Making Contact: Bodies and Borders
an exhibition without walls
Narratives of contact are embedded in a diverse range of human encounters, from the corporeal to the haptic, to the migratory and diasporic. This exhibition explores each of these modes of contact through the work of three individuals: visual artist Amarachi Odimba and dance artists Tess Angelica Losada Miner and Lourdes del Mar Santiago Lebrón.
Odimba has reimagined her Visa Interview series, originally conceived as an inkjet print paired with a Ghana-Must-Go tote bag, in the portable form of a postcard for this exhibition. Personal questions typed in shades of red, white, and blue form a Madras plaid pattern in imitation of the Ghana-Must-Go bag’s recognizable design. The bag gained its name in 1983 following Nigeria’s expulsion of West African migrants, largely Ghanaian citizens, who had entered the country during a period of economic prosperity. More than forty years later, the bag remains a potent symbol of migration across the globe.1 Odimba’s slate of queries—Do you have a property? Why do you want to study? What do you do for a living?—draw upon the visa interview questions one might field when seeking entry to the United States. Though seemingly innocuous, these questions form a matrix of interrogation that highlights the imbalanced power dynamic between the governmental agencies and interviewees, further reinforcing the precarious positions of persons seeking entry. Odimba points to the history of Nigerian citizens’ immigration to the United States and her personal experience of this relocation as an impetus for her Visa Interview series, in which she questions the efficacy, practicality, and intentions of the United States’s visa interview questions. Through haptic engagement with the Visa Interview series postcard, Odimba’s work directly engages viewers in a meditation on the complex histories of migration and African diasporic experiences.
Losada and Santiago explore the nature of human relationships in their dance performance, a meating. Throughout the piece, Losada and Santiago’s modes of corporeal contact— sometimes in the form of an embrace and slow dance, or crawling while carrying their partner on their back—reflect the physical and emotional ties between people and present a narrative of relational harmony and dissonance. Oscillating between moments of symbiosis and parasitism, the dance progresses through phases of synchronized collaboration—of understanding, in the words of the artists—and sudden disconnections or misunderstandings. Following each instance of separation, the dancer left behind collapses and is revived only upon the return of her partner. Each instance of reconciliation functions as a return to order; they place themselves back within this constantly swinging pendulum of raw, tangible human connection and the dance continues. The performance comes to an end only when there is no further reconciliation; their contact ceases once all understanding has been lost.
Hannah Wier, Brooke Eastman, and June Scalia
One printed postcard from Amarachi Odimba’s Visa Interview series is contained within this booklet (from an unnumbered edition of 100). Tess Angelica Losada Miner’s and Lourdes del Mar Santiago Lebrón’s performance of a meating will take place in Holmes Lounge at 6:30pm on Friday, February 23, 2024.
- Ying Cheng, “’The Bag Is My Home’,” African Arts 51, no. 2 (Summer 2018): 20–21. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/48547463. ↩︎