Closer Still presents a new body of work by Brooklyn J. Pakathi, shaped around longing at its most vulnerable. The title speaks as both a command and a confession, holding together an urge to remain near and the uncertainty that such closeness entails.
The exhibition turns to that precarious interval where relation takes shape and where feeling acquires form through measure and clarity, it also composes nearness as a living practice and affirms that desire endures through the ways we look, the ways we wait, and the ways we remain.
Due to numerous cancellations and censorship, one becomes an expert on how to archive and tell a story, reclaiming one’s right to speak while protecting oneself from potential legal accusations because of the text itself. It is an art we, the cancelled, are forced to master.
