From Sungi Mlengeya’s ethereal portraits to Claudia Peña Salinas’ ode to mythologies, Positions presents emerging artists whose work explores diversity, sensuality, and power

Laurie Barron

8 artists to watch in Art Basel Miami Beach’s Positions sector

Continuing to present exciting emerging artists and galleries, the Positions sector is an annual highlight for collectors and museum curators. Since 2019’s iteration, breakthrough artists including&nbsp;<a href="https://artbasel.com/catalog/artist/48301/Tau-Lewis">Tau Lewis</a> (<a href="https://artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/16901/Cooper-Cole">Cooper Cole</a>, Toronto),&nbsp;<a href="https://artbasel.com/catalog/artist/45640/Kyle-Dunn">Kyle Dunn</a> (<a href="https://artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/3351/Galerie-Maria-Bernheim">Galerie Maria Bernheim</a>, Zurich and London), and&nbsp;<a href="https://artbasel.com/catalog/artist/47553/Paul-Mpagi-Sepuya">Paul Mpagi Sepuya</a> (<a href="https://artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/17772/Document">Document</a>, Chicago) have gone on to show internationally.This year, Positions features 19 solo presentations. Exhibitors participating in the fair for the first time, such as Afriart from Kampala and Housing from New York City, join returning galleries like&nbsp;<a href="https://artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1866/Project-Native-Informant">Project Native Informant</a>, London. On view in December will be paintings, sculptures, textile works, research projects, installations, photography, and video – with many pieces developed specially for Art Basel Miami Beach. While these practices offer heterogeneous political, social, conceptual, and aesthetic perspectives, together they offer a radical and uncompromising vision of today’s art.

Sungi Mlengeya Afriart Gallery, Kampala, Uganda Self-taught Tanzanian painter Sungi Mlengeya is known for her striking portraits of women in Uganda. Placing her subjects against stark blank backgrounds, Mlengeya describes her work as providing ‘a place of calm, free and detached from social norms and restrictions, real and imagined.’ Her recent paintings put women in formations of unity and strength, their garments sometimes seamlessly melding into the background, as if the figures were floating in space. In a presentation titled 'Unsettled Minds',&nbsp;<a href="https://artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/29701/Afriart-Gallery">Afriart</a> will show four portraits of women close to Mlengeya whom she has returned to repeatedly during her career as she continues to pose important questions relating to women, equity, and freedom in East Africa.Karon Davis Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles Karon Davis’ ambitious, dramatic practice straddles the artworld and cinematic theater performance, her sometimes hyperrealistic works reclaiming misunderstood or overlooked Black histories and highlighting tender or introspective moments. For Positions, Davis will transform&nbsp;<a href="https://artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/22358/Wilding-Cran-Gallery">Wilding Cran</a>’s booth by assembling a crowd of life-size figures for viewers to navigate, emphasizing unity at a time of disjuncture. The plaster-cast sculptures will appear frozen in time, caught in that moment of reflection before a significant event in their lives, be that taking part in a protest, gathering for war, or getting married. Davis is also designing bespoke wallpaper for the space, as well as hanging pictures and placing props alongside her sculptures. The Underground Museum – the institution she founded with her late husband Noah Davis in Arlington Heights, Los Angeles, to support Black artists – will reopen in 2022.

Lewis Hammond Arcadia Missa, London Intentionally rendered in shadowy tones, Lewis Hammond’s eerie and transgressive paintings play with the symbiotic relationship between representation and violence, synthesizing the symbolism of William Blake with the color palettes of John Martin and Goya. Some works include unsettling imagery – flames and quasi-human satyr-like figures – while others spotlight tender moments, as glistening bodies caress one another. For Positions,&nbsp;<a href="https://artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/4854/Arcadia-Missa">Arcadia Missa</a> will present new works set within a desolate installation networked with spiking bronze hawthorn branches, that – like thorns – recur as a haunting device in many of the artist’s works. Titled 'Safe Haus', this presentation continues the artist’s dive into Black subjectivity and disrupted states of mind in a time of hyper-globalization and climate and health crises. Hammond reimagines and juxtaposes references from across art history – from Old Masters painting to Surrealism and ancient artifacts.Maya Stovall Reyes Finn, Detroit Best known for performances such as ballet dancing outside liquor stores in her native Detroit, Maya Stovall has developed an anthropological practice that seeks to uncover clouded American histories that often misrepresent the realities of social and racial injustice. ‘There has yet to be a reckoning where the US government, history books, popular narratives, etc., reflect reality,’ Stovall said in The New York Times last year. Reyes Finn’s Positions presentation will be '1526 (NASDAQ: FAANG)', an ongoing series of neon works by Stovall that literally bring to light data, information, and calendar dates relating to events of ongoing sociopolitical significance in US history. Previous works in the series have commemorated landmark ruptures, such as a petition in 1661 to abolish human trafficking and genocide; Adrian Piper's radical contribution to conceptual art in the late 1960s; and the long-running Detroit water shutoff crisis that started raging in 2014.

