Black Fire! by Thandi Loewenson

Black Fire! by Thandi Loewenson examines the intersecting geographies of race and the alien imagination, spanning from colonial captivity narratives to the anxious frontiers of settler colonialism across Zimbabwe. In her longstanding research, Loewenson traces the figure of the alien through meticulously indexed and archived sighting histories. Together these archives expose UFO mythology as an uncanny continuation of colonial history, and an expression of alternative cosmologies emerging from Indigenous knowledge and worldviews.

Through speculative fabulation composed of projection and shadow, archival recontextualizing, and sonic reimagining, Black Fire! takes its title from Michael Raeburn’s book by the same name. Loewenson uses the encounter with the extraterrestrial as a lens to orient the persistence of racial anxiety in and beyond the colonial world. The exhibition draws from the Archives for the Unexplained in Sweden, Zimbabwe’s National Archives in Harare, and several publications by Africa’s former lead UFOlogist, Cynthia Hind, including UFOs: African encounters (1982), UFOs over Africa (1997), and UFO Afrinews (1988–2000). Hind often encouraged witnesses to draw what they had seen, and fragments of these drawings, alongside sighting accounts from across the region, are reanimated in the space through ghostly projections in red light and shadow. The immersive installation frames the alien as both a legal and imaginative instrument—one that has shaped the human and its borders, and in doing so, unsettles fixed categories.

A series of events will activate the exhibition. A performance by Loewenson and Zimbabwean author Tinashe Mushakavanhu will expand on the work by reframing the gallery as a darkroom studio, spilling onto the street and culminating in an open mic night of otherworldly encounters, destabilizing the threshold between inside and outside. Intimate listening sessions with Mhoze Chikowero, Shana L. Redmond, and Zoé Samudzi will serve to further ground and untether the research. A child-centric workshop will reimagine the gallery as a printing machine, taking the child seriously as a narrator of the impossible.

Spooky Action: Child-Focused Shadow Workshop
Saturday, April 25, 2–4 pm
Drawing on Black Fire!’s connection to light, shadow, and imagination, join us for a child-focused, hands-on shadow puppet workshop. Participants will use scrap materials and simple assembly techniques to create their own shadow puppets and bring them to life through a light projection. After the workshop, participants will build short shadow performances exploring the boundaries between fiction and collective narratives.

Monstrous, Malodorous, Otherworldly: Listening Session with Mhoze Chikowero, Shana L. Redmond, and Zoé Samudzi
Tuesday, April 28, 6:30–8 pm
Explore sonic archives and radical alternate imaginaries through vinyl, audio recordings, and soundscapes in a listening session withMhoze Chikowero, Shana L. Redmond, and Zoé Samudzi. The evening will open with a guided introduction before giving way to a call-and-response exchange between the two hosts, who each bring distinct practices rooted in sound, memory, and speculative world-making. Part conversation, part back-to-back set, the session invites audiences into an intimate encounter with the otherworldly frequencies embedded in archival and experimental sound.

Darkroom: Performance and Open Mic with Tinashe Mushakavanhu
Thursday, April 30, 6–8 pm
Partake in a performance and live publishing event that reframes the gallery as a darkroom studio. Thandi Loewenson and Zimbabwean author Tinashe Mushakavanhu transform the space into a site of literary production with readings, live acts of making, and copies produced in the space for one night only. The evening will spill onto the street and culminate in an open mic night of otherworldly encounters.

Thandi Loewenson is an architectural designer/researcher who mobilizes design, fiction and performance to stoke embers of emancipatory political thought and fires of collective action, and to feel for the contours of other, possible worlds. Using fiction as a design tool and tactic, and operating in the overlapping realms of the weird, the tender, the earthly and the airborne, Thandi engages in projects which provoke questioning of the status-quo, whilst working with communities, policy makers, unions, artists and architects towards acting on those provocations.

Black Fire! is the third in a series of exhibitions under the theme of Homelands. Homelands is a long-term research cycle which delves into the political dimensions of memory—examining what is obscured or distorted in the dominant record—through the work of artists and architects who unmake and remake their connection to place.

Homelands is made possible with support from the Mellon Foundation, Teiger Foundation, the Brendan & Helen Bechtel Foundation, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Ruth Arts Foundation and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation; public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; and the invaluable generosity of Storefront’s Board of Directors, the Storefront Circle, Storefront members, and individual donors.