Kevin Space is pleased to present a new project by Rhea Dillon organized by the Center for Experimental Lectures. 

Rhea Dillon works in sculpture, painting, performance, and poetry, using wide-ranging materials to articulate an aesthetic of diasporic Blackness grounded in nonbeing. Her charged exhibitions and writing use poetics, abstraction, and everyday objects to produce distinctive arrangements of sense and affect.

For this project at Kevin Space, Vienna, a strain of Dillon’s research coalesces into an architectural intervention. She proposes a poethical construction of Black feminist interiority, utilizing Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the “fold,” to generate an original reading. The baroque materialism of Leibniz’s pleats and manifolds are reduced to a single Black fold by Dillon, as a site for imagining interiority and selfhood outside the framework and logic of Western man. She writes, “In the act of folding I am able to reencounter myself from a refracted angle. A new feeling made from the past, present and future.” The Black Fold is an essay that takes the form of an exhibition.

Dillon’s first institutional solo exhibition 'An Alterable Terrain' opened at Tate Britain in May as part of the Art Now series. Recent exhibitions include 'We looked for eyes creased with concern, but saw only veils' at Sweetwater, Berlin (2023); 'The Sombre Majesty (or, on being the pronounced dead)' at Soft Opening, London (2022); 'Real Corporeal' at Gladstone Gallery, New York (2022); 'Love' at Bold Tendencies, London (2022); an online screening at The Kitchen, New York (2022); Drawing a Blank curated by Ben Broome, London (2022); 'Janus' at Soft Opening, London (2021); 'Pressing' at Division of Labour, Salford (2021); 'Dishwater and No Images' as part of Distant Peak at Peak Gallery, London (2020); 'No Man is an Island' at Almine Rech, London (2020) and 'Uchronia et Uchromia' online at External Pages (2020). She was an artist in residence at Triangle - Astérides, Marseille and previously at V.O. Curations, London, which culminated in a solo exhibition, 'Nonbody Nonthing No Thing' and the publishing of poetry chapbook, 'Donald Dahmer' (both 2021). The artist presented 'Catgut – The Opera' as part of Park Nights 2021 at the Serpentine Pavilion, a publication of the same title was recently released by Worms Publishing and launched at the ICA London. 

The Center for Experimental Lectures is an artist project based in New York that engages with the public lecture as form. Initiated by Gordon Hall in 2011, and co-organized with Zoey Lubitz since 2016, the Center for Experimental Lectures has commissioned 48 new lectures at venues including Recess, MoMA PS1, The Shandaken Project at Storm King, Interstate Projects, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Artists Space, the Rhode Island School of Design and RISD Museum, Kunsthaus Glarus, and at the Whitney Museum of American Art presenting   Seminars with Artists in conjunction with the 2014 Whitney Biennial. An archive of past commissions, including video and written transcripts, can be found online at our website.