For Independent Art Fair 2025, Hannah Traore Gallery is pleased to present Weightlessness Training: a continuation of Turiya Adkins’ ongoing series exploring running and flight as expressions of her African ancestry and family’s legacy through histories including the Great Migration, Black athletes in track and field, the Tuskegee Airmen, and James Meredith’s 1966 March Against Fear.
Pursuing her personal “March Against Fear” further in this body of work, she transitions her subject to flight and freefall—a suspended motion that illustrates a conceptual gap, a peak at which it is possible to measure how far one has come and a moment in which fear is experienced rather than identified. Adkins’ fall is one that offers open interpretations of how fear and desire inform one another. Her departure from the land to the sky reaches all the way to space, where she gathers Afrofuturist queues from Sun Ra’s experimental jazz track “Astro Black” to the story of the Zambian Space Program and the concept of cosmic salvation. Across these references recurs a question of the potential of our individual and collective mythologies to, as Sun Ra described in a 1965 interview, “[permit] man to situate himself in these times and to connect himself with the past and the future. What I’m looking for are the myths of the future, the destiny of man… I believe that if one wants to act on the destiny of the world, it’s necessary to treat it like a myth.”
On canvases coated in muted tones, Adkins composes loose gestures that convey sensations of the body rather than figurations of the body—forms drawn, painted, sprayed, and adhered as a constellation of references. In some works, more precise symbols emerge, including the silhouette of the artist Michael Richards as it appears in his self-cast sculpture Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian (1999), a piece in which he honors the Tuskegee Airmen by depicting miniature planes crashing into his body—created just years before he himself was killed in his World-Trade-Center studio during 9/11. In other works, she incorporates more universal symbols, such as the outline of bright, almost blinding, stadium headlights—asking us to consider how shedding light on fear can both clarify and obscure our vision. Releasing control and measure, these are some of her most ambitious works to date—playing with space and scale to instill the intense and immense feelings that the act of falling reveals for each person.
In 1964—the year of Zambia’s independence—Edward Makuka Nkoloso, the self-appointed director of a national academy of science, space research, and philosophy, founded the Zambian Space Program. In this grassroots coalition, he led a group of amateur astronauts through a program of weightlessness and isolation training in the fields of Lusaka, instructing trainees to prepare for zero gravity by rolling down hills in oil drums and swinging from ropes that would be cut at their peak—a social experiment that challenged the American/Soviet space race as a critique of the capitalism and colonialism that endowed the West with the freedom to reach for the moon. Guided by her own cosmic salvation, each of Adkins’ gestural meditations is an exercise in weightlessness training. She holds us in that final moment of ascent before we are pulled back to earth and reality, welcoming and observing the relativity and unknowing of the fall.
For Independent Art Fair 2025, Hannah Traore Gallery is pleased to present Weightlessness Training: a continuation of Turiya Adkins’ ongoing series exploring running and flight as expressions of her African ancestry and family’s legacy through histories including the Great Migration, Black athletes in track and field, the Tuskegee Airmen, and James Meredith’s 1966 March Against Fear.
Pursuing her personal “March Against Fear” further in this body of work, she transitions her subject to flight and freefall—a suspended motion that illustrates a conceptual gap, a peak at which it is possible to measure how far one has come and a moment in which fear is experienced rather than identified. Adkins’ fall is one that offers open interpretations of how fear and desire inform one another. Her departure from the land to the sky reaches all the way to space, where she gathers Afrofuturist queues from Sun Ra’s experimental jazz track “Astro Black” to the story of the Zambian Space Program and the concept of cosmic salvation. Across these references recurs a question of the potential of our individual and collective mythologies to, as Sun Ra described in a 1965 interview, “[permit] man to situate himself in these times and to connect himself with the past and the future. What I’m looking for are the myths of the future, the destiny of man… I believe that if one wants to act on the destiny of the world, it’s necessary to treat it like a myth.”
On canvases coated in muted tones, Adkins composes loose gestures that convey sensations of the body rather than figurations of the body—forms drawn, painted, sprayed, and adhered as a constellation of references. In some works, more precise symbols emerge, including the silhouette of the artist Michael Richards as it appears in his self-cast sculpture Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian (1999), a piece in which he honors the Tuskegee Airmen by depicting miniature planes crashing into his body—created just years before he himself was killed in his World-Trade-Center studio during 9/11. In other works, she incorporates more universal symbols, such as the outline of bright, almost blinding, stadium headlights—asking us to consider how shedding light on fear can both clarify and obscure our vision. Releasing control and measure, these are some of her most ambitious works to date—playing with space and scale to instill the intense and immense feelings that the act of falling reveals for each person.
In 1964—the year of Zambia’s independence—Edward Makuka Nkoloso, the self-appointed director of a national academy of science, space research, and philosophy, founded the Zambian Space Program. In this grassroots coalition, he led a group of amateur astronauts through a program of weightlessness and isolation training in the fields of Lusaka, instructing trainees to prepare for zero gravity by rolling down hills in oil drums and swinging from ropes that would be cut at their peak—a social experiment that challenged the American/Soviet space race as a critique of the capitalism and colonialism that endowed the West with the freedom to reach for the moon. Guided by her own cosmic salvation, each of Adkins’ gestural meditations is an exercise in weightlessness training. She holds us in that final moment of ascent before we are pulled back to earth and reality, welcoming and observing the relativity and unknowing of the fall.
