The most significant takeaway from the Utah Museum of Fine Arts ongoing salt exhibition series, has been demonstrating the diasporic knowledge of culture as so spiritually, socially, ethically and epistemologically potent that its most meaningful and historically accurate expressions emerge not through the neutral space of conventional categorization, but rather by honoring the diasporic origins of its cultural authority.
To date, the 17 editions of the UMFA’s salt series have sparked fresh perceptions about a museum’s archival collection of artworks and cultural objects becoming a dynamic vessel of ancestral, memory and diasporic connections. Throughout the lifetime of the series, each artist has considered their relationship with Utah’s extraordinary ecological embodiment for their respective show. The latest edition by Adama Delphine Fawundu is breathtaking in its scope of the intersecting and converging realms of spirituality, social history, the indelible footprints of ancestral culture and the indefatigable resilience against colonial power excesses, cultural erasure and environmental extraction. The salt 17 exhibition opened last September concurrently with Fawundu’s featured work in the Congo Biennale in Kinshasa and the 36th Biennale in São Paulo.
To stir her artistic language and expression for salt 17, she selected from the UMFA’s collection of African Art objects of the Kuba and the Yaka peoples of the Congo River Basin including pendant and belt ornaments and a figurine with power materials. She incorporated patterned textiles inspired by the Great Salt Lake, Congo River, the dikenga, turtles, lukasa memory boards and UMFA collection objects.
An epic poem on film, the two-channel video installation in the nearby black box, Vibrations from the deep, blends footage from three continents (including locations in Utah) and the Caribbean. Impeccably edited, the video binds the exhibition’s composition and thematic structure with fine clarity.
