true names featuring Pacita Abad: YDP, London

YDP presents true names, a group exhibition that considers naming as an ethical practice that can call forth and safeguard identities while opening a space for socio-political negotiation. Bringing together artworks emerging from contexts marked by shared struggles and overlapping concerns, the exhibition explores how relations among identity, spirituality and power are mediated and regenerated.

A true name can mark a crossing between person and spirit, self and community, past and future. It may summon, bind, repair or restore passage between worlds. Yet a name may also be a wound, inviting misrepresentation and erasure. Diasporic and Indigenous communities have long histories of concealing or modifying names in response to displacement, assimilation and political violence.