Double Bind: Belonging and Its Discontents
Curated by Catharine Clark
June 30 – August 06, 2026
Opening Reception | Tuesday, June 30 | 6 – 8 PM
Performance by Wura-Natasha Ogunji | 6 PM
Artist Remarks | 7 PM
Fridman Gallery is pleased to present Double Bind: Belonging and Its Discontents, a group exhibition curated by Catharine Clark featuring works by:
Zeina Barakeh
Sandow Birk
Arleene Correa Valencia
Hiba Kalache
Athena LaTocha
Nate Lewis
Wura-Natasha Ogunji
Deborah Oropallo
Andy Rappaport
Daapo Reo
Stephanie Syjuco
Through drawing, sculpture, textiles, photography, video, installation, painting, and performance, Double Bind explores belonging as both a political condition and a lived experience. While many of the participating artists engage questions of migration, citizenship, public memory, and national identity, the exhibition ultimately asks a broader question: What allows us to feel that we belong?
The exhibition’s title references the paradox at the heart of contemporary belonging. To belong often requires visibility, yet visibility can expose individuals to surveillance, exclusion, or control. To assimilate may provide access and recognition, yet difference remains marked and policed. These contradictions are not abstract. They are experienced through bodies, families, communities, institutions, landscapes, and histories.
Curator’s Statement
Double Bind: Belonging and Its Discontents emerged from a conversation with a collector who observed a common thread running through works she had acquired over more than a decade. Across artists with widely differing backgrounds and approaches, she recognized a shared inquiry into what it means to be American—a story told from many perspectives rather than a single point of view. Her observation prompted me to look more closely at the artists in my own program and to recognize how consistently their work grappled with questions of belonging, national identity, migration, and civic life.
As I spent more time with the works, it became clear that the artists were asking a larger question as well: not simply what it means to belong in America, but what allows us to experience belonging in the first place. Is belonging found through citizenship and legal recognition, or through family, memory, language, labor, compassion, and acts of mutual support? Is it something granted by institutions, or something created through relationships?
The artists gathered in Double Bind approach these questions from many different directions. Together, they reveal belonging not as a fixed condition, but as something continually negotiated, carried, contested, and remade. Their work invites us to consider not only who belongs, but how we come to feel that we belong—in the body, in the home, in community, in collective memory, and in the fragile yet enduring bonds that connect people across distance, difference, and time.”
— Catharine Clark
Proposal for a Monument to the Declaration of Independence (and a Pavilion to Frederick Douglass), from the series “imaginary Monuments”, 2018
Direct gravure etching on two copper plates printed on two sheets of gampi paper, joined and backed with sekishu kozo paper., 44 x 61 in.
Sandow Birk‘s imagined civic monuments revisit foundational American texts and democratic ideals, exposing the exclusions embedded within the nation’s history while imagining more expansive futures.
Proposal for a Monument to the Declaration of Independence (and a Pavilion to Frederick Douglass), from his “Imaginary Monuments” series, turns belonging into a foundational question of national architecture and civic memory.
The work stages a monumental encounter between the Declaration of Independence, Frederick Douglass’s 1852 critique of American freedom, and Thomas Jefferson’s deleted passage condemning the slave trade. In Birk’s composition, the founding text is not erased but reframed, forced into relation with the exclusions and hypocrisies it helped to sanction. Belonging here is revealed to be foundationally split: the nation’s ideals remain inseparable from the violence and omissions built into them.
There Will Come a Soft Rain, 2025
Shellac ink, synthetic walnut ink, and pigmented inkjet print on paper, 44 x 88 in.
Athena LaTocha expands the exhibition’s consideration of belonging beyond architecture and foundational documents and into the land itself in a work titled There Will Come a Soft Rain. Working in this piece with, walnut pigments, ink, and shellac—and in other works with soils, industrial debris, steel, lead, tire shreds, river mud, and demolition sediment gathered from specific sites—LaTocha constructs monumental surfaces that register histories of extraction, displacement, habitation, and ecological violence. Her works do not depict landscape in any conventional sense; rather, they emerge from direct physical engagement with environments marked by industrial intervention, indigenous histories, and environmental trauma.
daaPo Reo‘s sculptural works draw on his experience as a Nigerian immigrant and American citizen, transforming national symbols into meditations on visibility, citizenship, and the labor of belonging.
By cutting, stitching, layering, and repairing, Reo exposes the seams of identity itself as something continually assembled through systems of history, memory, and power, a dynamic also evident in Visible Man, a Disappearing Act, a triptych of sculptures that reflects the artist’s experience of living in America as an African immigrant under the pressure of constant visibility and self-surveillance. Referencing Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the work explores the tension between presence and erasure, recognition and concealment.
Visible Man, a Disappearing Act part II / Made in Nigeria, Assembled in America.., 2026, Mixed-media soft sculpture, textile, and buttons, 22 x 10 x 6 in.
Applicant Photos (Migrants) #1-3, 2013-2017
Archival Epson pigment print, Frame: 16 x 20 in.
Stephanie Syjuco examines the institutional and historical frameworks through which visibility is produced and regulated.
In Applicant Photos (Migrants #1-#3), she investigates how systems of representation determine who may safely appear, under what conditions, and at what cost, and how those systems reinforce racialized narratives. Her work reveals visibility not as neutral recognition, but as a structure deeply entangled with surveillance, colonialism, bureaucracy, and state power.
