Brooklyn J. Pakathi: Closer Still

Closer Still presents a new body of work shaped around longing at its most vulnerable. The title speaks as both a command and a confession, holding together an urge to remain near and the uncertainty that such closeness entails. The exhibition turns to that precarious interval where relation takes shape and where feeling acquires form through measure and clarity.

Brooklyn J. Pakathi pursues a language that values economy and exactness, aiming for an expression that arrives through conceptual rigor. Here, the artist investigates nearness as a lived condition, examining how closeness organizes perception and time, requests patience, and alters the very pace of looking and listening. The exhibition advances a position that intimacy requires careful orientation and that this orientation can be composed with attentiveness and care.

Closer Still offers an account of love that privileges attention, recognition, and measure. The exhibition composes nearness as a living practice and affirms that desire endures through the ways we look, the ways we wait, and the ways we remain.

The exhibition is accompanied by a public program that translates its conceptual concerns into collective, bodily practices. The workshops, led by Tayla Myree, Samo Zeichen, Bilal Alame, and Bita Bell, create shared time for hesitation, approach, and articulation. Through poetry, sound, mapping, and movement, they offer methods to practice orientation, to give form to personal geographies, and to make the discipline of tenderness a communal exercise. The program concludes with a finissage hosted by Marissa Lôbo, a final soft gathering that honors the ways we sustain proximity.

Brooklyn J. Pakathi is a media artist with an ongoing studio practice in Vienna.

Much of their most recent work concerns itself with the language and materiality of emotion. Sentimental longing, melancholy, and various other configurations of intimacy affirm their practice. The Vienna-based artist constructs objects, images and virtual spaces to connect and abstract the underlying architecture of these profound and complex psychological forces.

Pakathi also works as an independent curator and cultural producer. Their curatorial work is shaped by an interest in decolonial curatorial practices and a search for alternative curatorial strategies that can be used to embed cultural equity.

Brooklyn works in actioning cultures of technology, developing inclusive and alternative definitions of the technological and using virtual space to deploy artistic practice and discourse outside of the modern colonial world system.