Places & Spaces: Curated by Emann Odufu

Friedrichs Pontone is delighted to present Places & Spaces, a group exhibition curated by Emann Odufu.  Featuring works by Sarah-Mecca Abdourahman, William Buchina, Nancy Baker Cahill, Edgar Cano, William Corwin, Delano Dunn, Simon Fernandes, Ivan Forde, Tomokazu Matsuyama, Suchitra Mattai, Maliyamungu Muhande, Chelsea Odufu, Dennis Osadebe, Umar Rashid, Laurie Simmons, Pap Souleye, Sergio Suarez, Kiyomi Quinn Taylor, Chester Toye, and Yatreda.

Places & Spaces will open on September 5, 2025, and will close on September 28, 2025. The opening reception will be on September 5, 2025, from 6 pm - 8 pm. The exhibition is located at the gallery’s flagship location at 273 Church Street in New York City.

Curatorial Statement by Emann Odufu:

 In 1974, Sun Ra famously declared “Space is the Place,” channeling cosmic philosophy and sonic mythmaking to imagine liberatory worlds beyond the confines of history. Years earlier, Guy Debord coined the term psychogeography as a framework for decoding how environments, urban and natural, visible and invisible, shape human behavior, emotion, and perception. These radical ideas inform Places & Spaces, an exhibition that treats space not as passive backdrop, but as an active medium: charged, constructed, and contested.

This exhibition brings together artists working across painting, sculpture, photography, textile, video, interactive installation, and game design. Through layered material processes—stitching, coding, building, etc. —they challenge the assumed boundaries of space, both physical and psychological. Fabric becomes architectural building blocks. Code becomes terrain. Video becomes sculpture. Shapes, colors, and emotions become three dimensional.

A central preoccupation of the exhibition is the idea of nested realities: spaces within spaces, histories within images, identities within avatars. One work in particular, an interactive game installation, literalizes this by creating a navigable world within a world—a digital fortress to be mapped, moved, and dismantled. But across mediums, this impulse recurs: spaces fold into themselves, echo each other, or split open under pressure.

Surrealism pulses throughout—not as an aesthetic style, but as a logic. Figures dissolve. Landscapes bend. Time loops. This surreal quality unsettles fixed narratives and allows for alternate readings of memory, ancestry, and self. Whether through miniature sets, fragmented maps, speculative portraits, or layered sound and moving image, the works conjure a dreamlike spatiality where meaning is slippery but resonant.

Throughout, the exhibition resists strict categorization. Moving images are positioned as physical presences; tactile materials are arranged as portals or screens. Embodied practices—ritual, gesture, adornment—coexist with technological ones, revealing how space is produced not just through architecture, but through language, culture, and performance.

Ultimately, Places & Spaces asks: What does it mean to build or unbuild a world? How do spaces remember us—and how do we reimagine them in return? The show becomes a shifting atlas of thresholds, ruins, soft data, and sacred zones. Here, space is not simply where the story unfolds. It is the story—and it is always in flux.