Waseem Nafisi

“The exhibition centerpiece, in the left window, is a new work by Waseem Nafisi, “Paris in Peaces (Rue Denfert),” which also thematizes exchange through an iterative structure that recreates and reprises an earlier work by Nafisi, which itself takes up an instruction piece by Yoko Ono as well as images from Ono and John Lennon’s “War is Over! If you want it” campaign. Nafisi’s work carries the traces of images he has earlier copied, distributed, and then received back and reincorporated; as well as the political histories embedded in the rue Denfert it depicts—a gathering place for numerous iterations of revolutionary and collectivist desires. Like the show itself, this work reminds us of the friendship networks and communicative exchanges that make political action possible and different political futures realizable. But the practice of image reproduction, division, dispersal and return also performs a complex operation of abstraction on the concrete political history of the pictured place, translating history into a series of reproduced and exchanged images, in a manner that resonates with the commodity culture (an incipient society of the spectacle) the arcade represents. This new work sits across from and in counterpoint to the other works that emerge from deeper histories of friendship in networks of queer theory, including those by Kyla Wazana Tomkins, Nao Bustamante, and Lauren Berlant. That many of these works honor forebears who have passed and friendships that have ended through death amplifies the bittersweetness of the exhibition and the nostalgic quality of the space itself.”

- Damon Young in “Passing Through,” Dispatches Magazine