Shani Strand: Everything Must Be Returned

Shani Strand's immersive installation examines colonialism, extraction, and resistance through sculptures and film inspired by Caribbean history and trickster figures.

Why go

Strand's first New York institutional solo show occupies Artists Space's entire ground floor with a newly commissioned film and expansive sculptures made from materials bearing traces of historical encounter—rebar, ceramics, JJJ Bricks—arranged with site-specific resin pools to evoke geographies structured by violence and resistance.

What to expect

An immersive ground-floor installation featuring a 10-minute film titled R.I.P. He Deserves It (a clown story and revenge fantasy exploring wrought iron's colonial theft) alongside multiple sculptures of trickster figures—duppies and demonic angels—made from bamboo, rebar, ceramics, and other materials, positioned within and atop resin pools.

Things to know

• First New York institutional solo exhibition by the artist.
• Film inspired by Denise Ferreira da Silva's Unpayable Debt (2022), examining coloniality and raciality from a Black feminist perspective.
• Sculptures reference Louise Bennett-Coverley's poem Colonization in Reverse and C.L.R. James on Hegel.
• Artist co-founded Sucking Salt, a project archiving Caribbean architecture and aesthetics.
• Recent exhibitions include Studio Museum in Harlem (2026) and Rachel Uffner, NY (2024).
• Lead support from Arison Art Foundation.