Andrea Chung’s multi-room set up is a meditation on motherhood, the legacy and trauma of slavery, and Black temporality. Titled in the event that they put an iron circle round your neck I’ll chew it away, the work is on view on the John Michael Kohler Arts Heart (JMKAC) via October 1.

Chung’s undertaking interprets Drexciya, an underwater Afrofuturist utopia conceived by the enigmatic Detroit digital music duo of the identical identify. This legendary Black Atlantis is populated by the descendants of pregnant African girls who had been thrown or jumped overboard throughout the Center Passage on their journey into slavery. Reasonably than succumb to loss of life, the ladies gave start to infants who didn’t want air to breathe, forming a peaceable civilization within the huge abyss of the Atlantic Ocean.

Put in within the historic John Michael Kohler house, Chung’s evocation of this watery realm presents the residence of a sea-dwelling Drexciyan girl. Saturated in shades of celestial blue, the rooms of the Nineteenth-century home are remodeled into nurturing areas supposed to be suffused with maternal love. The exhibition title, taken from Toni Morrison’s Beloved, invokes the theme of motherhood. Morrison’s novel offers literary type to slavery’s devastating impression on the bonds between mom and baby.

This reimagining of the Drexciyan mythos additionally goals to replicate what Chung describes as “the legal guidelines of Black physics.” She defines this because the methods Black folks transfer otherwise via time, present in a perpetual state of turning into, the place they traverse imagined pasts and futures to navigate a gift stuffed with harmful and dangerous methods. 

Chung hopes to craft an immersive website of potentiality the place time and area collapse, and various worlds and futures are inside attain.

in the event that they put an iron circle round your neck I’ll chew it away is on view via October 1 on the John Michael Kohler Arts Heart in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Admission and parking are free.

For extra data, go to jmkac.org.