Arts and Letters

Josiane M.H. Pozi (b. 1998; London, UK) attempts to meet experience where it is. Perhaps because so much of life now passes through screens, Pozi channels the unconscious instinct of the internet: always first person and always a disclosure that seeks to bridge distances. There is a lot of similarity between that instinct and making art. That’s why, to her, TikTok is “gorgeous,” posting is “cathartic,” and any platform where she has made and disseminated work—Instagram, Omegle, Snapchat, TikTok, Tumblr, YouTube—is a place to leave “imprints” of herself. Viewing these impressions, you encounter filmmaking that is as simple and as complex as life is.

In Pursuit of Feeling takes up that practice and presents films and videos Pozi made over the last eight years, remixed and rearranged into an installation at Arts and Letters. Seeing it requires positions that are unexpected: gazing out a window, lying prone on the floor, or hunching over a black well. These are not diversions. Rather, they are a request to participate, a request to meet Pozi where she is. “I am trying to understand or materialize something that exists outside of language,” she says, describing the impulse that first drew her to film. “I will forever be in pursuit of that.”

This exhibition, Pozi’s first institutional solo show, insists on the value of staying with what is unresolved, asking not what a story means, but what it feels like to live inside it.

Arts and Letters commissioned a short play, Good Thoughts, by Nazareth Hassan, which will accompany the exhibition as part of our Reader series. It was written in response to the films on view.

Arts and Letters will host an opening celebration for the exhibition on Saturday, March 14, from 4 to 7pm. This event is free and open to the public. All are welcome. Please let us know if you plan to attend here.

In Pursuit of Feeling is organized by Noa Wesley, Assistant Curator.

Support for this exhibition is provided by Carlos/Ishikawa, London. Special thanks to Sony Pro Audio.

Major support for contemporary exhibitions at Arts and Letters is provided by Patrick Collins.

Arts and Letters exhibitions are also made possible by the Childe Hassam Fund, Eugene Speicher Fund, and Huntington Exhibition and Museum Fund, and by members of Arts and Letters.