Tschabalala Self’s presentation inaugurates a new series of exhibitions entitled RESPONSES. The series attempts to bring established contemporary artists into dialogue with the program presented with a show operating as a gesture.

Self’s powerful works combine fabric collage, printmaking, and painting into a distinctive visual language that brings the lived realities of contemporary Black life to the fore. The compositions she develops create spaces in which her two-dimensional figures seem to live and breathe. Her practice moves between artistic and craft-based traditions, addressing questions of identity, self-determination, and collective memory.

The wall painting The Hands (2020) welcomes visitors with the depiction of a handshake, two hands interlocked and holding one another. The silhouetted form is lifted from the painting Sprewell (2020) as many of her wall works do, referring to her paintings. On the wall the work Pan-African Checkered Board (2025) with its checkered pattern, reveals a field of tension between dualities and perceived opposites. These patterns appear frequently in Self’s installations—particularly in her Bodega Run series—evoking places from Self’s youth, such as the bodega: a small convenience store found in urban U.S. neighborhoods that functions both as a social and cultural meeting point for the neighborhood. In this work, the pattern is rendered in the colors of the Pan-African Flag. The presentation is completed by Black Hand (2020), a painting depicting a figure reduced to a singular shape, animated by a cascading hand that creates a kaleidoscopic movement. The figure is composed of various textiles, most notably a red and black cloth bearing the Gye Nyame symbol from the Akan people of Ghana. Translating to “except for God” or “God is supreme,” the symbol expresses belief in God’s omnipotence and omnipresence.

Self’s work enters into an expanded dialogue with the themes that shape the practices of Edwards and Mekondjo: the material and symbolic conditions of Black life across the African and American continents; the entangled cultural legacies of colonialism, slavery, the plantation and equally the resistances that emerged; through political movements and currents, from the Civil Rights Movement to more recently, Black Lives Matter.