Borderlands: Soft Margins, Hard Truths

Featuring Metem, a 3-channel video by Nsenga Knight and curated by nico w. okoro–Founding CEO of The Building Fund–Borderlands: Soft Margins, Hard Truths dismantles the social constructs of race, space, and place, imagining an end to the living legacies of colonialism that bind the three. Featuring thirteen artists from across the Northeast, the exhibition spans both floors of the Cummings Art Galleries, inviting visitors into a multidimensional viewing experience that is at once politically charged and spiritually meditative.

Borders are often imagined as firm lines—clear divisions, demarcating one territory, identity, or ideology from another. Yet, in reality, borders are experienced as charged spaces of dual convergence and rupture, where contested identities slip, cultures clash, and histories echo. Borderlands: Soft Margins, Hard Truths reframes the concept of borders, not as a fixed boundary, but as a mutable space, shaped by social movement, cultural negotiation, and political uncertainty. These soft mar gins suggest permeability—edges that blur rather than sever, inviting cohabitation rather than enforcing closure. The artworks on view boldly dwell in this space of contradiction, a nexus of possibility and constraint, where imposed binarizations falter and humanity’s most painful truths take shape.

Through a diverse range of media—including large-scale paintings, text-based installations, hand-sewn talismans, and personal photographs—Borderlands: Soft Margins, Hard Truths uplifts the work of the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity at Connecticut College by visualizing historical wounds and gesturing toward contemporary modes of reimagining and rebuilding a fractured world. The featured artists—Ophelia Arc, Nic[o] Brierre Aziz, Alex Callender, Adger Cowans, Lewis Dérogène, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Shabez Jamal, Fidelis Jo seph, Nsenga Knight, Ron Norsworthy, Theda Sandiford, Toby Sisson, and Amanda Russhell Wallace—draw upon personal history, collective memory, and intergenerational dialogue to invite viewers into moments of embodied reckoning.

About Metem:

Knight gathered her family members at this table to have dinner with Guayanese food, to celebrate her mother’s first return to her home country Guyana after 53 years since she left in 1960. This trip also marked Knight’s first visit to Guyana. In this familial story-telling gathering, Knight and her mother led a conversion with family members about their homecoming trip. The footage captures the traditional Guyanese food, conversation, and photo sharing, with their extended, New York-based Guyanese family members.