Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle: Embodied Disappearance

Curator. San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries: Main Gallery. April 2018

Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle’s solo performance work, Embodied Disappearance, accompanies her solo exhibition The Retrieval (February 16 through April 7, 2018) featuring drawings, video and sculpture that respond to the disappearance of Black women and female-identifying women due to various abuses and the current human trafficking trade.

According to Hinkle, “There’s often a community that knows about women and girls engaged in prostitution or being trafficked, and yet how does accountability enter into the consciousness of teachers, neighbors, shop owners, etc…? How do we ghost these women/girls and how does society at large ghost them? What one sees and what one does not want to see is crucial to the investigation this exhibition is undertaking.”

The Retrieval features over 100 works that respond to the disappearance of Black women and female-identifying women due to various abuses and the current human trafficking trade in the Bay Area and beyond. The exhibition responds to how we perceive, comprehend and react to these erasures as removed spectators or actively involved witnesses with new work from two distinct bodies of work. Drawings from the artist’s ongoing The Evanesced series focus on the erasure of Black women from the African Diaspora, will take over the Gallery’s walls. Holding court in the center of the space is a new large-scale, textile-based, healer-figure inspired by Nigerian Egungun festival costumes. The work is a new addition to the artist’s research and educational platform for a contested geography and culture named Kentrifica.