David Adjaye Adam Pendleton

Originating from Pendleton’s seminal Black Dada text of 2008, the phrase “WE ARE NOT” is broken down and merged to form all-over compositions. Pendleton’s reiteration and reconfiguration of his own past language extends the dynamics of his ongoing Black Dada project, a conceptual framework through which the artist explores ideas about the future through the evocation of the past, with an emphasis on the relationship between blackness and the avant-garde. The Untitled (WE ARE NOT) paintings similarly address questions of historical and collective definition, alluding obliquely to the rhetoric of contemporary identity politics. Pendleton uses the repetition of such words to produce a kind of combinatorial patterning; what starts as “WE ARE NOT” quickly dissolves into “NOT NOT WE” and “NOT ARE WE.” These permutations, hovering on the edge of signification and meaninglessness, encode the often ambiguous, arbitrary, and fictitious logics at the heart of identity, which is often taken as self-evident.

In Adjaye’s marble pyramids, there exists another kind of layering: the way in which their surfaces register the passage of geologic time. The material of marble is formed through the long history of geologic compression, in which minerals recrystallize to form streaks and veins. These marks on the body of the stone become a kind of writing, echoing the lexical logic of Pendleton’s compositions in a radically different time scale. That Adjaye’s sculptures appear static and immovable in their heavy solidity belies the fact that each of the four constituent parts can be reconfigured to produce multiple variations, giving them a sense of dynamism and play that is itself semantic in nature. In referring to the ancient form of the Egyptian pyramid—a form that encodes an entire cultural history of technological innovation and ancient African knowledge systems—these sculptures both extend and depart from Adjaye’s broader architectural practice, in which he examines relationships formal and cultural meaning, between the canons of Classicism and the vernacular traditions of non-Western cultures.

This exhibition comes at an important juncture in both artists’ careers. This fall, Pendleton will present Who Is Queen?, a major solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Meanwhile Pendleton recently unveiled his site-specific installation, As Heavy as Sculpture, in the lobby of the New Museum in New York, which was created for the landmark exhibition Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, originally conceived by the late Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor.

Since the beginning of his career, Adjaye’s architectural practice has been informed by his interest in contemporary art. Adjaye has collaborated with visual artists in the past, including Chris Ofili with whom he created The Upper Room, a room size installation permanently on view at Tate Britain as well as Kapwani Kiwanga, with whom he created Sankofa Pavilion, a glass structure used as a space for conversation, shown as part of Whitechapel Gallery’s Is This Tomorrow? exhibition in 2019. Alongside his numerous architectural projects, Adjaye led the design of the Ghana Freedom Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, the country’s first pavilion in the Artigliere of the historic Arsenale. Among his current projects are a new design for the Edo Museum of West African Art (EMOWAA) in Benin, Nigeria, the long-awaited new home for the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Abrahamic Family House, an interfaith complex in Abu Dhabi.