Lemia Monét Bodden

Lemia Monét Bodden hails from the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her BFA, with honors, from New York University in Film Production in 2008. Her student short film, LOVE'S LOST, was selected and shown at the 60th Cannes International Film Festival - Short Film Corner. She went on to direct, write, produce, and edit a short film called GLANCE, in 2013, which was accepted into Auckland International Film Festival, Gallery TOKYO, and curated by IFC Center in NYC during May 2018. She is currently in post with her short film, BLIND, which was shot in Los Angeles this past fall 2019.

A photographer since she was 12 years old, Lemia has had her work in over 50 exhibitions, including The United Nations, Momenta Art, New York Photo Festival, DUMBO Arts Festival, MPLS Photo Center, Freies Museum Berlin, Vox Populi, Root Division, ACUD MACHT NEU Galerie, ARLES 2018, Altonaer Museum Hamburg, and Ferencvarosi Gallery in Budapest, Hungary. She will have another TBD solo show in Berlin coming up in late 2020.

MOUTHPIECE is a digital collage artwork that is influenced by how children of color are silenced, shamed, and villainized for who they are within mostly white institutions. By taking the 60s group class pictures from elementary schools and reconstructing them to show the juxtaposition of the power dynamic between teacher and student, these collages are a blatant expression of how, at early ages, white supremacy kills the individuality of black (and brown) children.

kyle malanda

kyle malanda (b. 1994) is a Malawian visual artist whose interdisciplinary work explores the intersections of sexual identity, mental health, tribalism, and generational trauma in an increasingly globalized digital world. She employs techniques ranging from photography and fashion design to augmented reality, glass beadwork, and film.

Using her multi-cultural and transcontinental experiences as a queer Black woman, kyle's work is an autobiographical reflection of both society and the self/ves. She is based in Lilongwe, Malawi but is often elsewhere.

Kulela, verb, Chichewa: (of children) to raise.

As a black woman, I’m acutely aware of how the historic exploitation of black women’s domestic labour still impacts the daily realities of black women everywhere. Lately, I find myself thinking about milk maids, the help, and other aspects of the mammy archetype.

I refuse to regurgitate trauma by simply recreating the same jarring imagery we see in history books, there’s enough in the past for that. Instead, through Kulela, I choose to reimagine these situations from a place of resistance.

To exist in white supremacist patriarchy is to constantly be at war with society & with history. So how can painful pasts be reimagined? What can resistance look like in the face of the impossible? What about power? How can the narrative be changed to empower those who have been systematically abused? And what role can (imagined) violence play in reclaiming collective dignity?