CPT Reversal: Black Quantum Futurism Present REDCAT Exhibition

Black Quantum Futurism, Memory Works 000 ( 2021). Collage. Image courtesy of the artists.

Multidisciplinary collaborative Black Quantum Futurism (BQF) considers new chronologies and Afrodiasporic concepts of time and sound in CPT Reversal, a new exhibition running from Nov. 6 to March 5, 2022, at REDCAT in downtown Los Angeles.

In CPT Reversal, BQF artists Camae Ayewa (Rockers!; Moor Mother) and Rasheedah Phillips (The AfroFuturist Affair; Metropolarity) ponder a “Black quantum womanist future” through a variety of collage works, film, music, writing, and creative research aiming to “develop and enact a new spatiotemporal consciousness.” More about the exhibition from the official release:

The series of work created for CPT Reversal examines time and temporality at various scales and dimensions—personal, interpersonal, communal, global, and cosmic—and their connections and reverberations. The title of the exhibition comes from the acronym commonly understood as “Colored People’s Time,” oftentimes a stereotype of Black people as chronically late, but also a cultural understanding that events and experiences do not adhere to strict schedules and linear time. In physics, the same three letters stand for “charge, parity, and time reversal,” a fundamental symmetry of laws that holds for all physical phenomena.

Exhibition works include an assortment of clocks from the series Dismantling the Master’s Clocks (2015-21), a three-channel film Write No History (2021), and a soundscape. The latter is a recording of discussions between the artists and scientists from Spain and Switzerland during BQF’s Collide Residency at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). The CPT Reversal exhibition is part of the collective’s long-term research project with CERN, titled CPT Symmetry and Violations.

BQF Collective investigates preservation of communal memories, histories, and stories, and seeks to employ creative and holistic healing methods in order to transform negative cycles into positive ones. The collective is a 2016 A Blade of Grass Fellow, 2015 artist-in-residence at West Philadelphia Neighborhood Time Exchange, and had their experimental short “Black Bodies as Conductors of Gravity” premiere at the 2015 Afrofuturism Now! Festival in Rotterdam.