About this Event
December 16, 2021 at 55 Bond Street, Malaika Temba debuts five new works which consider the autobiographic history of softness in universal goods at the artist's premier New York solo preview. Temba is a Tanzanian-American New York-based textile artist. Malaika Temba is the recipient of the National YoungArts Foundation’s Jorge M. Pérez Award (2021) and the Warren Family Social Engagement Award (RISD, 2018), and has shown work at Miami Art Week, Allouche Gallery, and at the 2019 Met Gala. She recently concluded her first solo show, Sugarcane Is Sweetest At The Joint, at Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami. Temba’s new work expands the definition of translation by reflecting on how universal objects (plastic chairs, keys) can become deeply personal and complex through an understanding of the global labor that produces and delivers them to us. As Temba observes, the word for sugar is nearly ubiquitous across language, yet humans live in radically varied proximities to its origin. Like the agriculture fields behind pineapples and sugar, these goods demand a production lineage which touches many histories to bring sweetness to the contemporary world. Across all of Malaika Temba’s work, a request for slowness and contemplation is extended. Looking to reinvest humanity into utilitarian products of trade shifts the authority of these goods away from the consumers, and returns them to their producers’ own narratives. Woven through an iconography of the familiar is a cross-hatched recollection of the lives who touch and are touched by the origin of production and the speed of demand.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
55 Bond St, 55 Bond Street, New York, United States
USD 0.00