Photograph credit: Trina Michelle Robinson, Liberation Through Redaction, 2022. Photopolymer intaglio print, ink made with soil collected from Senegal, charred cedar, bone black dry pigment, sisal dyed with hibiscus from Senegal, raw cotton paper sourced from a Black-owned farm in North Carolina. Courtesy of the Artist.
Allegedly the worst is behind us
September 14, 2024 – Feb 23, 2025
Allegedly the worst is behind us highlights the practice of twelve contemporary artists who pursue personal and collective acts of rebuilding fractured memories and stolen histories. Positing the body as an archive with generations stored achingly inside, the exhibition prompts examination on the toll of historical trauma and how to recover fragments of disrupted pasts.
Curators, philosophers, historians, and artists have long problematized normative notions of the archive, interrogating the role of institutions in including or excluding information and asking who has the power to build historical narratives and repositories. Emerging from performance and dance theory, the idea of the body as an archive centers corporeal forms of knowledge that challenge these dominant modes of keeping history. The artists in Allegedly the worst is behind us work to mend and amend the past in reckonings with memories, records, and archives, acting as both revisionists and storytellers. Drawing from their own family lineages and cultural backgrounds, in many cases lost or ruptured through forced relocation or removal, each artist explores what it means to be a living archive, carrying previous generations’ experience into the present. Through investigations in installation, painting, and video, they affirm the importance of art in keeping and questioning history—creating not mythic pasts but active practices for considering what stories need to be told, and, even rewritten.
In Allegedly the worst is behind us, past knowledge and future imagination meld in the hands of living artists who show us how re-examinations of history can offer insight towards the radical changes needed for today. The exhibition prompts the questions: What does it mean to inhabit a fraught or silenced history? How do we critically analyze and reconstruct historical narratives while caring and tending to our communities? How can reflecting on the past create spaces of liberation for the future?
Featuring Artists:
Tricia Rainwater
Pantea Karimi
Arleene Correa Valencia
Livien Yin
Suchitra Mattai
Trina Michelle Robinson
Shirin Towfiq
Demetri Broxton
Paola de la Calle
Razan AlSalah
Mik and May Gaspay
With thanks to Amanda Gorman for the inspiration for the title in her poem “Ship’s Manifest.” Curated by Zoë Latzer, Curator and Director of Public Programs.
Allegedly the worst is behind us at the ICA San José has been made possible thanks to lead sponsorship from the Ronald Whittier Family Foundation. Programs and exhibitions at the ICA are made possible with thanks to generous support from the City of San José’s Office of Cultural Affairs, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the San Francisco Foundation; significant support from Applied Materials, the Lipman Family Foundation, and Yvonne and Mike Nevens; along with additional support from SVCreates. In-kind support has been provided by Benjamin Moore paints.