Modupeola Fadugba: Dreams From The Deep End (Aug-Nov 2018)

It’s summer in Harlem and the air is heavy with dreamy languor. The heat summons universal fantasies of how best to cool off: breezes by a bustling pier; ice cream that swiftly melts down your hand; plunging into public swimming pools – the rites of summer...

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Dreams from the Deep End shown during the summer of 2018, at Gallery 1957, presents an immersive installation, evoking the pool as a nostalgic yet contested space, where communities gather to play, learn, rest, and resist. Yet, within this watery oasis, there also lurk more turbulent experiences of risk, exclusion, and the looming chance of drowning. Nonetheless, in the deep end, resilience surfaces and togetherness triumphs. This exhibition expands Fadugba’s focus on powerful Black figures together in water. In the artist’s celebrated on-going series Synchronised Swimmers, one is submerged in an abstract underwater world, filled with dynamic, moving bodies, weaving stories about teamwork, friendship, and unity – from transcending the rules of a game to defying debilitating stereotypes.

Gideon Appah: Love Letters (Jun-Aug 2019), curated with Michael Babanawo

This multi-media exhibition presents a journey through the individual and collective memories defining artist Gideon Appah’s West African childhood and personal narrative.

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Multi-layered stories of a large family emerge, where tales of mystic visions are passed down through generations, Gollywood films are played on a Gold Star VHS recorder, and forgotten love letters are found in the thin sheets of saturated family albums. With reference to his last body of work, “Memoirs Through Pokua’s Window” (2018), Appah creates a dreamlike world of deep, soulful blues where spiritual figures emerging from melancholy waters sit alongside joyful family photographs and interiors to create a space where surrealism meets domesticity, and folklore meets religion. At the heart of this exhibition is the large facade of a Ghanaian house – a physical and figurative window into the artist’s upbringing, family life, and memories where reality mixes with fantasy, as if on a Gollywood movie set.