Interior Infinite

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Meryl McMaster, "Dream Catcher," 2015

ink jet print, edition 2 of 2 AP, Courtesy of the artist and Katzman Contemporary

Interior Infinite

Featuring: Lacie Burning, Nick Cave, Dana Claxton, Martine Gutierrez, Kris Lemsalu, Meryl McMaster, Zanele Muholi, Aïda Muluneh, Zak Ové, Skeena Reece, Yinka Shonibare CBE, Sin Wai Kin, Carrie Mae Weems, Zadie Xa.

Interior Infinite brings together an international group of artists whose works span photography, video, performance, and sculpture. Predominantly featuring portraiture, with an emphasis on self-portraiture, the exhibition focuses on costume and masquerade as strategies for revealing, rather than concealing, identities. Across these works, disguise functions as an unmasking, as artists construct their own images through adornment in order to visually represent embodied experience, memory, and understanding.

Interior Infinite draws on the spirit of Carnival, a celebration of both radical togetherness and unique self-expression. The title is drawn from Rabelais and His World, an influential text by Mikhail Bakhtin, which extolled the potential for carnivalesque practices to overcome the limits of repressive conformity and expand our social imagination. The vibrant, fluid, and myriad expressions of identities seen in the exhibition become an act of resistance to erasure, pushing narrow definitions of normativity to include a broader range of lived realities.

As Bakhtin writes: “The interior infinite could not have been found in a closed and finished world”.