zakkiyyah najeebah dumas-o’neal’s visual and critical practice is anchored by a commitment to fostering a different kind of gaze that transcends the conventional and engages with empathy, desire, love, queer identity, intimacy, illegibility, and poetics. Her work engages a more nuanced understanding of selfhood and Black femme existentialism to navigate the intricacies of belonging and aliveness across time, location, and space, engaging both the universal and the specific.
the work of devotion, and soon my whole body pulls language from two separate poetic works from prolific writer Alice Walker, to offer a unique look into zakkiyyah najeebah dumas-o’neal’s own Black femme embodiment through the lens and gaze of Black lesbian and queer selfhood, domesticity, desire, and intimacy. Much like the generated title alludes to, dumas-o’neal composes photographic images, a video montage, and audio to suggest the ways memory, being, and interiority are informed by experiences of transience, embodiment, love, and acts of retreating.
the work of devotion, and soon my whole body is reflective of the artist’s ongoing quest to utilize deeply personal interventions to encourage ways of being and feeling that reach beyond the systems and conditions imposed us – wholly embracing strategies of nonlinearity, poetics, and illegibility to arrive closer to autonomy and oneness.