Prompt: This exhibition brought together a group of artists, activists, and writers who partake in the impossibility of reconstructing an archive, while trying to archive the impossible. Together, the works comprise a record that disorders, reroutes, and transgresses the protocols of the archive that Saidiya Hartman describes in her essay, “Venus in Two Acts.” How can we, as Hartman asks, “revisit the scene of subjection without replicating the grammar of violence?” How do artists adequately render precarious lives—specifically, Black lives—often made “visible in the moment of their disappearance?” In this time of acute precarity, we felt renewed urgency to gather Black artists, at various stages in their careers, whose work renders the multitude of Black life and engages strategies for imagining counterhistories. If history remains bound to “dead certainties...produced by terror,” these works gesture toward a mode of archiving that exceeds the limits of record and fact, producing instead a narrative track warped by the “keens and howls and dirges” of the unsaid.

What are the kinds of stories to be told by those and about those who live in such an intimate relationship with death? Romances? Tragedies? Shrieks that find their way into speech and song? What are the protocols and limits that shape the narratives written as counterhistory, an aspiration that isn’t a prophylactic against the risks posed by reiterating violent speech and depicting again rituals of torture? How does one revisit the scene of subjection without replicating the grammar of violence?

—Saidiya Hartman

Image: Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Terms and Conditions, 2019