“a/wake in the water: Meditations on Disaster,” recently on display at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art (MoCADA) in Brooklyn, New York, was a small but intensely conceptualized video exhibition/installation whose inspiration lay in the intersections between traumatized diaspora bodies and contemporary environmental disasters that have defined a global generation. Featuring the work of twelve video artists in varying formats from wall screens to 12-inch TV sets, the exhibition incorporated multiple methods of storytelling ranging from disaster footage and documentary narratives to science fiction productions and choreographed performances. The subsequent videoscape created a multilayered experience whose disorienting yet somehow cohesive visual and conceptual threads “echo[ed] the sentiments of people in the midst of catastrophe,”1 in the words of curator Erin Christovale, and underscored the global reach of this exhibition in establishing linkages between black experiences of environmental disasters across numerous geographic, political, and cultural borders and contexts.
The...