Alisha Wormsley: Remnants of An Advanced Technology | 360 tour et VR

This exhibition will debut a new multimedia installation by artist Alisha B. Wormsley including dozens of new works from 2021, shown for the first time. The exhibition foregrounds the artist’s celebrated engagements with Black futurism—a genre of reimagining Black life often with a futuristic aesthetic. The imagery in this exhibition draws, in part, from her established body of work, Children of NAN. This is what Wormsley describes as: n n“an archive of objects, photos, video footage, films, sounds, philosophies, myths, rituals and performances that I have been compiling for over a decade to document the ways that Black women care for themselves, each other, and the earth.” n nWhile the word “archive” may seem to suggest a fixed past rather than futurity, Wormsley’s Children of NAN employs the archive as a means for futuristic ends. Specifically, it makes a new archive of Black women—an archive that has been largely absent due to slavery and its afterlives—with art that conjures the presence of both fictional and real, both contemporary and future Black women. This is an archive, in other words, that imagines new possibilities of recording and asserting the presence of Black women. As such, Wormsley presents a precise and apt apparatus for Black Futurism, named in her title for the exhibition, an “Advanced Technology.” n nWormsley’s exhibition at HAM will feature this important project. Her work will spread across two gallery spaces. The first-floor gallery will feature a series of films from this archive displayed on monitors with headphones. Together this display of films will form a kind of repository through which viewers can virtually enter the archive that Wormsley has recorded and conceived.