{"id":3943,"date":"2023-10-18T07:41:34","date_gmt":"2023-10-18T07:41:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.afmuseet.no\/en\/?post_type=exhibition&p=3943"},"modified":"2024-08-14T11:30:51","modified_gmt":"2024-08-14T11:30:51","slug":"cauleen-smith","status":"publish","type":"exhibition","link":"https:\/\/www.afmuseet.no\/en\/exhibitions\/cauleen-smith\/","title":{"rendered":"The Deep West Assembly\n Cauleen Smith"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Exhibition<\/span>\n\n

The Deep West Assembly\n Cauleen Smith<\/h2>\n\n14. Jun. 2024 – 15. Sep. 2024<\/span>\n\n
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Cauleen Smith, The Deep West Assembly, 2024, Film still \u00a9 Courtesy of the artist. Photo credit: Mar Sudac.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n

Astrup Fearnley Museet presents a solo exhibition of work by multidisciplinary American artist and filmmaker Cauleen Smith (b. 1967, Riverside, California; lives and works in Los Angeles). <\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Smith is internationally known for visionary works that draw on experimental cinema from the 1960s and 1970s, science-fiction films and literature, and Afro-diasporic experience and thought. This solo exhibition offers a comprehensive view of Smith\u2019s prolific output and premieres her latest film, The Deep West Assembly<\/em> (2024), commissioned by Astrup Fearnley Museet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In producing her films, videos, live-feed projections, and slide projections, Smith deploys original research and techniques of improvisation, arrangement, and live performance and narration, creating works that share affinities with theater and visual art. Aptly characterized by Romi N. Crawford as a \u201cbuilder of Black cinema,\u201d Smith merges film with music and poetry, longstanding forms for Black expression. Music, which features prominently throughout her work, serves as structure and scaffold, and her commitment to improvisation as a version of mastery accords with African and Afro-diasporic cultural production. Her methodologies rely on experimentation with collaborators, who help to shape and concretize her initial ideas into spaces for thought and creative resistance, without the intention of finding solutions or formulas to address the objects of her studies, such as racism in an anti-Black world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conceived for the show, Smith\u2019s most recent film The Deep West Assembly<\/em> delves into the concepts of geological time and Blackness as camouflaged in image, song, and word by Black and Brown creators (after thinkers such as Suzanne C\u00e9saire and Ryan C. Clarke). Incorporating images of geological formations like lava caves, calderas, and salt domes, as well as human-made landforms such as ancient Choctaw burial mounds, The Deep West Assembly<\/em> paints a view of the American South as a horizontal \u201cDeep West\u201d (a term borrowed from poet Wanda Coleman). Smith situates this cultural Deep West in the Mississippi River Delta, exploring Black cultural practices as kin to Indigenous traditions. Actor Dionne Audain embodies multiple voices\u2014guides\u2014reading, among other texts, Smith\u2019s recent Volcano Manifesto<\/em> (F Books, 2022) for the camera. The exhibition also includes a new large-scale video installation in the museum\u2019s double-height space, as well as the artist\u2019s textile banners, drawings, and recent sculpture series of large hand-poured candles. Upstairs, Smith has embedded a reading room in the exhibition space, including a library comprising an international reading list made in collaboration with Oslo-based artist Ayesha Jordan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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