Amant Foundation To Open Brooklyn Space This Summer, With Solo Exhibition By Grada Kilomba
The venue will be home to Amant's exhibitions, public events, archival projects, performances, and residency program.
By: Stephi Wild
The Amant Foundation has announced that on June 5th it will open the doors on Amant, a 21,000 square foot multi-building "art campus" in East Williamsburg, designed by the award-winning architecture firm SO-IL. The complex will serve as Amant's new headquarters, as well as the home for its exhibitions, public events, archival projects, performances, and residency program. Conceived as a research and process-oriented platform, Amant provides a public forum that presents and supports the practices of both established and under-recognized artists working across diverse creative fields.
Amant will open with a survey of work by Grada Kilomba (b.1968), the Portuguese artist, writer and academic of West African descent whose work deals with the difficult legacies of slavery and the colonial past. It will mark Kilomba's first show in the United States. The Amant Foundation made its debut with the launch of its Siena residency in the summer of 2020. The foundation is the vision of philanthropist and art collector Lonti Ebers, with the Brooklyn programs to be spearheaded by Artistic Director Ruth Estévez, former Gallery Director at REDCAT in Los Angeles and Senior Curator at Large at the Rose Art Museum. She is also the co-curator of the 34th São Paulo Bienal, which opens this fall. The New York residency will welcome its first group of four artists in September and will host similarly sized groups three times a year. While its summer residency in Siena is geared towards mid-career artists as a "working retreat," the Brooklyn program is research-focused, facilitating cross-discipline collaborations between Amant's residents. "The idea behind Amant was to create studios and exhibition spaces that would encourage artistic research and experimentation, free of the time restrictions and financial and administrative confines that typically accompany art practices in New York," said Ebers. Amant's program will focus on research-based projects that do not always neatly fit into pre-existing systems of artistic and cultural production. Forthcoming collaborations include a commission by Gala Porras-Kim exploring current practices in the restitution and repatriation of cultural objects, and a new work by New York-based filmmaker Manthia Diawara depicting a series of hypothetical conversations between Martinican poet Édouard Glissant and thinkers of the African diaspora, drawn from Diawara's own archive. "At a moment when New York is still reeling from the pandemic, Amant wants to stress the importance of human relations," said Estévez. "We want to provide opportunities to seed long-term cohesion between artists and audiences, supporting a tissue of intellectual, creative and emotional togetherness." Most of Amant's time-based programming will occur at Géza, a 1800-square foot multipurpose building on campus for performances and screenings. In the fall, as conditions permit, Géza will host a screening series featuring Grada Kilomba, Olivia Plender, Dora García, and Clara Ianni, whose cinematic works dissect and re-assemble history through found footage, news archives, and other epistolary documents and ephemera.
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