NEW YORK, NY.- Fridman Gallery presents Double Bind: Belonging and Its Discontents, a group exhibition curated by Catharine Clark featuring works by Athena LaTocha, Sandow Birk, daaPo Reo, Stephanie Syjuco, Zeina Barakeh, Nate Lewis, Hiba Kalache, Arleene Correa Valencia, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, and Deborah Oropallo and Andy Rappaport.
Through drawing, sculpture, textiles, photography, video, installation, painting, and performance, Double Bind explores belonging as both a political condition and a lived experience. While many of the participating artists engage questions of migration, citizenship, public memory, and national identity, the exhibition ultimately asks a broader question: What allows us to feel that we belong?
The exhibition's title references the paradox at the heart of contemporary belonging. To belong often requires visibility, yet visibility can expose individuals to surveillance, exclusion, or control. To assimilate may provide access and recognition, yet difference remains marked and policed. These contradictions are not abstract. They are experienced through bodies, families, communities, institutions, landscapes, and histories.
Curator's Statement
Double Bind: Belonging and Its Discontents emerged from a conversation with a collector who observed a common thread running through works she had acquired over more than a decade. Across artists with widely differing backgrounds and approaches, she recognized a shared inquiry into what it means to be American—a story told from many perspectives rather than a single point of view. Her observation prompted me to look more closely at the artists in my own program and to recognize how consistently their work grappled with questions of belonging, national identity, migration, and civic life.
As I spent more time with the works, it became clear that the artists were asking a larger question as well: not simply what it means to belong in America, but what allows us to experience belonging in the first place. Is belonging found through citizenship and legal recognition, or through family, memory, language, labor, compassion, and acts of mutual support? Is it something granted by institutions, or something created through relationships?
The artists gathered in Double Bind approach these questions from many different directions. Together, they reveal belonging not as a fixed condition, but as something continually negotiated, carried, contested, and remade. Their work invites us to consider not only who belongs, but how we come to feel that we belong—in the body, in the home, in community, in collective memory, and in the fragile yet enduring bonds that connect people across distance, difference, and time.
— Catharine Clark
Exhibition Highlights
Sandow Birk's imagined civic monuments revisit foundational American texts and democratic ideals, exposing the exclusions embedded within the nation's history while imagining more expansive futures. Athena LaTocha's monumental works made from earth, sediment, and industrial materials examine land as a site of memory, extraction, and ecological transformation.
daaPo Reo's sculptural works draw on his experience as a Nigerian immigrant and American citizen, transforming national symbols into meditations on visibility, citizenship, and the labor of belonging. Stephanie Syjuco's Block Out the Sun, Applicant Photos, and Better America interrogate archives, photography, and systems of documentation, revealing how histories are constructed, preserved, and contested.
Zeina Barakeh's animated videos merge mythology, technology, political resistance, and speculative futures to imagine new forms of collective identity and survival. Nate Lewis's intricately carved paper works investigate embodiment, migration, transformation, trust, and interdependence through imagery drawn from anatomy, movement, and the natural world.
Hiba Kalache's paintings explore memory, displacement, intimacy, and relation through layered surfaces informed by domestic space, family histories, and lived experience.
Arleene Correa Valencia's textile-based works draw on family photographs and migration histories to examine separation, care, resilience, and the sustaining power of memory.
For the opening reception, Wura-Natasha Ogunji will create a live drawing-performance that transforms language into an embodied act of repetition and negotiation, asking how meaning—and belonging—is continually made and remade through the body.
At the scale of public memory, Deborah Oropallo and Andy Rappaport's installations REBELLION and RECKONING examine protest, monuments, civic space, and collective resistance. Oropallo's photomontage Carousel further reimagines toppled monuments as symbols of historical revision and democratic possibility.
Together, the artists in Double Bind reveal belonging not as a fixed achievement but as an ongoing process shaped by memory, migration, care, visibility, resistance, and imagination. The exhibition offers no singular answer to the question of belonging, yet it maintains an enduring faith in art's capacity to expand how we understand ourselves, one another, and the worlds we inhabit.
