Last week, Awol Erizku hosted a celebration for Mystic Parallax, a retrospective of his major works across sculpture, painting, photography, installation, and film. The show, on view at The Momentary until October 13th, follows the pioneering artist’s first monograph, published with Aperture, which showcased a body of work dedicated to following and expanding on the Black radical tradition. Motifs of the Pan-African flag and Nefertiti recur throughout, contributing to a visual language that Erizku terms “Afro-Esotericism.” “I feel like I have my own vernacular,” he explained to me at the exhibition opening in Bentonville, Arkansas last week. “I try to distill all these really intricate and complex ways of communication to get to that point.” After walking through the retrospective, we sat down with Erizku to talk about moving away from celebrity photography, what he calls “trap-conceptualism,” and why there’s no artistic medium he won’t try.
September 20, 2024
