My heart makes my head swim.
Jonathan González and Karyn Olivier
Curated by mai eltahir
Opening Reception: Friday,March 7th, 2025| 6-9pm | Free-To-Attend
Friday,March 7th, 2025 – Sunday, April 13, 2025
Presented in Gallery 3
About the Exhibition
What if the mind feels and our senses become theoreticians?
Citing Frantz Fanon’s Black Skins White Masks, My heart makes my head swim is a site of absented presences seeking to entwine material and dematerial gestures that intimately animate the afterlives of devastation and loss. Jonathan González and Karyn Olivier recompose senses using textual scores, photographs, sculptural objects, installation, participatory improvisation, and sonic activation. Situated in the exploration of the cosmological, the historical, and the intimate, their respective practices heighten diasporic sensitivities moving across and in-between ungraspable waveforms, seemingly out-of-time and out-of-joint, slipping into architectural breaks, and memory inventions placed on unmappable desire, thus opening other sensorial ethnographies to be encountered. Both artistic practices bring together multifarious invitations with attention to outlaw and alternative forms of black livingness that preside within our human-environment world.
Sonic activations on March 21st and April 4th during Vox Populi gallery hours from 12pm to 6pm.
About the Artists
mai eltahir is an independent curator based in Philadelphia, PA.
Jonathan González is an artist working at the intersections of performance, time-based media, and writing. Engaging with how the historical passage of geographies, architectures and communities become entangled is at the heart of Gonzalez’s practice. He is a 2024 Herb Alpert Award Fellow (in the category of Dance), a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Fellow in support of his research on Carnival/MAS Performance in the Caribbean (PRACTICE, 2022), and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts – Grants to Artists (in the category of Performance Art, 2020). He recently completed a durational performance installation at the American Academy of Arts and Letters entitled, Spectral Dances (2024), and was an inaugural Dance Artist-in-Residence under Sarah Michelson’s platform at David Zwirner Gallery (2024). He is approaching the publication of his first book, Ways to Move: Black Insurgent Grammars, in November 2025 (Ugly Duckling Presse).
KARYN OLIVIER, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago, creates sculptures, installations and public art. This year, Olivier will unveil a Philadelphia memorial, commemorating more than 5,000 African Americans buried at Bethel Burying Ground. Last year, she participated in the Whitney Biennial (NY, NY), La Trienal at El Museo del Barrio (NY, NY), the Malta Biennale (Valleta, Malta), and Prospect.6 Triennial (New Orleans, LA). Olivier was also selected to co create a public installation in Milwaukee, memorializing Vel R. Phillips, the late politician, attorney, judge, and civil rights activist. In 2023, Olivier presented her second solo show at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. In 2022 Olivier participated in Documenta 15 and installed a permanent commission for Newark Airport’s Terminal A.
