Research + Events

This talk presents a selection of artworks that use visual strategies of refusal and opacity to redefine Black girls’ agency amid racialized surveillance and policing in Canada and the U.S. Inspired by the Black feminist interventions of Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation and Christina Sharpe’s wake work, de Jesús’s practice reimagines what it means to bear witness to Black life, death, and suffering while simultaneously navigating the representational paradox of engaging these images to achieve social justice. In doing so, these artworks refuse to reproduce the visual economies of anti-Black spectacle and insist on alternative ways of seeing that center care, make the embeddedness of racism legible, and reclaim the everyday as a site of radical Black girl presence.