Talk and Reception for Opening Passages at Experimental Station
This outdoor installation presented in Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood is part of a citywide, multi-site photographic exhibition produced by Villa Albertine and its City/Cité program. It is also part of Art Design Chicago, a citywide collaboration initiated by the Terra Foundation for American Art that highlights the city’s artistic heritage and creative communities. It features recent works by ten American and French artists interested in the dynamic social landscapes of Chicago and Paris. Selections from all participating artists appear together downtown at the Chicago Cultural Center, while site-specific installations like this one highlight cross-cultural resonances between areas within the two cities.
Photographs by two artists living and working on Chicago’s South Side, zakkiyyah najeebah dumas-o’neal and Tonika Lewis Johnson, are shown here on 61st street along with a series of images produced along the Paris transit system by Assia Labbas. Together, these images invite us to reflect on how the histories of racial and socioeconomic division within each city have shaped the relationship between center and periphery and the particular connection each of us has to public spaces.
The discussion between the artists will be moderated by exhibition curators Carl Fuldner and Clément Postec (Ateliers Médicis, Paris) and followed by a reception. The outdoor exhibition and reception are wheelchair accessible, but the talk is not.
Carl Fuldner
Carl Fuldner is a Chicago-based art historian and curator whose work engages photography’s role in shaping environmental perspectives. He holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Chicago, where he also currently teaches as an Assistant Instructional Professor in the Master of Art Program in the Humanities and the Department of Art History. He is also a co-editor of The Art Institute of Chicago Field Guide to Photography and Media, published in 2023.
Clément Postec
Artistic Advisor, Head of Exhibitions at Ateliers Médicis // Artistic Director at Nouveau Printemps. A curator and filmmaker, Clément Postec has been involved for more than ten years in the development of projects at the crossroads of cinema and contemporary art (films, exhibitions) as well as the deployment of cultural venues and institutions. For Ateliers Médicis, he designs artistic programs (commissions, residencies, workshops, editions) and has curated exhibitions such as Regards du Grand Paris in 2022. In 2024, he was appointed Artistic Director of the festival Le Nouveau Printemps de Toulouse.
zakkiyah najeebah dumas-o’neal
Recipient in 2023 of the Chicagoland Seen grant commission funded by the Chicago chapter of the Albertine Foundation, zakkiyyah najeebah dumas-o’neal is a Chicago-based visual artist. Her work engages a more nuanced understanding of selfhood and Black femme existentialism, navigating the intricacies and complications of belonging and aliveness across time, location, and space. Her work has been presented in various forms at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, NADA, The Art Institute of Chicago, Centre Pompidou, The August Wilson African American Cultural Center, Chicago Humanities Festival, DePaul University, EXPO Chicago, and Harvard Graduate School of Design to name a few. She has held research forward artist residencies at the University of Chicago, Indiana University, and was a 2022 3Arts Awardee. Her work is represented in both private and public collections, including the Block Museum of Art and The Eskenazi Museum of Art.
With in the open you are here, dumas-o’neal creates quietly radical art that advances the possibility of Black autonomy and self-determination from within the historically fraught terrain of landscape art.
my reverie, series in the open, you are here, 2024, ©zakkiyyah najeebah dumas-o’neal
Tonika Lewis Johnson
2023 laureate of the national photographic commission Regards du Grand Paris, led by the Ateliers Médicis in collaboration with the Centre national des arts plastiques (Cnap), Tonika Johnson is a photographer and social justice artist from Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood. She explores urban segregation and challenges media portrayals of violence in the city through her art. Recognized citywide in recent years, she was named the National Public Housing Museum’s 2021 Artist as Instigator, currently working on her project Inequity for Sale, highlighting the historical context of Greater Englewood homes sold through Land Sale Contracts in the 1950s and 1960s.
In 2018, Johnson posed a question to teenagers of color on Chicago’s South Side: “Where have you felt you didn’t belong?” She photographed them in those places and recorded their stories. When invited to a residency in Clichy-sous-Bois by Ateliers Médicis, she expanded her Belonging series into a transatlantic conversation about racial divisions in urban areas.
Jason, Hyde Park, Chicago, 18, series Belonging, 2019 ©Tonika Lewis Johnson
Assia Labbas
Assia Labbas, a writer and artist from the Paris region, studied literature and journalism before contributing to publications for Bondy Blog, The New York Times, and Vanity Fair. She joined Kourtrajmé School in 2019, writing a short film screenplay and creating the Cacophonique installation exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in 2020. In 2021 she was a laureate of the national photographic commission Regards du grand Paris carried out by the Ateliers Médicis in collaboration with the Centre national des arts plastiques (Cnap), aimed at documenting the contemporary urban upheavals at work in the French capital.
In her RER B-ANLIEUES series, she combines photography with testimonials from users of the RER B line, which connects the northern suburbs of Paris with the center of the capital, revealing unexpected perspectives on the landscape of the area and those living in, and the impact of media discourse on the people living in Seine-Saint-Denis.
Beau Sevran, series RER B-ANLIEUES, 2021 ©Assia Labbas
Since 2021, the Paris-Chicago dialogue has been flourishing under the umbrella of Clichycago: a platform for community-based cultural exchange and artistic experimentation, with the support of the Ateliers Médicis in Clichy-sous-Bois / Montfermeil (France) and Villa Albertine in Chicago.