Postmasters is delighted to present the first US solo exhibition of Paris-based artist Kenny Dunkan. His work was previously shown at PostmastersROMA.
Titled Affinities are Miracles, the exhibition fills the entire gallery space, and includes works in multiple media, including sculpture, photographs, video, performance, and installation. As they explore the complexities of identity theory, Dunkan’s works exude both a daring intimacy and an inter-national perspective. Affinities are Miracles is not a painful or tragic show. On the contrary, its depth is playful and looks to a hopeful future of inclusion of consciousness and acceptance of the self and others.
Dunkan’s practice is greatly influenced by his upbringing in Guadeloupe and its multiform Caribbean culture, which itself synthesizes a melange of influences from African history and colonialism. Dunkan also engages deeply with the constructs of identity in multiple contexts as formulated by the philosopher Édouard Glissant (1928-2011). Affinities are Miracles is poetically saturated with the intricacies of Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, particularly the subtle yet powerful idea that what we ignore or are unaware of in the context of morality or politics continues to affect both ourselves and others beyond the present.
The ideas of nature and culture, history and present, ritual and heritage, oppression and resistance, violence and protection, intimacy and vulnerability, the sacred, the mystical, and the mundane, are all seamlessly folded into Dunkan’s art. Juggling assimilation and otherness, his view and treatment of identity is not a simplistic or linear one, but rather a complex accumulation of ideologies, cultures, and collective and personal experiences.