We honor two brilliant women who inspired the SWERVE platform into being: curator, writer, and historian Adrienne Edwards and artist Okwui Okpokwasili. In fact, it was Edwards who suggested we call this journal “swerve.” (Thank you, Adrienne!)

Edwards and Okpokwasili are frequent collaborators, and theirs will likely be a life-long conversation. This particular talk took place at Dedalus Foundation.

Edwards deftly used the concept of the “swerve” to orbit through Okpokwasili’s multi-disciplinary performance work, Poor People’s TV Room, which draws on two historic women-led resistance movements that occurred in Nigeria, and which was partly developed at Denniston Hill in collaboration with her partner Peter Born.

Edwards asked several questions about “proximity” within the process of art making—meaning proximity to source material and research, and proximity to the people we intentionally put around ourselves.

Okpokwasili connected proximity to her relationship with her audiences, asking “how do I make more mirrors for the way you are watching?” She also spoke with deep reverence and love about possible proximities to Blackness itself, stating:

To go into the blackness, its material, to disappear in the most profound Blackness.
That’s where you become form.
That is the beginning and the end.
I think about the skin.
The fact that Blackness is something that’s not seen,
Blackness was not meant to be exposed.
Always in opposition to light.
The truth is in Blackness maybe.  
The most optimally liberated space
for black and brown bodies to be and move together.



Adrienne Edwards was a resident at Denniston Hill in 2016.

Okwui Okpokwasili was a resident at Denniston Hill in 2016, and is the inagural recipient of Denniston Hill’s Distinguished Performance Artist Award. 

@bornokwui


Special thanks to Katy Rogers, ProgramsDirector and Director of the Robert Motherwell Catalogue Raisonné Project at Dedalus Foundation.