A wall to wall red carpet covers the floor, and a large curvy creme couch with a chunky knit blanket faces a massive screen which is folded down the center to about 120 degrees; a thick marble coffee table on a circular rug gives a sense of comfort and luxury. These are a few of the elements which make up the first of four immersive environments at Terence Nance’s Swarm at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (on view through July 9th, 2023). While this filmmaker’s first solo museum exhibition has a retrospective angle, looking largely at his projects from the last ten years, this first room was commissioned specifically for the ICA’s exhibit, curated by Maori Karmael Holmes. Sound, sight, and setting are all vital contributors to the experience of this video installation, not necessarily in clear or cohesive ways, rather with a nonlinear narrative that honors Black women, expands what film can be, and maps out an intuitive understanding of the power and interconnectedness of black culture.

In Swarm Part Zero, an audio track that sounds like a hoard of bees plays over a highly processed video that is projected onto adjacent screens. The video looks like crashing waves, but remains ambiguous enough to allow the mind to imagine other possibilities. Abrupt visual and audio transitions move the video along in both smooth and abrupt ways, as closely harmonizing a cappella voices changes into deep voices chanting and laughing, over a constant stream of mostly abstracted projections. The final scene cuts to a black transperson sitting on the back of a park bench, making a commentary on various drivers in pop culture, industrialization, TV, and the dispossession of black bodies. Behind the plush couch are a few arrangements of regal chairs and intimate shrines. As if pulled from someone’s living room, a side table with two framed photos of women sit in a homely arrangement on a crocheted doily. In the next corner, a black and white photo is framed and arranged with a bowl, a dried flower bouquet, and a small footstool, creating a sense of nostalgia and reverence for the every-day, and paying homage to the woman in the photograph.

In the next partitioned space, Nance has created another immersive installation: an alcove of two screens curving inward to face each other. Viewers can walk between them to occupy this space where one is enveloped and cannot step back far enough to see the entire screen. A circular seat between the two screens rotates so slowly that one might not even notice, except when seated the viewer can hear its gentle creaking. This video installation, Univitellin, is Nance’s interpretation of a tragic love story, involving the meeting of two lovers in Marseille, the murder of the female lead, and the consequential grieving of her death by her male counterpart and her mother. One screen shows the male’s perspective of the story and the other shows the female’s, playing in a loop that purports the cyclical question of what could have been if the given scenarios had been different and the male lead had been able to save his lover. By deconstructing a succinct narrative and dubbing over it with his own speculations and conjectures, Nance pays tribute to women who are victims of violence and opens up the abyss of “what if” that plagues the universal human experience of regret. He emphasizes how one seemingly inconsequential interaction can result in life or death, and highlights the temporality of these significant moments.

In the third space, Nance continues to explore the theme of looking back in a six hour loop of sketches and clips from his filmography. An amphitheater style structure provides the most traditional seating in the exhibition with headsets to listen in. Projected in an oval, vibrant watercolor drawings of nude figures animate into a playful dance accompanied by an audio commentary on the psychology of unreciprocated attraction. With a self-deprecating humor, the narrator processes the unreturned affection of a woman who “lives in another hemisphere and has most likely forgotten that [he] exist[s]”. Occasional live-action scenes from Nance’s films interrupt the colorful animations as the main character (Nance himself) makes a retrospective critique on what went wrong in the relationship. He wonders if it ever existed in the first place, and honors her by taking the burden of blame for all that went wrong. Behind the amphitheater is a metallic chain linked curtain—each link repeats the cut-out words “BLAACK MATTER”—offering a dual perspective of the amphitheater installation and the next immersive space. The lace-like curtain divides the spaces while also joining them. It’s metallic quality reflects the third film while its holes provide a partial glimpse into the fourth and last film. This sculptural adjoining of these two separate films communicates the inextricably intertwined quality of these narratives, a connection that cannot be fabricated or denied, rather that must be trusted.

Anchoring the exhibition is Swimming in Your Skin, a twenty one minute piece on the navigation from black boyhood to manhood. The enclosure contains four single velvety seats that allow viewers to sit in their own contemplative space. A grass green carpet covers the floor, and plant installations line the edges of the two screens. A reflective floor and ceiling connect the outer corners of each screen, curving out to create up to six replicas of the same image at once. At times, one screen will go dark, or project an upside-down perspective of the same scene, which then reflects right side up in the floor and ceiling, insisting on the reflective surfaces as a critical part of the image.

In the opening scene, a small group of young Black boys are in a tropical forest. They are chanting as they take turns walking toward a peer to hand off a bright yellow megaphone like a baton. A motherly figure emerges and places yellow hand prints on their backs—a mark of protection, sacred communities, and solidarity. Her active engagement with these young boys centralizes her spiritual influence, underlines her agency, and acknowledges the vital role black women play, both now and historically.

An abrupt shift from one scene to another conveys the unjust complexity and difficulty for young black boys moving from adolescence to maturity. A church service where children are awkwardly spread out references the Black Church in African American life. Men floating in pools and oceans illustrates a paralyzing uncertainty created by systemic racism. A woman moving in tandem with the sounds of a tropical forest while another woman speaks of her relationship to God and nature. This audio visual pairing justly centralizes black and brown women in the movement of Ecofeminism. A dancing child with overlaid audio of a news anchor reporting that Miami will be completely submerged by the end of the century provides a jarring reminder that the colonizing societies which are causing climate change and reporting on it will also be the ones who are able to adapt to it; This dancing child, in contrast, may be uprooted by climate change. All these juxtaposed scenes create a layered and abstracted narrative that is beautifully held together by a cohesive aesthetic of color and style. The film concludes with a disclaimer to any religious affiliations or existential claims, and restarts its loop seamlessly.

In the four dark and immersive environments of Swarm, fleeting moments, spiritual rituals, and multi-layered modes of expression come together to extend Nance’s interdisciplinary approach and challenges traditional definitions of filmmaking. Like the four legs of a relay race, the artist’s strongest players are at the beginning and end—a curatorial decision which was undoubtedly a good one. Curator Maori Karmael Holmes has skillfully arranged this collection of works, although it is challenging to see where the hand of the artist and curator differ. The exhibition has similar yet contrasting bookends: a red carpet to a green carpet, a domesticated space to a wild one, and similarly bi-folded screens in which projections fall in and out of sync. Creating both intimate shrines and monumental film installations, Nance proclaims an ideal of expansiveness that spans both personal and collective spheres. In each of his four pieces, he has deconstructed formerly cohesive narratives, and consequently provided an insight to the resounding themes that remain: black womanhood, transversal modes of expression, and the resistance by sacred communities against oppressive societal hierarchies. Nance’s installations are hard to describe, categorize or pin down; as a result, those who attend Swarm will not leave with answers, rather with an awareness of new potential, questions, and tributaries for thought. By subverting how one might expect a video installation to behave, commemorating black female figures, and mapping out an instinctive sense of black culture, Terence Nance has manifested a new kind of liberation for himself, his community, and the world at large.

Terence Nance Deconstructs Narratives & Collages with Film