Little Italy, New York
Group Exhibition
Numbers
Salma SarriedineOsama Said, Emad Hendrik Ette, Ellery Neon/Hugo Gyrl, Haifa Bint Kadi, Ridikkuluz, Sam Sundos, May Elian, Kyle Myer, Osama Hussein, Mohammed Al-Hawarji, Roxy Farman, Dre Massaad, Pamela Sneed, Baseera Khan, Fadl Fakhouri, and Early Shinada Salma Sarriedine welcomes you to Numbers, a group show featuring seventeen artists. Without presumption or artifice no other gallery show in New York captures the urgency of this cultural moment more significantly and presciently than the show Numbers. In a context of political and social upheaval in the United States with battle lines across race, gender, class and sexual orientation, Numbers is presented with the knowledge that artists have always led and been at the frontlines of movements and calls for social justice. Here, Palestinian, SWANA and other allies and comrades offer their work across many disciplines. The show is not an attempt to argue a didactic but to elucidate the realities and toll of war and genocide. It is a reflection on loss, memory, connection, identity, freedom, struggle, resilience and resistance. From the curator's perspective, it is an attempt to hold space for a difficult, contested and erased subject when dialogue is so desperately needed in art and cultural spaces. Of the many works, Ridikkuluz depicts a painting of guns pointed at Queer bodies in the act of sex. Mohammed Al Hawajri's digital collage, entitled Via Dolorosa, depicts the pathway Jesus walked en route to his crucifixion. The piece juxtapositions a surplus of figures meeting at a modern-day checkpoint in expressions of both exhaustion and persistence. May Elian's sculptures of human ears speaks profoundly to the exhibit's theme and intent. At a glance Osama Said's collages portray burning structures and a ghostly face over newspapers, signifying themes of displacement and perhaps an underlying desire for home. All art whether visual, literary or otherwise requires not just the eyes, but are acts of heightened listening. We are all aware of how conflict manifests when people and parties stop listening. Numbers presents the visual expressions of deeply marginalized voices that have laid bare the immeasurable cruelties of violence and loss. The show moves us beyond headlines, beyond numbers and mechanics to how artists visually process and survive the atrocities of war. —Pamela Sneed