Pillars
LMCC: The Arts Center at Governors Island, New York City
May 28 - October 30, 2022
Pillars is an interactive video installation that continues artist Simon Benjamin’s investigation into the people of the African diaspora and their complex relationship with the sea. Benjamin takes shipping barrels—traditionally filled with goods that immigrants send home to their loved ones—and transforms them into viewing portals or dioramas. Glimpsing through these portals, viewers encounter live and recorded footage of US seascapes with sightlines facing the direction of islands in the Caribbean.
As sculptural objects, the barrels evoke the distance, separation, and longing of Caribbean migrants, as well as the disembodied forms of care they provide through their labor. Each pillar becomes a vessel of diasporic memory, and like the sea itself, contains deep and often traumatic histories of migration.
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