Tanika I. Williams
T. I. Williams (she/her) is an African-Jamaican writer, video, and performance artist. She investigates Black women’s use of movement, mothering, and medicine to produce and pass on their ancestral wisdom of ecology, spirituality, and liberation. Williams holds a B.A. from the New School Eugene Lang College at The New School, and an M.Div. from Union Theological Seminary. Tanika has been awarded residencies at New York Foundation for the Arts and BRIC. Additionally, she has been featured on 99.5 WBAI; in Art in Odd Places; Creative Time; Civic Art Lab, GreenspaceNYC; Let Us Eat Local, Just Food; and Performa.
During her time as a CRITICAL BREAKS Artist in Residence, Tanika plans to work on the development of PRESSING. PRESSING is a performance centering on an archival recorded interview between a matriarch and her great-granddaughter in order to illustrate, and disrupt, the generational cycle of family separation and its residual trauma. Using projected video and the performance of chores as everyday acts of care, PRESSING seeks to understand how we wear and repeat family patterns of silence and separation. The work speaks to the experience of migration—moving from country to town, across countries, across towns—and seeks to present the pain around the unspoken suffering experienced during the separation of caregiver and their charge.
Still from Songs of Ascent presented at Chinatown Soup;
Image credit: Duane X. Garay
