UPCOMING EXHIBITION
Interstitial
Arda Asena
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Artist:
UPCOMING EXHIBITION
Interstitial
Arda Asena
Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York is thrilled to announce Interstitial, a solo show by interdisciplinary artist Arda Asena. Working across photography, jacquard weaving, and sculpture, the exhibition will be on view at Baxter St’s main gallery located at 126 Baxter Street from January 8 – February 26, 2025.
“Jacquard weaving has pushed me to question different temporalities collapsing within one medium,” Asena explains. “It becomes a site of projection, a way to meditate on what the body holds, and to bury what is overlooked, unspoken, or expected to remain silent.”
Asena’s work transpires through an intricate visual and tactile language, complicating the materiality of the photograph, and attending to translations across mediums. Texture contains memories, unarticulated feelings and traces of experiences that have been submerged, yet seep through unexpectedly. In Interstitial, cross-disciplinary experimentation complicates material boundaries, underscoring multiplicity in both Asena’s approach to making and the varying modes of engagement visitors may experience through works.
The tensions of physical and psychic violence etch into the body, burrowing through the psyche and settling into the recesses of the mind. It reconfigures ways of being, manifesting through forms that elude detection and fixed definition. Pain accumulates and we adjust to new realities; moving across expansive distances from former selves. Sometimes who you were is difficult to recognize.
Quiet is not devoid of sound or action. It accompanies secretive strategies, modes of communication that circulate below the surface of perception. Interstitial affirms the nonverbal and intangible, where the depth of feeling resides. Asena proposes the framework of secretive eroticism, tactics that have long been employed for survival by queer people in the face of social and cultural violence. These secrets lean into abstraction, for the traumas of violence exceed representation, too slippery to grasp.
Violence often precipitates mourning, inciting temporal disorientation that may never end but changes shape. The warp-and-weft structures of weaving continue to generate questions on structure, contemplating what different mediums hold in their layers. Certain elements become emphasized depending on the viewer’s approach, evoking a presence that may be more acutely felt, while other aspects of the work recede into a seeming absence.
Asena’s work exists in space molded amidst anticipation and reality, attuned to the gaps. Interstitial forges an ecosystem of experience, individual and collective. Each visitor is invited to dwell in this interplay, negotiating the tension and release.
Asena’s practice is based in photography, sculpture, and textile, and invested in establishing cross-disciplinary connections. Through the translation of similar ideas across mediums, they are interested in the nuances that emerge through the materiality of each artistic form. Their work explores the abstraction that occurs in these moments of translation as generative opportunities to complicate notions of identity, social-cultural experiences and ways of being more broadly. Abstraction allows for a meditative orientation to the interior landscapes of emotions, desires, vulnerabilities and contradictions we each possess. Asena engages a visual language that attends to the concept of secretive eroticism, which they use as a reflection on tactics often engaged by queer people as a mode of survival amidst social and cultural violence. Asena claims illegibility as a critical stance in their work, affirming the refusal to be read and categorized.