*** POSTPONED TO 2025, watch this space! 🙂 ***

To Be Seen: An Exhibition Project in Conjunction with Artist-in-Residence, Mary Elizabeth Jo Dixen Pelenaise Kapi’olani Lawson in September & October 2024

To Be Seen is a multidisciplinary collection of stories for and from the archive, that tell us how the women we love have gone. Placing us at the ever-intersection of questioning why life is this way and examining why and how we choose to carry on and live another day. Looking into our shared witnessing and confusions around why and how these women died. What everyday negotiations do we have to make that kill us slowly in return? Who these people lived for. How they loved. How we witnessed them living and dying. How truly seeing them may have come in their final hours of living. And what to do with this opportunity to be reborn over and again.

Mary Elizabeth Jo Dxen Pelenaise Kapi’olani Lawson is interested in the persistent investigation and possibility of care as an everyday practice. Mary wants to know more about how sacrifice and the witnessing of endured suffering in the name of care / love, have impacted the lives of BlPOC women. She desires living a life that necessitates care, as a way of moving her posterity closer to what could be seen as wholeness. Perhaps we may be able to build a world where Black women, and Women of Color are able to not only take up space but truly live and breathe into a life where wholeness is happening individually and collectively, where our intricate whole being is cared for in the many ways we are, and are changing. Our new world.

For her MHAS residency, Mary will focus on gathering experiences and recording stories of BIPOC women/femmes who reside in Berlin. As these stories accrue, they will contribute to an exhibition that holds space for various forms of memory, ritual and the celebration of life influenced by her Black roots. She plans to film the performance of a ritual that she created and does almost daily, as a way of healing, recovering and repairing her whole body; physical, mental and spiritual body. This ritual performance will be scored by sounds, song and spoken word written and composed by the artist. The gallery will be a mapping of ritualized objects that e are significantly mythic/symbolic and all hold similar meaning in her life; change. Mary will bring in and dwell in the voices of Black and Indigenous Feminist Visionaries to create a soundscape for the exhibition and performance that will be collaged together with the recordings of stories shared in Berlin.

As a Black femme-woman with Native and Indigenous Cherokee and South Pasifika roots she is of the sun and the black earth. She comes from a Woman of Faith, and so she too is also. A Woman of Faith. Her way of seeing and being in the world is often leaning wayward, offering her the opportunity, on every breath, to create the life she wants, needs and desires.

As an artist in song and performance singer-songwriter, Mary Elizabeth (aka Mesonjixx) will share a performance of a ritual through a layered video installation, that will be scored by sounds, song and spoken word. She will also offer a community dialogue/workshop in the gallery that holds space for grief, mourning, celebration, conversation, storytelling, remembrance and honoring the women we love who’ve gone.

Mary comes to MHAS ready to share her artistic practices, archival research and connect with other Black diasporic women through conversation, communal gathering and celebration of living. We are thrilled to welcome Mary to MHAS!

Artist website:

http://maryelizabethlawson.org/