Installation view of Who? Me?
Who? Me? at the Hannah Traore gallery is a survey of the self.
“Before I even knew I wanted to open a gallery, I knew I wanted to curate a show about self-portraiture,” says Hannah Traore, reflecting on the new group show Who? Me? at her eponymous gallery on the Lower East Side. “They really do have the capability to shape one’s legacy.”
Traore’s inspiration for the curation sparked in college, where she first encountered the history of self-portraiture. From Caravaggio to Renee Cox, she was fascinated by the artists’ abstractions and conceptual embodiments of self. “It struck me, back then, [how this medium] can be anything, capturing an artists’ essence rather than just their likeness.”
Who? Me? radiates a shared vulnerability. Traore’s pitch to the artists was purposefully broad, inviting intimate and expansive interpretations of genre. Misha Japanwala’s Firaaq The Ache of Separation, immediately captures your gaze hung opposite the gallery entrance. Her contribution takes shape as a golden sculptural collage, combining body moldings from herself and three other women who are of Kashmiri, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Indian descent. The patchwork of one subject’s clavicle, with another’s breast, and stomach embodies a shared grief and pain. Their bodies keep score of trauma past and present, evoking the entwined ancestry and histories of a fractured region. “It’s an exploration of our collective history, longing, and grief,” Japanwala shares. “Though fragmented, each one with her distinct history, identity, and journey, they exist here as one torso: a composite presence shaped by division, memory, and longing.”
Kesewa Aboah, in turn, is no stranger to self-portraiture. “The artists had a very similar sentiment, Kesewa and Misha, which was that they both started their practice with self-portraits because that was what was available to them,” explains Traore. ‘Now with the invitation to do a self-portrait, they were really excited to go back to themselves in a more intentional way.”
Selected works of Who? Me?
Aboah presented a magnesium plate, subtly yet intricately etched with imagery of her lips and kisses. “Returning to my own skin for this show was refreshing, it showed me there were still things to discover about something I felt so familiar with,” explains Aboah. “A Kiss is a self portrait that you give to someone else. A fleeting momentary one, that now- inside the metal – can endure.”
On the opposite wall, Bre Andy leans literal with a hyper-realist oil on canvas. In her painting, You’re The Only One Watching, Andy depicts herself nude and tenderly turned away lying in her home. While the composition feels cropped and close, her gesture reveals a reluctance –– a genuine snapshot only emerges where the two intersect. “I don’t want to have a moment about me right now, even though I wanted to join the show. And so I felt like there must be another way to portray myself,” shares Andy. “This just felt a bit more honest as to how I was feeling in that moment.”
Sincerity shines throughout. Case in point: Turiya Adkins offers her first ever self-portrait as a mix of stone, collage, and acrylic on wood entitled Fertile with Memory. We see imagery that is core to her identity, from a mural at her late grandmother’s house, to newspaper clippings of Black women track extraordinaires, Odessa Smalls and Maicel Malone-Wallis. Meanwhile, across the room there’s black and white photography by Samuel Fosso, “the grandfather of self-portraiture” in West Africa. His legendary pieces converse with Anya Paintsil’s found leather, yarn, and painted fabric figuration. Then there’s Arlina Cai, who abandons the human form altogether with an aura-like acrylic painting that whispers an abstraction and diffusion of personhood.
The opening last week invoked community and introspection, as do all of Traore’s events. Running through July 26, Who? Me? is as much a survey of contemporary self portraiture as it is a reclamation of identity, visibility, and autonomy. “I think it is important to be a steward of your own image,” says Traore.
