique Jordan to present first solo show at Zalucky Contemporary, a featured exhibition for the 2019 CONTACT Photography Festival

• Saturday, May 4th, 3 - 6PM Opening Reception 

Public talks co-presented with Mayworks Festival of Working People and the arts:

• Thursday May 9, 7PM-9PM Hold: a conversation with activist Tina Garnett on the refusal of sense-making
  
• Thursday May 23, 7PM-9PM Hold: a conversation with journalist Priya Ramanujam on media, youth and relationships that carry memory

Ban’ yuh belly is a series centering on the grief, anger and mental health of loved ones who are mourning those they have lost due to violence – systemic or otherwise. The works attempt to disturb the normalcy through which Black lives are violently taken and interrupted. Through a localized historical lens, Anique Jordan has created new work to contend with the survival strategies used to make sense of the senseless.

Employing a Trinidadian expression meaning to hold onto something, Jordan uses the phrase Ban’ yuh belly to visualize the ways we cope with violence. How do we make sense of this? What do we hold onto? Ban’ yuh bellyis in part inspired by Aereile Jackson, a Black woman interviewed in the film The Forgotten Space – A Film Essay Seeking to Understand the Contemporary Maritime World in Relation to the Symbolic Legacy of the Sea(2010) and discussed in scholar Christina Sharpe’s text In the Wake. In the film, Aereile Jackson is seen holding several dolls which she explains, she is holding onto because they are the only things that remind her of her children. She says, “don’t think I’m mentally ill or anything like that…I’ve lost a lot. I’m trying…I’m hurt”. 

Jordan’s practice works with the spaces between historical archive, speculative futures and what she sees every day. Her work sources pathways to understand how and where on our bodies our histories live. It is an obsession with what she calls, a haunting. Over the past four years, Jordan’s work has contended with these questions, trying make sense of the role it plays in our lives. It is a question she continues to ask of Black bodies, but more deliberately, of Black women and is the starting point to much of her work.