Contemporary Projects features original projects driven by artists, designers, or curators, highlighting diverse, critical forms of knowledge directly produced by art and design practices.
Alongside my work exploring the possibilities of self-liberation through craft traditions, I am a picture maker. I was first drawn to self-portraiture as a means to find answers to questions about the internal transformation that is brought forth by my work with indigo dyeing, weaving, and hand sewing. But as I begin to center self in my lens-based practice to explore introspection in art, each image—and my response to the prints—reveals to me that this work is also an active engagement with the gaze.
Growing up, my grandmother called me “beauty queen.” At our family gatherings, my features and who I inherited my looks from were often a topic of debate. The compliments were almost never about my intellect or sharp wit, but about outward appearances. It was within these domestic spaces that I became acutely aware that I’d been bestowed a commodity called beauty.
With pride, little me stepped out with an awareness that good looks afforded me a special privilege. But that certainty shifted when the unwelcome gaze from strangers became commonplace. It was in these power dynamics that I learned to look away, be aloof to a dominant stare, and at all cost, avoid casting a direct look back. I attempted to render myself invisible and as a result I hid from the person who I needed the most—me.
If I am to be a spectacle, this is what I want the spectator to see—a wayward woman. Ungovernable. Wild. Sensual. Free.
Inspired by introspection and change and led by my indifference to the demands of respectability, I document moments of awakening, self-love, acceptance, and feminine power. Each snapshot is a gesture of resistance. A challenge to authority. A map of my interior world that explores the liberatory potential of softness and self-intimacy. By sharing who I am and how I choose to show myself, I reclaim my own subjecthood and right to gaze back.
Driven by my relationship with the camera and how my connection to the device changes over time, I shoot a pack of film in each setting, creating a series that can be traced through a period of time. I am also drawn to the instantaneous and brutally honest result of the Polaroid, which captures what would otherwise be edited in post-processing or concealed with a social media filter. The intimacy of the technology brings forth a process of experimentation and play with lighting and movement that is vulnerable and freeing. I also find poetics in the branching veins that appear in the corners of the black-and-white images.
By breaking down the barrier between the artist and the subject, I become the performer, enacting choice each time I press the shutter button. Like a performance, these portraits are meant to be a generative force, to draw the viewer into my one-woman show motivated by agency, revealing Black womanhood in all its unattested complexities. This untitled series is in its embryonic phase. But even in its infancy this work proclaims that I exist. If I am to be a spectacle, this is what I want the spectator to see—a wayward woman. Ungovernable. Wild. Sensual. Free. A protagonist in my own story, a story different from the one that has been scripted for me.
narkita (she/her) is a researcher, writer and interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans the mediums of photography, textiles, installation, and performance. She earned her BS in Public Relations in 2010, and a MA in Arts Politics from the Department of Art & Public Policy, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University in 2022.