Claudia Peña Salinas Curro, Guadalajara, Mexico Encompassing installation, painting, photography, publications, sculpture, and video, Claudia Peña Salinas’ multifaceted practice responds to the heritage of her native Mexico, drawing reference from powerful phenomena including Indigenous Mayan architecture, Modernist art, and ancient mythology. Devised as a holistic response to the sensual principle of atli temoayan – translated as ‘stream of water, downwards,’ a term found in the first Nahuatl-Spanish dictionary –&nbsp;<a href="https://artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/2568/Curro">Curro</a>’s booth will feature hanging brass, cotton thread, and Plexiglas to create a waterfall effect. Like a Japanese shoji screen – a movable, translucent, and ethereal room divider – Peña Salinas’ installation will function as a portal for reimagining the mythological associations of water as a sacred and feminine deity, at a time when crises relating to water and access are a contemporary reality.Mariana Manhães <a href="https://artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/17776/Central-Galeria">Central Galeria</a>, São Paulo, Brazil PIPA Prize nominee Mariana Manhães contrasts organic and man-made materials in interdependent, fragile, seemingly post-human arrangements to ask deconstructionist questions regarding the capacity of language to convey meaning. Manhães’ complex installation – or ‘macrocosm’ – creates an interconnected biome from unfired clay, plaster, and mechanical systems responding to a video animation. Her work departs from a critical stance on anthropocentric thinking and accepted ‘essential truths.’ By embracing the vulnerabilities of rational language, she invites viewers to unlearn conventions and imagine their own nonverbal way to understand the relationships between art, technology, and ecology.

Soshiro Matsubara Union Pacific, London 'Golden Sorrow',&nbsp;<a href="https://artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/20803/Union-Pacific">Union Pacific</a>’s presentation of Soshiro Matsubara in the Positions sector, will feature his&nbsp;expansive installations, which often depart from the manifestations and tragedies of storied romantic partnerships. Here, he will memorialize and reinvigorate the symbiotic love affair between the Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka and composer and author Alma Mahler. Matsubara is known for creating surrealist, anthropomorphic glazed ceramics and lighting installations, usually presenting them in faux-domestic and fragmentary settings that, like stage sets, serve as fictional replicas of moments lost in time. Inviting visitors to be voyeurs looking into a private and bourgeois residence, 'Golden Sorrow' will include oil paintings, a ceramic relief, a dyed rug, and a circular light shade.Arlene Wandera Housing, New York City Arlene Wandera’s sculptural works are constructed from discarded materials that have been subjected to burning, recycling, and joinery to create playful yet tentative totemic objects. Her practice addresses the diasporic interplay between local sociocultural concerns and global shared experiences, the interstitial area between her Kenyan heritage and western life (in 2017, she represented Kenya at the Venice Biennale). K.J. Freeman founded&nbsp;<a href="https://artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/29402/Housing">Housing</a> to challenge white patriarchal systems in the arts and beyond; the gallery’s Positions presentation, 'Nothing to Declare', includes new sculptures by Wandera that pay tribute to Black figures such as the artist Jennie C. Jones and musicians Julius Eastman and Sonny Sharrock. Works on view have been treated using the Japanese wood-preservation practice yakisugi, through which the pieces are charred, giving them water- and fire-resistant properties.Art Basel in Miami Beach runs December 2–4, 2021. Discover all galleries participating in this year's Positions sector&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/miami-beach/exhibitors#64613https://www.artbasel.com/miami-beach/exhibitors#64613">here</a>.Top image, desktop version: Soshiro Matsubara, kiss VII (detail), 2018.&nbsp;Courtesy of the artist, Croy Nielsen, Vienna,&nbsp;Union Pacific, London, and&nbsp;Schiefe Zähne, Berlin.&nbsp;Top image, mobile version: Lewis Hammond,&nbsp;Chimezie (rising and falling with the current) (detail), 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Arcadia Missa, London. Photo by&nbsp;Gunter Lepowski.

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Positions Sector in Miami Beach

From Sungi Mlengeya’s ethereal portraits to Claudia Peña Salinas’ ode to mythologies, Positions presents emerging artists whose work explores diversity, sensuality, and power

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