Working across medium and disciplines, Igbo-Nigerian American artist Okwui Okpokwasili, in collaboration with director Peter Born, has conceived a room-sized video installation, which will be presented for the first time during Crossing The Line Festival 2021.

Using their own footage, the artists investigate the themes of remembrance, community mourning, and history: “This installation is a crossroads, a midpoint, a caesura. A place caught between worlds. Can we remember what came before while imagining the shape of a future landscape? We enter mid-song, a song that marks a singular moment in time while also expressing an entire lineage. The song is a container for an unreliable memory. From whose mouth is history born? Whose words are trusted when it comes to the telling of what happened? If the history we learn is that which is spoken aloud, what is learned by listening to the whispers that have not been written?”

On Wednesday, October 20, join us for the opening celebration at 6pm in the FIAF Gallery, followed by an artist talk at 7pm with Okwui Okpokwasili and Festival co-curator Claude Grunitzky in the FIAF Skyroom.

The installation will be on view from Wednesday, October 20–Saturday, November 6 in the FIAF Gallery.

About Okwui Okpokwasili

Okwui Okpokwasili (b. 1972) is an Igbo-Nigerian American artist, performer, and writer based in Brooklyn, New York.

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  • Her performance work has been commissioned by the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA with REDCAT, Los Angeles, California (2018); the 10th Annual Berlin Biennale, Berlin, Germany (2018); Jacob’s Pillow, Becket, Massachusetts (2018); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota (2017); and Danspace Project, New York, New York with Performance Space New York, New York (2014). She has been the recipient of two New York Dance and Performance Bessie Awards, and was a 2018 MacArthur Fellow.