Robin Coste Lewis: Intimacy

Marian Goodman Gallery New York is delighted to present Intimacy, a moving-image and sound film by Robin Coste Lewis that will be presented in our Third Floor Gallery, from 6 May - 24 June 2023.

A single-channel video projection with sound, the installation features projected images derived from a selection of 66 photographs representing a modern 20th-Century photographic archive depicting the Lewis family and their friends. The trove of portraits, discovered by Lewis approximately 25 years ago in the home of her maternal grandmother, Dorothy Mary Coste Thomas Brooks, are sepia, tintypes, color and black-and-white pictures that recount the history of the Lewis family and circle..

The Lewis family, along with millions of other Americans, fled the Southern States of America in the 20th Century as part of the Great Migration west, in search of a place devoid of racism, injustice, and white terrorism. With the upheaval of forced migration, and concomitant scattering of a family unit and dispersal of possessions, the existence of this deep collection of photographic images represents a distinctive vernacular collection, especially notable for its volume, rarity and joyful, private sentiment..

Through graduations, birthdays, weddings, recreational and holiday gatherings, the pictures play with with depiction and the notion of lineage. On the one hand, the photographs in Intimacy gives the viewer the illusion of charting this American family and their significance within the context of Black history. The photographs denote resilience and resistance to the profound historical enmity that surrounded them through the celebratory nature of the moments encapsulated on film..

However, the sound element of the installation, which features the voice of Lewis, diverges from the intense nostalgia evoked by the photographs. In both deliberate syncopation and pauses, Lewis reads her existentialist lyric poem titled Intimacy (for Julie) Part 2. The entrancing and moving reading of approximately 24 minutes, serves as an homage to the multitude of Diasporas human beings have created over millenia––and the central roles Black people have played within this enduring history. As such, the soundtrack relocates Blackness within the history of the universe and human evolution..

The poem and the resulting composite installation stems from a political and aesthetic friendship between Lewis and Julie Mehretu, which grew over decades, the outcome of a continuing conversation between the two who met as graduate students during the heady 90's through shared studies of post-colonial theory, queer studies, and critical race theory. Intimacy mediates on their mutual interest in language, the history of time, mark-making, human migrations, desire and the abstract. The installation in our New York space follows on the premiere of the work at Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris, in 2022, and more recent screenings and conversations at MoMA and LACMA. The Paris presentation highlighted a poignant aspect of Lewis’ heritage, given that her Great Grandmother, who was French, had emigrated to the former French colony of Louisiana, now US. Intimacy therefore traces the lineage of descendants of the survivors of French colonialism in Louisiana, a defiant answer to the destructive nature and intention of colonialism..

Archive of Desire, a series of multimedia performances celebrating the poet C.P. Cavafy featuring Robin Coste Lewis, Vijay Iyer and Jeff Ziegler, and Julie Mehretu will take place at National Sawdust in Brooklyn on 3 and 4 May 2023. The event was created for a weeklong festival to be held courtesy of the Onassis Foundation.