The history of Blackness is a testament to the fact that objects can and do resist.
In the Break – Fred Moten

How does the imposition and often demanding expectation of stillness traverse from being a gesture to a necessary apparatus of white supremacy? How many steps away from stillness would be needed to start a movement? How could the movement, stillness, and marked presence of Blackness be employed as both aesthetic and praxis of liberation, self-definition, and self-actualization? In Sit Still, exhibiting artists Arshi Chadha and Collin Patrick explore the tensions between the mandated stillness of the Black body and the urgency, negotiations, and movements that comprise the Black diasporic experience.

From the documentation of colonial subjects to the annotation of scenes of subjugation during enslavement, the camera has been used as a weapon not only to mark Blackness as the diminished other but further as a tool of control, power, and dispossession, with the image asserting itself as a neutral depiction of reality. In this vein, the stillness captured through the lens’s aperture is rife with politics, meaning, and definition cast onto the subject’s likeness from elsewhere.

As cognizant observers—and perhaps victims—of the intrusion of stillness and inexpression on Black life, Chadha and Patrick’s lens-based and material practices establish themselves as an inquiry into the politics of neutrality and the extended uses of self-representation through gesture, abstraction, and physical and psychic interventions that ponder how images are defined and the relationship between the image’s subject, viewer, and documentarian.