There is an undeniable heaviness to 2025. In her video work “What is Burden” (2025), artist Hannah Bang explores this weight. Projected onto the final drawing, the four-hour piece captures the performer in the process of making it, continuing even as the paper gradually tears, playing with ideas of temporality and flux. How can art help us navigate the difficult changes of 2025?
In Re:Turning, the Parsons Fine Arts MFA show curated by P! Krishnamurthy, students like Bang try their hand. The resulting artworks don’t point out the obvious, nor offer explicit political critique, as much as they gesture towards strategies to bear the flux, to mourn it, to process it, and maybe find an emotional center to keep coming back to.
Andrew Samuel Harrison, for instance, creates sculptures that play with gravity. In “Hypervisibility: Systems of Support 5” (2024–25), a concrete slab leans precariously but stably against the wall. It demands a double-take from a viewer — is that safe, or is it about to fall? — cleverly finding an unexpected center. The lean takes on new layers of meaning for Harrison as an artist navigating a congenital asymmetry between his left and right sides caused by Poland Syndrome, echoing the incongruous equilibrium found in many of his works.
Sumaiya Saiyed offers a kinetic sculpture in which braided hair repeatedly twists upwards only to fall back down again. “I wanted to look at hair as a commodity and how it’s violently extracted from the body in Pakistan and Southeast Asia,” Saiyed told Hyperallergic. The global wig trade underpays these women for their hair, upcharges the end consumer in a rich country, and greedily pockets the difference. The kinetic sculpture darkly alludes to how capitalists keep coming back to exploit the new hair growth. It also plays with the flux of the braid repeatedly reaching its breakpoint and falling.
Yeabsera Tab’s “still we are water” (2023–25) combines ceramic coffee cups she made by hand and scattered across the gallery floor with a projected video of a performance in which she sows chickpea and coffee hulls while speaking to relatives about growing up in a small neighborhood in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, perhaps alluding to the importance of gatherings in the maintenance of a community’s memory.
In accordance with such ideas, during her April 13 event at the gallery, Tabb created a “coffee circle” around her installation, pouring the drink and facilitating a conversation in the Ethiopian coffee tradition. It is customary within this convention to brew larger quantities and invite neighbors and the wider community, with different families hosting the morning, afternoon, and evening coffee hours in rural areas. Tabb offers this shared ritual, which bridges differences between Ethiopia’s multi-ethnic communities and syncopates the rhythm of daily work with moments of rest and connection, as a way to weather the flux.
The old Ethiopian proverb “The same water never runs into the same river” suggests that change is as inevitable as it is natural. This year feels quite unnatural so far, but ethical judgments aside, the deeper question is about how we can relate to major shifts beyond our control. As this thought-provoking exhibition suggests, it may well be our attitudes toward flux that can make or break our year.
Re:Turning, the Parsons Fine Arts 2025 MFA Thesis Exhibition, continues at Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery on the first floor of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at The New School (2 West 13th Street, Greenwich Village, Manhattan) through April 19th. The exhibition was curated by P! Krishnamurthy.
