Esmaa Mohamoud at Arsenal Contemporary
The Kendrick Lamar lyric “If a flower bloomed in the dark, would you trust it?” comes to mind when looking at Esmaa Mohamoud’s installation Darkness Doesn’t Rise to the Sun, But We Do. Awash in a murky orange light, a field of matte black dandelions sprout across the gallery which has been covered in steel, diamond-treaded flooring. That work figures in her exhibit “It Cannot Always be Night,” where there is a sense that, against all odds, life will continue to bloom. Mohamoud clearly takes pride in the Black community’s hard-won survival, but her optimism is tempered by a knowledge of how unwanted, and even despised, Black bodies are. Where there should be nourishment in the soil that would normally hold these dandelions, there is none to be found.
