MOCA GA / Masud Olufani

Poetics of the Disembodied is a mixed media sculptural installation of several new works that seek to investigate the imprint of ancestral memory through the mediums of visual form, language, and performance. The title refers to a quality of spirit that exists beyond the frame of the corporeal where time and timelessness intersect.  Drawing on personal and collective narrative (real and imagined; past and present) as source material, the work attempts to suture what was to what is and what can be.  The abutment of disparate materials—readymade and fabricated—invested with memory and meaning refers to the transgenerational registry of the lived experience on the individual and the collective while the subtle allusions to the Sacred point towards the soul’s aspiration for transcendence.  The thematic elements of race, class, social stratification, and isolation serve as points of departure where the limited resources of the body give way to the limitless resources of the spirit.