Absessence: The Art of Refusal, curated by ashanti owusu-brafi

Absessence: The Art of Refusal

“We embody. We learn. We release the idea of failure, because it’s all data. But first we imagine”
—adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

This thematic grouping proposes an emergent strategy in problematizing the Smart Museum’s collection through the reappropriation of works in a way that gathers new mythologies within museum practice; a queer futurism.

The question that guided this meditation was on decentering as a visualized archival practice. This grouping echoes an exhaustive act of ‘grasping things at the root’ through the denial of what is normative in order to uncover how we might exhibit past modalities and future functions within our bodies, relationships, and environments.

Comparisons of scale, framing, collage, and sculpture engage a responsibility of viewing that is interdependent with the artists’ strength in confidently navigating knowing and unknowing within each artwork. Additionally, the fractured nature of some works, isolated from their series, leave objects vulnerable and reappropriated as an intentional sequence of exploitation. In this collection each artist acts as a node in a network of mapping a multi-layered connective disconnect of visual form, authorship, and museum practice. To reimagine the validity of institutional objectivity by disseminating uncertainty. This is an open-ended harmony. A rhythmic subversion of normative frameworks where wades the absessence of canonicity.

This thematic grouping was curated by ashanti owusu-brafi AB ‘21, 2020-21 Curatorial Undergraduate Research Associate at the Smart Museum of Art.