Co-sponsored by Cornell Media Studies and the program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Dark Laboratory presents the photography exhibition I’m New Here: Black and Indigenous Media Ecologies. The exhibition explores the intersecting ideas of race and ecology through the visual and literary interpretation of the work of seven photographers from across the Western hemisphere. In landscape and portrait form, the artists engage with the entanglement of Black and Native presence in nature across the hemisphere. Linking the histories of the dispossession of Native sovereignty and African enslavement, they offer visual commentary on how any just future must reckon with race and climate.
I’m New Here: Black and Indigenous Media Ecologies celebrates a chorus of contemporary voices who illuminate how art continues to answer the call for a vision of ecological and racial justice. Drawing from the Afro-diasporic Americas and Native Americas – Amerindian. Quechua, Oneida, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, St. Vincent and the Grenadines the photographic essays connect across Black and Native languages and geographies.. As part of the Dark Laboratory’s commitment to public humanities and community-engaged collaboration, the curators put the works in conversation with one another to intertwine geographies. These photographs are not merely fragments of a disappearing history but rather a symbolic meditation on survivance and Black and Indigenous futurity. They reflect on climate crisis, erasure, and the power and poetry of non-linear storytelling to narrate the ongoing conquest and the cosmos beyond it.
The exhibition is a component of the Dark Laboratory Photographic Narrative Prize conceived by Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe. It is accompanied by a virtual reality gallery and print catalogue.
Featured Artists: Abigail Hadeed, Nadia Huggins, Kai Pyle, Allison Arteaga, steve núñez, Melia Delsol, and Dóra Papp.
Curators: Tao Leigh Goffe and Tatiana Eshelman.
