ART AS AN EXERCISE IN MOVING THROUGH GRIEF

HYPERALLERGIC
MARCH 21, 2022

“Husni Bey’s art-political environment evokes an echo chamber, especially striking since so much of what it reverberates is the anguish of silence and absence. The artist herself suggests this idea in the video [On Necessary Work, 2021], when she tells the nurses that their conversations—and the videos they shared—made her think of ‘a kind of ghost.’ She follows her comment with extreme close-ups split across three screens of a nurse’s uniform, the camera slowly traveling up until it zooms out, in a framing that suggests depersonalization, but also a pervasive, disembodied haunting. Maybe the challenge then is not to exorcise the ghost—as we might rush to do after a trauma—but to find metaphors and tangible manifestations that capture its collective ‘silent roar.’”

—Ela Bittencourt