You Don't Know Us Negroes
Amir Saadiq MFA Thesis Exhibition
April 13 - 21, 2023
Reception: April 15, 5:00 - 7:00 p.m.
By appointment: amir@asaadiq.com
Main Gallery, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego
Summoning the interstice spaces between invisibility, erasure, and ubiquitous presence, Amir Saadiq bestows the ontological irreconcilability of Blackness amongst emotionally rich abstractions positioned within America’s haunting historical landscape body through literal and figurative structures of violence. This exhibition is rooted in Frantz Fanon’s colonialism as domination and Orlando Patterson’s concept of natal alienation.
Wading through shadowy waters and dilapidated doorways, various entry points and exits highlight the plight of an onerous escape muddled with timeless violence and the impossibility of freedom. Unfolding into and upon fields of whiteness, YOU DON’T KNOW US NEGROES evokes and interrogates levels of personal, cultural, collective and historical reflections and contemplations about the phenomenological experience of the faceless subject. Who is seen, what remains hidden, what lurks in the psychological textures of anonymity? The installation features Saadiq’s Super 8 mm film Just Beyond and a collection of black and white photographs, evoking visceral, visual and aural wanderings into the tension of conscious and unconscious dynamics of disequilibrium.