WOOL: Aria Dean

Eulogy for a Black Mass

16 september 2023 - 11 February 2024
work in collection

For the short video Eulogy for a Black Mass, the American artist Aria Dean (1993) compiled memes she found on social media. They vary from viral dances and hip-hop moves to fragments of concerts and are all products of Black culture. ‘Memes have something Black about them,’ we hear Dean say in the voice-over. The artist continues, musing aloud in an attempt to unpack where the ‘Blackness’ of the memes comes from and what that means. She describes the process by which memes – slowly but surely – take on a life of their own on the internet. How they are endlessly reused, shared, reproduced and modified. And how, in that process of transformation, they become increasingly disconnected from their Black makers. In an almost poetic fashion, Dean makes the viewer part of the vicious circle in which the memes are caught up. She also questions the ambiguous nature of the images themselves. In their pursuit of visibility, and despite their purportedly humorous intentions, the clips seem to reinforce stereotypes about Black culture.

Aria Dean is an artist, writer and curator. The relationship between digital culture, race and identity is a recurring theme in her oeuvre. Last year, De Pont acquired her sculpture GUT PUNCH/Little Island (2022), a bright-green column that seems to buckle under the force of a massive blow. With Eulogy, which was created in the period when Dean was still working at Rhizome, a digital platform for art and culture, De Pont has gained another early core work.