The work of world-making and clairvoyance is driven by desire and forces seeking to project into the future. In Clairvoyant nine multi-media artists investigate history, memory, and female and personal experience to center us in real-time, wielding and yielding to the forces that be.

Behind Katya Grokhovsky’s bright mark-making and honorific references to her matrilineal heritage lies outrage with the patriarchy and war in Ukraine, and as the title of the smaller sculptural painting alludes, Yearning, a longing for a home that entails safety and freedom. Grokhovsky’s practice spans painting, performance, and installation, and bodily agency is embedded within the materiality of her works—as with Ayana Evans and Orlan. Singular in merging abstract action, performance, and participation to give expression to Black femme experiences, Evans has in My colonial get-away: fu## it, I ain't budgin, a series of photographic lithographs on plexiglass, positioned her body as an element and intervention on colonel’s row on Governors Island discretely, unusually, and boldly (every which way) demanding people to see and respect her. With her face hidden and situating her body as the artwork, Orlan dances with her shadow in Corps-sculpture sans visage en mouvement dansant avec son ombre n°6—refusing to adhere to the classical movements that she learned as a child the piece is a rebellious act of liberation. Evans’s 2019 series and the chief historical work by Orlan from 1967 expose and erase the social boundaries of their time.

Weaving through threads of emancipation, sensation, and intuition, the exhibition Clairvoyant imagines the trajectory of time, from geological, in a literal sense, in Linnéa gad’s works which center lime (calcium carbonate) from limestone—accumulated ocean debris that over millions of years formed sedimentary rock—to oyster shells, to a moment, or memory, as in Yasmine Huang Anlan’s narrative short film My heart is a bleeding tank, on view in the Whitney Biennial 2024: Even better than the real thing, that reminisces the desire and angst of teenage love. How do concepts of time affect us? The increase in access to reproductive health products, the expansion of the wellness industry, and the science of astrology bear the promises of control—a combination of injecting and extracting, mastering sleep and diet, and predicting and explaining the behavior of ourselves and others lull us into the false security of being able to preserve and extend our bodily and mental functions, creating balance and upending time. Yet, as the work in the exhibition shows, time is not linear and is hard to grasp, let alone control. Nowhere is this more present than in Bianca Abdi-Boragi’s work Hourglass, a Baroque-style drawing that presents obverse and reverse self-portraits reflecting Gaston Bachelard’s counter-time theory. “If being is conscious of itself only in the present instant, how could we not realize that the present instant is the sole domain in which reality is experienced?” the French philosopher wrote in 1932—briefly, time as segmented or durationless instants, measured by emotion.

Anna-Ting Möller and Katie Hubbell walk the line between icky and palatable, creating work that resembles but is not quite. Over the past ten years, Möller has nurtured a kombucha scoby to use in her sculptural practice—separating it to coat sculptures or nurturing smaller batches in vessels as a commentary on adoption, geopolitics, and asymmetrical relationships. Biological matter centers Hubbell’s works as she embeds materials in paper pulp titling her artwork after the descriptors of smells, allowing them to touch the reader. These explorations of hybridized forms recall our responses to the dynamism and decay of the world around us. Finally, the sudden passing of her husband, composer Robert Phillips, led Hanae Utamura to explore the supernatural realm. Find the media player, put on the headphones, press play, and stand before Utamura’s iridescent painting and imagine Phillips grasping her hand to lead her brushstrokes—these enigmatic and beautiful works show that connection is key in grieving.

Seeing clearly sometimes simply means daring to sit in your own body.

(Text by Anna Mikaela Ekstrand)

Anna Mikaela Ekstrand is a Swedish/Guyanese independent curator and arts writer based in New York City. She is interested in feminisms, decolonial theory, and social practice and is also the founding editor-in-chief of Cultbytes, an online art publication. Ekstrand co-curated The Immigrant Artist Biennial 2024: Contact zone and her latest books are Assuming asymmetries: conversations on curating public art projects of the 1980s and 1990s and Curating beyond the mainstream both published by Sternberg Press. She has held curatorial positions at Bard Graduate Center, Metropolitan Museum, Museum of Arts and Design, and Solomon R. Guggenheim and graduated with MA degrees from Bard Graduate Center and Stockholm University in art and design history.