Arda Asena’s exhibition Interstitial at Baxter St

Asena’s work transpires through an intricate visual and tactile language, complicating the materiality of the photograph, and attending to translations across mediums. Texture contains memories, unarticulated feelings and traces of experiences that have been submerged, yet seep through unexpectedly. In Interstitial, cross-disciplinary experimentation complicates material boundaries, underscoring multiplicity in both Asena’s approach to making and the varying modes of engagement visitors may experience through works. 

Asena’s work exists in space molded amidst anticipation and reality, attuned to the gaps. Interstitial forges an ecosystem of experience, individual and collective. The tensions of physical and psychic violence etch into the body, burrowing through the psyche and settling into the recesses of the mind. It reconfigures ways of being, manifesting through forms that elude detection and fixed definition. Pain accumulates and we adjust to new realities; moving across expansive distances from former selves. Sometimes who you were is difficult to recognize. 

Quiet is not devoid of sound or action. It accompanies secretive strategies, modes of communication that circulate below the surface of perception. Interstitial affirms the nonverbal and intangible, where the depth of feeling resides. Asena proposes the framework of secretive eroticism, tactics that have long been employed for survival by queer people in the face of social and cultural violence. These secrets lean into abstraction, for the traumas of violence exceed representation, too slippery to grasp. 

Violence often precipitates mourning, inciting temporal disorientation that may never end but changes shape. The warp-and-weft structures of weaving continue to generate questions on structure, contemplating what different mediums hold in their layers. Certain elements become emphasized depending on the viewer’s approach, evoking a presence that may be more acutely felt, while other aspects of the work recede into a seeming absence.   

Asena's exhibition will be on view from January 8 to February 26, 2025, at Baxter St.