Motions to Unfurl: co-sensing with Naima Green & Ica Sadagat

A performance and conversation with artist Naima Green and poet and essayist Ica Sadagat. “Motions to Unfurl” is an experiment towards trust, candor, and possibility where two collaborators reveal, unveil, and soften to prioritize the inquiry rather than the conclusion. Naima and Ica will perform and demonstrate their attempts at becoming in real time.

 
ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Ica Sadagat(B. 1987) is a poet, essayist, reader, and collaborative artist immersed in textual impact, pain points, pleasure/play, and question marks. They write to give body. Sadagat’s work has been shared in Apogee, TAYO, Nightboat Books’ online roundtable, Skin Contact, and I Keep Missing My Water at ICA VCU, with forthcoming work to be published in Fence. Ica earned her MFA from California Institute of the Arts as the Truman Capote Literary Fellow. She gained her BA in Literature and Cultural Studies from The New School and her tongue in tides from the sea. Her literacy begins with her hands and ends with a mouth, but she enjoys when the path deviates or evolves and she’s taken by the waist to somewhere new.

Naima Green is an artist, photographer, and educator from New York. Her work is an invitation to participate, witness, and reckon with ways of being that are safe, utopic, and intimate. Green has been featured in exhibitions at Fotografiska NY, Smart Museum of Art, MASS MoCA, ICP, Houston Center for Photography, Bronx Museum, BRIC, Gracie Mansion Conservancy, Studio Museum in Harlem, and Arsenal Gallery. Her works are in the collections of Barnard College Library, Decker Library at MICA, Fleet Library at RISD, ICP Library, MoMA Library, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, National Gallery of Art, Olin Library, Smart Museum of Art, and Teachers College, Columbia University.

Green earned an MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from Bard College, an MA in Art & Art Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a BA in Urban Studies & Sociology from Barnard College.

She is the Harnish Visiting Artist and Lecturer in Photography at Smith College.

 
Excerpt from Interstitial / Intertidal: Reflections on Motions to Unfurl

The ‘lecture’ I witnessed by Naima Green and Ica Sadagat was a transgression on the form itself, occluding it of all illusions of mastery. Instead of a single speaker seeking to distill their knowledge to an anonymous audience, Naima and Ica paced in circles while asking questions of each other, answering in real time while reveling in their un-answerability. Who are you now and who loves you? What do you know about living? Their performance transformed the lecture into a dialectical inquisition, cruising through the soft black space of our collective unknowing.Their constellation of questions activated a new mode of inquiry, one that is enchanted rather than limited by the inexpressible, falling back on the somatic sphere when we hit the limits of language. When do you feel like water? “Motions to Unfurl” was a purification ritual, like the juice of a grapefruit sliding down the small of a lover’s back.

by Angie Sijun Lou