Symposium

The “Behold” symposium at Brooklyn Museum was carefully crafted with wisdom, love, and admiration for the artistic practice of María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Congrats Carmen Hermo, what a fantastic curatorial work. This exhibition raises many important topics like decoloniality, women’s labor, spirituality, the materiality of art, and many more.

Art

Among all the works shown, these stood out for me for many reasons. 

In this picture, you can see “Spoken Sotfly To Mama”, a work cherishing women’s domestic labor, ancestors, and the beauty of tactile. 

This work is a beautiful tribute to Breonna Taylor’s memory and her brown eyes. 

Here you can see artists’ breast milk and the work that was created between raising a newborn and commuting to Polaroid’s studio.

This picture shows an installation of “I am a Fountain,” or an artist’s depiction of fluidity and fluids that run through her, that make her body keep going. 

Finally, in the this piece, you can see multiple large-scale Polaroids, with two figures, connected with braids, holding a ship that symbolizes movement, motion, history and present, tragedy and survival, displacement and home, death, and life. 

Symposium

Starting with an incredible invocation from Pamela Sneed the symposium was powerful from start to finish. 

In the art historical portion of the event, Cheryl Finley gave an amazing talk on the many contextual routes of Campos-Pons’ art. 

In the first roundtable Odette Casamayor-Cisneros, Tatiana Flores, and Jamaal Sheats, with Adriana Zavala talked about the notion of place-making, moving and shifting social landscape and the force of nature that is Maria Magdalena. 

In the second roundtable, legacy, Carlos Martiel, Helina Metaferia, and Carrie Mae Weems, with Nikki A. Greene talked about their friendships and connections with Campos-Pons, the notion of memory, ritual, and humanity itself. 

For her speech, Carrie Mae Weems has prepared a moving and powerful tribute to Okwui Enwezor, an art historian and thinker, who changed the contemporary art world and was a longtime friend of both artists.

The symposium “Behold” ended with a performance piece “A Mother’s River of Tears,” performed by Magdalena Campos-Pons and collaborators, including Kamaal Malak, composer and sound architect. It was truly magical. 
Grateful I could take a piece of the performance with me, the packet from the picture is filled with spices.

Text and images by Julia Stachura