Diedrick Brakens

born 1989, Mexia, Texas; lives in Los Angeles, California

Diedrick Brackens engages questions of history and identity through weaving. Brackens sees the loom as a “space of invention,” creating narrative textiles that draw on a global range of traditions from Flemish tapestry to Ghanaian kente cloth to American quilting.1 Brackens has created a uniquely hybrid visual language and personal mythology that speaks to his own identities as a queer, Black, Southern man. Working primarily with cotton, his work gestures toward the violent histories of slavery inextricably tied to this material in the United States, while his recuperation of cotton as a medium of personal expression is an act of self-determination and healing.

Catfish are a recurring motif in Brackens’s work. Catfish are muddwelling bottom feeders often perceived as dirty or undesirable whom Brackens recasts as exalted creatures that provide both psychic and physical nourishment. In his work, catfish act as agents of transformation and spiritual transcendence. Catfish first appeared in his work as an allegorical figure for three young Black men who drowned in Lake Mexia in Texas while in police custody on Juneteenth 1981—a story of local racial violence often retold to Brackens by his mother and grandmother. Over time, catfish have taken on a broader meaning in Brackens’s work, serving as a symbol of Black Southern culture—catfish are a staple of much regional cuisine—and as a representation of Brackens himself and, more expansively, as a reference to the soul or ancestral spirits.

1The Mint Museum, “Diedrick Brackens: Ark of the Bulrushes,” YouTube video, 7:33 mins., July 5, 2022. https://youtu.be/bMDOcxD_AI4.

Ali Cherri

born 1976, Beirut, Lebanon; lives in Paris, France

Ali Cherri’s work across film and sculpture investigates histories of nation-building, political ecologies of place, and legacies of trauma, especially in the context of the Arab world. In particular, Cherri challenges dominant narratives of social and cultural progress that often conceal harm against people and the environment.

Of Men and Gods and Mud is a threechannel video installation that traces the central role of mud and floods in creation myths from around the globe, and in the labor and lives of seasonal mud-brick workers in northern Sudan. In the film, Cherri attends to the way the construction of the Merowe Dam in the region has disrupted the Nile River’s natural flow and dramatically reshaped the local landscape, displacing many people from the fertile Nile Valley to arid desert lands. In the past, annual flooding shaped the region through regular cycles that left fertile silt deposits in the path of receding waters. With the start of construction on the Merowe Dam in the early 2000s, this natural cycle ceased. The inundation of water buried local villages in unabated depths, and the river now flows at the command of political and economic power. In the film, Cherri contrasts the forces of state and capital with the individual lives of regional laborers who, like the land, are subject to the authority of these forces.

Ali Cherri,

The Inca, the Maori, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Hindus, the Yoruba, the Sumerians. Seas and mountains and years apart and yet they all told the same story: man

And, indeed, We created man from an extract of clay. Out of mud we first made. Out of mud we dreamed we were made. Then we forgot, or sought to forget, and declared ourselves the makers.