Featuring work from over 12 Queer and Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Color (QTBIPOC), where will I be buried*? opens today, July 17. The exhibition was curated by Muse Dodd and Catherine Feliz. The Flux Factory major exhibition centers marginalized communities’ mourning, healing and transformations.
“For QTBIPOC communities the question of ‘where will I be buried’ is not easily answered. How we approach ritual, ceremony and death varies culture to culture, religion to religion and even more so depending on your gender or sexual identity,” Dodd tells Remezcla. “Too often, Black trans* people are misgendered in their death—a continued violence that started long before the moment of their death. This is a communal space to honor those that we’ve lost as well as ourselves in this present moment.”
In the context of a global pandemic and social uprisings for all Black lives, grief is pertinent to sit with, as death and violence are everyday matters for QTBIPOC.
“I see this space as a real opportunity to reimagine and restore balance to our relationship to death,” Feliz says. “It’s no secret that death is a part of life but when we’re systematically targeted with violence, a sacred balance is lost. I’m inspired by the ways we choose to surrender any sense of knowing, and transform the past as it lives within us. These works, especially during these past few weeks, have helped me imagine new ways to hold each other through the voids.”
The online exhibition offers comforting prayers as well and documents imagined and contested past and possible futures. Featured artists include Felicita Felli Maynard, Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor, Nine Yamamoto-Masson, Smita Sen, Brittany J. Camacho, Rox Campbell, Catalina Xavlena, Dillon God Gardner, Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, Wazina Zondon and Linda Labeija. There are also workshops and performances led by Vee, Electropapi, Olivia Ahn and Karolina Castro.
You can visit the exhibition and learn about all upcoming programming here.