Qulture Collective in Oakland, CA is celebrating Black History Month with a month-long residency and exhibition of photo and video works by multidisciplinary artist India Davis. From A Place With No Space or Time includes two multimedia gallery installations on display from February 12 through February 26, 2016.
Qulture Collective is a multi-use community space (café, shop, gallery, workspace) in downtown Oakland founded by three queer women. The organization is committed to serving the LGBTQIA+ and allied community with a focus on building QTPOC visibility.
In their newest exhibit, Davis embodies traditional and imagined spiritual and cultural archetypes as a means for creating new narratives that reflect queer Black femme experience and power. Adrift, shot in New Mexico, follows an afro-surreal water spirit as they navigate a vast rolling gypsum sand dune desert. In the second installation, What the World Knows of Infinity, Davis channels the World card from Tarot, carrying elements for creation through New Orleans, a city known as a center for Black spiritual power and magic.
Davis is a trained acrobat, aerialist, and pole dancer, and a founding member, dancer, and choreographer of Body Waves, a queer Black acrobatic dance collective in Oakland. She is currently co-facilitating Destiny Arts Center’s groundbreaking new Queer Emerging Artist Residency program.
“I want to recognize that ghosts, spirits, and supernatural entities are a very real way that people understand themselves and reality,” says India Davis. “It’s about channeling, and self-determination, and creating worlds that lift up what feels true. This is especially important for queer people, people of color, trans people, who in dominant American cultural narratives aren’t given power, and may not even exist.”
For more information on the exhibit and Qulture Collective, visit www.qulturecollective.com.
