Tongues of Fire - Li(sa E.) Harris: unlit: sof landin

Tongues of Fire Li(sa E.) Harris: unlit: sof landin May 24–September 16, 2023
Opening celebrations: May 26, 6–9pm, special performance from Li(sa E.) Harris of works by Jesse Chun

unlit: sof landin
unlit: sof landin is a solo exhibition by interdisciplinary artist, musician, and filmmaker, Li(sa E.) Harris. Through an intuitive and experimental process, the artist explores sound as a medium for liberation and resistance. The artist creates an immersive dream space with newly commissioned works: a nine-hour composition, a non-linear film, sculpture, and sonic collage. Through this new body of work, Li envisions safe spaces for beings—Black beings in particular—to soften and activate the power of dreams and the unconscious as a means for transcendence, survival, preservation, and joy.

Li's Ballroom Marfa exhibition is centered on Sleep On It, a nine-hour composition that guides listeners through a dream cycle transporting to AFRAM—an imagined African-America. The work summons hallucinatory vistas though Li’s layering of improvisational music performance, field recordings, vibraphone, chimes, vocal fragments, Wurlitzer piano, and visual projections.
unlit: sof landin is organized by Sarah Meléndez, Ballroom Marfa Music Curator.

Tongues of Fire
Tongues of Fire is a group exhibition of artworks reflecting on language that has been suppressed, silenced, or obscured. Featured artists include Jorge Méndez Blake, Jesse Chun, Adriana Corral, JJJJJerome Ellis, and Nakai Flotte.

The exhibition’s title is inspired by Chicana cultural theorist, writer, and poet Gloria Anzaldúa. She urges artists to “write with your eyes like painters, with your ears like musicians, with your feet like dancers. You are the truthsayer with quill and torch. Write with your tongues of fire.” Artists continue to use language, including their artistic languages, as acts of creativity, resistance, and power, as seen in this exhibition. These artworks speak to us and remind us how to be alive. They are a testament to the potential for advocacy, humor, wonder, and pleasure we all may find through language.

Tongues of Fire is organized by Daisy Nam, Ballroom Marfa Executive Director and Curator with assistance from Alexann Susholtz, Ballroom Marfa Curatorial and Exhibitions Assistant.