Description
Adrian L. Burrell: The Saints Step in Congo Time is an ongoing archival research project in the form of a short film that documents Burrell’s family’s experiences with plantocracy and sugar production after the Louisiana Purchase. For Burrell, the math and commodification of Black life and labor is the basis of modernity. Throughout his oeuvre, Burrell examines the extractive, unjust relationship between capitalism and Blackness as well as how gratuitous violence—from state-sanctioned systems of containment to intramural conflict—circumscribes Black life. Burrell’s family’s migration from Jim Crow Louisiana to modern-day Oakland, and the powerful matriarch at the center of this vast extended family, are at the center of Burrell’s most recent work. His art is simultaneously motivated toward healing the past as well as realizing the not-yet-imagined in the present and future. Similar to his other projects, The Saints Step in Congo Time functions as a collective portrait that dispels the myth of the American Dream.
The Saints Step in Congo Time artfully spotlights how Black bodies have been used to perfect colonial systems of extraction in the past and present. These systems continue to be exported and replicated around the world. In preparation for Burrell’s first museum exhibition on the east coast, the artist worked with The Delaware Contemporary to make connections between his lineage, Delaware’s own history of sugar production, and systems of global extraction and exchange that still center around sugar. Within cycles of catastrophe, Burrell’s film creates space for collective storytelling as a means for survival and care.
January 13 – May 28, 2023
OPENING EVENT: February 4, 2023 | 5 – 9 PM
On Art: February 8, 2023 | 6:00 PM
DuPont I Gallery