This year, the Slaughterhouse Project on Hydra will feature Until That Day, an exhibition by Nari Ward (b. 1963, St. Andrew, Jamaica; lives and works in New York), who is renowned for his sculptural installations composed of discarded material found and collected in his neighborhood. By re-contextualizing these found objects, Ward creates thought-provoking juxtapositions that address social and political issues surrounding race, poverty, and consumer culture.
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Until That Day speaks to the condition of migration as a defining reality of the modern world. Across borders and generations, immigrants and displaced people carry with them memory, labor, language, music, and tradition, reshaping the cultures and societies they enter even as they are too often met with suspicion, exclusion, or invisibility. Their movement is frequently born from necessity, war, economic hardship, political instability, environmental collapse, or the enduring aftermath of colonial histories, yet their presence continually renews the social and cultural fabric of nations worldwide. For the exhibition at the Slaughterhouse, I invited Aggelos Aggelou, a singer whose music reflects the storied traditions of the Greek folk genre rebetika—as well as other Afro-Greek musicians to perform a response to the 1963 address by His Majesty Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia, to the United Nations, a speech in which he pleads for global cooperation between nations, where he called for international solidarity and warned that peace could never truly exist while inequality and racial injustice persist. His refrain, “until that day,” speaks not only to one historical moment, but to an ongoing global condition: the unfulfilled promise of human equality across borders, races, and nations.
The immigrant exists in every nation as both witness and builder, carrying histories that connect one place to another. Their stories remind us that migration is not an exception to human history, but one of its oldest and most enduring truths. Until that day when their humanity is fully recognized and embraced, their voices, labor, and songs will continue to shape the world.
—Nari Ward