There Are People Here Too

Pivoting around a group of sculptures made by Baum, There Are People Here Too, is a collaboration between two friends that maps a non-linear journey through a set of conversations one-and-a-half years in the making. The stalks of sunflowers Baum and Ayinde planted together become surreal black arrows that suggest movement in directions with no particular destination. Pieces from previous sculptures show up to help new forms move from one place to another. Black triangles explode off the page to anchor new textures and offer doorways into questions around gravity, time, trade routes, and colonialism.

Throughout the exhibition there is a concern with upending the landscapes we have inherited, rupturing the logic that renders them stable, and posing questions that use the material language of the work in There Are People Here Too to fracture and simultaneously recombine the complex layers that make up our contemporary horizons. There are no answers here. There is no clear narrative. There are shapes and forms that mirror, become un-seamed, and show up elsewhere. There is an attention to iteration; of self, art, dialogue, land, ideas. There is the whisper of two voices that have become comfortable nudging in and out of different depths, losing each other before finding new points of harmony. There is the meandering texture of friendship, it’s surface craggy and uneven – a landscape in its own right. There are nuanced ruminations on race and identity; routes from the Indian subcontinent and Africa coming into contact on the shores of the Caribbean. And there is poetry, which “must be made by all.”