The Best is Yet to Come
October 2020
Fabrics, thread, coins, cowrie shells
9’10” x 10’8” x 7’3”
The Best is Yet to Come is a textile collage installation about real estate speculation, gentrification and displacement, racial policing, and social control. The installation forms a layered, diagrammatic neighborhood map of the current encroachment and pressures of luxury real estate as an example of racial capitalism.
A proliferation of luxury developments hints at the possible near-future of Crown Heights as a proto-hyper-gentrified neighborhood which soon might follow the course of Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Policing and social control both protect developers, property owners, and their investments, as well as encourage and pave the way for a primed territory where future real estate investments are safe and promising. Potential investment returns have a spillover value transmitted to properties surrounding new luxury developments which inevitably infuse the often-fraught relationships between landowners and tenants. In addition, racial policing ensures that people are not permitted to live and exist outside of the housing market. In effect, the police serve and protect primarily white business and property interests that further gentrification and displacement and embody a fundamental form of racial capitalism.
A tapestry-like and carpet-like collage enmeshes patterns inspired by traditional garments of Yemeni Jews with the burgeoning luxury real estate space economy in Crown Heights.
My transnational lived experience as an Arab Jew of color of Yemeni descent born in Brooklyn and coming of age in the hegemonic Israeli society dominated by European Jews shaped my identity and subjectivity. As a second or third class citizen in Israel, and by being racialized in the US as a person of color, I relate to and identify with the indignation and struggles for equality, equity, and liberation of melanated people in NYC and across the world.
The title The Best is Yet to Come evokes the orthodox urban planning dictate of "the highest and best use" of land, recalls a loudly projected speech conclusion from the 2020 Republican National Convention, expresses concern about the future of Crown Heights, and warns of the current trend in the housing market throughout NYC.
Condo Conundrum
August 2019
Steel, drinking cans, aluminum, copper wire, Plexiglas, flooring, paint
24 tent-assemblages, each 18 x 32 x 32 inches
FiveMyles Exhibition and Performance Space, Brooklyn, NY
Condo Conundrum is a mixed-media sculpture-installation that composes a place to reflect on mass homelessness, on the context of the homeless in urban environments and on the relation between homelessness and pervasive luxury developments.
As a constructed place, Condo Conundrum portrays urban housing and planning dynamics, provokes thought about the complexity of these dynamics, and forms a space that is both disturbing and intriguing through its material contrast, altered scale, repetition and pattern. Condo Conundrum illustrates the intimate connection between insufficient supply of affordable housing as leading to homelessness and the prevalence of newly-built luxury-unit developments throughout New York City. According to three organizations working with unhoused persons, the primary cause of homelessness is insufficient supply of affordable housing; accordingly, all three organizations conclude that the long-term solution to mass homelessness is to create more affordable housing. We are currently in the midst of the most severe homelessness crisis since the Great Depression, 74% higher than ten years ago. By enmeshing signifiers of both homelessness and excess, Condo Conundrum engages viewers in the connectedness between mass homelessness and real estate trends.
The sculpture-installation comprises several layers. Flattened drinking cans reference can collectors across the city-- both unhoused persons and housed persons of various income levels-- who invest their time for a meager supplemental income, highlighting the income and wealth polarization and inequality in NYC where drinking cans become a currency. Thousands of drinking cans echo the recurrent theme of mass where the city is a space of mass, ubiquitous luxury developments, and simultaneously a space of mass homelessness. Parts of the tent envelopes are made of plexiglass panels framed by aluminum, recalling glass façades of high-end developments. Inside the tents, finished flooring covers the ground and signifies another real estate feature.
Fusing two diametrically opposed social conditions evokes the otherwise hidden links between homelessness and luxury, as well as implies processes in the space economy such as gentrification, displacement, vacancy and rising rents. Condo Conundrum forms an environment that generates dissonance, an experience of contradiction and an encounter of absurd juxtapositions.
Mass homelessness is a catastrophe whose persistence is a conundrum that mirrors real estate forces. Condo Conundrum meditates on vast income and wealth inequality, on capital accumulation in NYC, and on the hegemony and condition of the integral state and class power, where public and private sectors partner and operate in tandem towards mutual economic visions and goals.