There is an undeniable heaviness until 2025. In his video work “What is Burden” (2025), artist Hannah Bang explore this weight. Projected on the final drawing, the four -hour piece captures the interpreter in the process of doing so, continuing even if the newspaper is gradually tearing itself, playing with ideas of temporality and flow. How can art help us navigate the difficult changes of 2025?
In Re: turning pointThe Parsons Fine Arts MFA Show organized by P! Krishnamurthy, students like Bang try them. The resulting works of art do not underline the evidence, nor do not offer explicit political criticism, as much as they go to strategies to carry the flow, to cry, to treat it and perhaps find an emotional center to continue to return.
Andrew Samuel HarrisonFor example, creates sculptures that play with gravity. In “Hypervisibility: Support systems 5” (2024-25), a concrete slab leans precariously but stable against the wall. He demands a double socket of a spectator-is it sure, or is he about to fall? – Find intelligently An unexpected center. The Lean takes new layers of meaning to Harrison as an artist sailing a congenital asymmetry between his left and right sides caused by Poland syndromeEchoing the incongruous balance found in many of his works.
Sumaiya Saiyed offers a kinetic sculpture in which braided hair twists several times upwards only to fall back. “I wanted to consider hair as a commodity and how it is violently extracted from the body in Pakistan and Southeast Asia,” said Saiyed Hyperalgic. The global wig trade underpays these women against their hair, recharges the end consumer in a rich country and eagerly faces the difference. Kinetic sculpture is alluded to how capitalists continue to come back to exploit new hair growth. He also plays with the flow of the braid reaching several times his point of stopping and the fall.
Yeabsera tab“Still We Are Are Water” (2023-25) combines ceramic coffee cups that it has made by hand and dispersed through the floor of the gallery with a video projected of a performance in which she shakes chickpeas and coffee ratings while speaking to parents to grow in a small neighborhood in Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia, making the importance of gatherings The maintenance of the memory of a community.
In accordance with such ideas, during its April 13 event at the gallery, Tabb created a “coffee circle” around its installation, pouring the drink and facilitating a conversation in the tradition of Ethiopian coffee. It is usual in this agreement to brew larger quantities and invite The neighbors and the community in the broad sense, with different families organizing the hours of morning, afternoon and evening in rural areas. Tabb offers this shared ritual, which folds the differences between the multiethnic communities of Ethiopia and syncopate The rhythm of daily work with moments of rest and connection, as a means of resisting flow.
The former Ethiopian proverb “The same water never presents itself in the same river” suggests that change is as inevitable as it is natural. This year, this seems fairly unnatural so far, but the ethical judgments aside, the deeper question is how we can relate to major changes outside our control. As this stimulating exposure suggests, it can be our attitude towards the flow that can do or break our year.
Re: turning pointThe Parsons Fine Arts 2025 MFA Thesis Exhibition continues at the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen gallery on the first floor of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at the New School (2 West 13th Street, Greenwich Village, Manhattan) until April 19. The exhibition was organized by P! Krishnamurthy.
