Welcome to Notes from MoAD: Emerging Artists and Critic Series, dedicated to the Museum of African Diaspora’s 2018-20 Emerging Artist Program. For our sixth episode of this series, multidisciplinary artist Indira Allegra and curator Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen discuss an expanding of world and experience, the interplay of consent and complicity, exhaustion of identity-based inquiry, and the temperature of colonialism. Indira’s faceted explorations of weaving through performance, textile, video/new media, and performance have documented and deconstructed physical, psychological, historical, social, and practical tensions. In conversation, Allegra and MacFadyen deliberate on these vectors of power and the reality that nothing is neutral.

BODYWARP was a solo exhibition by Indira Allegra exploring weaving as performance requiring a unique receptivity to tensions extant in political and emotional spaces. BODYWARP explores looms as frames through which the weaver becomes the warp and is held under tension, performing a series of site-specific interventions using her body. Like the accumulation of memory in cloth, looms and other tools of the weaver’s craft become organs of memory, pulling the artist’s body into an intimate choreography between maker, tool, and the narrative of a place. BODYWARP was presented at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco as part of the Emerging Artists Program, from September 19 through November 4, 2018.