Interstitial is a solo show by interdisciplinary artist Arda Asena. Working across photography, jacquard weaving, and sculpture, the exhibition was 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.
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.