Steffani Jemison
Tumblers
The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève is pleased to announce Tumblers, the first solo exhibition in Switzerland of New York-based artist Steffani Jemison. Tumblers spans fifteen years of her work across media and marks the debut of two live performances, to take place within the exhibition space to mark its opening and closing weekends.
Bodies in motion have long propelled Jemison’s expansive practice, which concerns itself with how we shoulder the weight of both physical and social forces. Her exhibition of new and existing works unfurls the narrative potential of acts of falling and floating, suspension and support. Spanning video, drawing, kinetic sculpture, and performance, the show traces legacies of flight in Black cultural traditions within a broad range of material forms.
The exhibition’s choreography leads viewers through a set of Jemison’s enduring themes, as motifs and maneuvers recur with a difference. Bodies become architecture in video footage of attempts to build a human pyramid; trained acrobats leap into the air but never land; the rigid geometries of a metal sculpture are disrupted by delicate drawings on glass hinged to its crossbars; rock tumblers hone and polish debris dredged from the bed of Lake Geneva, turning rough edges smooth.
Taken together, the works assembled here pose key questions that have guided Jemison’s work. “How do we move?” she asks. “How are we moved by others? How can we let our bodies become means—supports—the way that bricks and beams are means? How do we stand on and be stood upon at the same time? How do we learn on the fly? How do we fly? And if we’re all we’ve got, how do we use ourselves to find the forms of the future?”
This exhibition is curated by Andrea Bellini.