Zeina Barakeh‘s animated videos merge mythology, technology, political resistance, and speculative futures to imagine new forms of collective identity and survival. Barakeh’s animation, The Gardens of Maladies, draws inspiration from Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, reimagining the historical triptych as a poetic reflection on the contemporary condition. She blends references from Persian, Mughal, and Chinese miniature traditions with surreal landscapes that oscillate between paradise and catastrophe. Across the animation, bodies, organisms, and hybrid forms move through states of mutation and instability, evoking cycles of birth, decay, and transformation. Womb-like structures suggest continuous regeneration, while trilobite fossils become metaphors for surveillance and military defense. Locusts appear throughout as symbols of destruction and renewal, embodying the terror and inevitability of change.
Nate Lewis‘s intricately carved paper works investigate embodiment, migration, transformation, trust, and interdependence through imagery drawn from anatomy, movement, and the natural world.
Lewis created vortices 4, a hand-sculpted work on paper with ink featuring morphing butterflies. The butterfly functions as both image and metaphor: a figure of transformation, migration, and continual becoming.
Unconstrained by human borders, it moves across territories and nations according to rhythms larger than political systems yet remains profoundly vulnerable to environmental conditions that threaten its survival. Lewis’s intricate interventions into the paper echo these oppositions, leaving traces that resemble both scars and pathways.
vortices 4, 2026
hand sculpted paper, ink, 40 x 46 in.
Hiba Kalache‘s encounter-event becomes a space of relation rather than representation, shaped by memory, displacement, domestic intimacy, and the lingering afterlife of war. Working with layers of acrylic ink and oil, Kalache builds surfaces through accumulation, repetition, and repair, drawing on the rhythms of crocheting learned in childhood from her great-aunt, where communal making, storytelling, affection, and critique unfolded together. Gestures behave like threads, returning and intertwining across the canvas as traces of encounters that resist fixed narrative.
Drawing from family photographs and remembered interiors: curtains, fabrics, wallpaper, and other domestic fragments, Kalache approaches memory as something activated rather than recalled. The home emerges as both psychological and architectural space, where warmth, tension, protection, and loss coexist. Influenced by Bracha Ettinger’s concept of the matrixial and the notion of Carriance—the experience of carrying and being carried through relation—her paintings propose subjectivity as something formed through encounter rather than separation.
encounter-event, 2026
Acrylic ink and oil on canvas
32 x 65 in.
Drawing from her experience growing up in a mixed-status immigrant family, Arleene Correa Valencia transforms textiles and repurposed materials into images that are at once intimately personal and communal. Textile “paintings” such as Capturados: Pájaros En Vuelo 1997 (Captured: Birds in Flight 1997) and I Have To Have Good Memories: When You Weren’t There are compositions based on family photographs taken during a period when migration separated children from parents pursuing opportunity in El Norte.
Correa Valencia’s work traces how belonging is sustained through family memory, migration, and compassion that persist across distance and separation. Her textiles carry multiple meanings: they recall the clothing, domestic spaces, and cultural traditions of home, while also functioning as repositories of memory and longing. Her practice recognizes that joy and suffering often coexist, particularly during moments of profound upheaval.
I Have To Have Good Memories: When You Weren’t There (pink canvas), 2024
Repurposed family clothing sewn on canvas, 60 x 48 in.
Capturados: Pájaros En Vuelo 1997 / Captured: Birds In Flight 1997 (blue canvas), 2022, Repurposed family clothing sewn on canvas, 60 x 54 in.
Atlantic, 2017
Thread, ink, graphite on tracing paper, 48 x 24 in.
Wura-Natasha Ogunji turns to language as an embodied practice through which belonging is continually enacted, repeated, and renegotiated. Ogunji introduces movement, performance, painting, video, and drawing as forms that explore how meaning is produced through embodied action and collective experience. Her work often turns to water as architecture—lagoon, river, sea, or imagined expanse—while also drawing on language, dream journals, and the collective interactions of Lagos street and market life.
For this exhibition, Ogunji will create a drawing-performance that explores the embodiment of language through the act of repetitive writing. Using both hands to write, words become a method for both making and undoing meaning. The piece references Alighiero Boetti’s 1974 video performance It is the body that always speaks in silence, in which he wrote this phrase in Italian with both hands at once. It is this embodied relationship to language that Ogunji will explore in her performance on the opening night of the exhibition.
Collective memory and public confrontation inform the collaborative media works of Deborah Oropallo and Andy Rappaport, transforming the gallery into a dispersed field of reckoning, resistance, and encounter.
In the video RECKONING, monuments lose their certainty. Memorials from across the globe overlap and dissolve into one another, creating a layered landscape of historical memory in which conquest, colonialism, nationalism, and resistance become inseparable. Figures once cast as embodiments of permanence flicker between presence and disappearance, their authority destabilized through shifting images, tagged sculptures, and a percussive soundtrack that, as Andy Rappaport writes, incorporates “a snare-drum-like sound meant to evoke Civil War-era Confederate marches.
RECKONING, 2020
Single channel video with 2 channel sound, Edition: 8 + 3AP
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Catharine Clark is the Founder of Catharine Clark Gallery, which serves as the primary representative for an acclaimed roster of international artists, including Masami Teraoka, Stephanie Syjuco, Marie Watt, Nina Katchadourian, Arleene Correa Valencia, Julie Heffernan, and Sandow Birk. Exhibitions change every eight weeks, and each is accompanied by a time-based media or video work presented in the Gallery’s dedicated Media Room. The Gallery works with fine art presses and co-publishes original prints, which are presented in our works on paper gallery. Since 1994, the Gallery has been a member of the San Francisco Art Dealers Association (SFADA), and in 2023, the Gallery joined the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA).