bury the bridge

DUPLEX IS PLEASED TO PRESENT bury the bridge, a group exhibition featuring work by Nissa Nishikawa, Alice Gong Xiaowen, and Aminah Ibrahim.

Living between worlds, countries and cultures, a bridge was constructed with an assemblage of tools and alternate histories of force and gravity. To be present on the bridge is to be in a place of reflection, slowing to a pause to take in the view and accept the direction. It is a crossing between a momentary action, an ongoing transition, a happening towards a destination never fully reached. Bridging spirit and materiality, the bridge becomes a necessary home forged with an ancient, immediate, and malleable memory. The bridge and the mechanism of the human body become one, a channel for mutation, a medium for a message challenging to translate. Skin is tight—the body is the vehicle and the foundation. The physics evolves and the bridge breaks. Dismantling and blurring, we bury the bridge and we grieve its architecture, honoring the currents that have brought us here. To bury is to plant, to grow—here, we rejoice.

For Aminah Ibrahim’s first curatorial project, they have been moved to present Nissa Nishikawa, Alice Gong Xiaowen, and Ibrahim’s own artworks together in conversation. Supported by a diversity of spiritual and movement educations, Nishikawa’s multidisciplinary practice slows down to tune into subtle senses through a continual return to the earth while simultaneously transcending the earthly. Rooted in the material traditions of her heritage, Gong Xiaowen’s sculptural practice is a convergence of layers; a translation of nonverbal gestures, those inherited and atrophied, into cast mediums that become profoundly new. Attaching sensibilities of ephemerality to sculptural works, Ibrahim is creating instruments for the body, sounding space in flesh. Synchronistically crossing paths, the work of these artists embodies a different method of movement: how else can we cross?