GRAY is pleased to participate in the inaugural edition of Art Basel Qatar with a monumental sculpture by Torkwase Dyson. Titled Nia, the sculpture is made of two identical components in steel and wood, which have been painted and hand-coated with graphite. Balancing curved forms and arcing cantilevers with sharply defined vertical passages, the sculpture forms a charged, architectural environment.
The second work in Dyson’s Memory Horizon series, Nia (the Swahili word for "purpose"), is described by the artist as "a deep meditation on the stillness of thresholds—the liminal space between the architecture of dispossession and the creative act of place-making for liberation."
Throughout her work, Dyson confronts histories of enslavement and the geography, geometry, and architecture of dispossession. Dyson deploys shapes from stories of liberation and her own vocabulary of what she terms Black Compositional Thought to imagine strategies for spatial liberation. In Nia, the tension between curvilinear and rectilinear forms invites viewers to negotiate a newly defined space and to physically move in unfamiliar ways, and as such, confront historical registers and new possibilities.
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