Fly Away
photo by Freddie L. Rankin II
Fly Away is a live puppet show, co-created by Derek Fordjour and Nick Lehane as a central feature of Fordjour’s solo exhibition event, SELF MUST DIE, (Petzel Gallery November 12–December 19, 2020). SELF MUST DIE, Fordjour’s premiere solo show with the gallery, is an offering of creative labor in response to our current moment, a deeply personal and collective state of anxiety around death and hyper-visible racial violence. It examines the nature of martyrdom, vulnerabilities inherent to living in a Black body, performance of competency, and the liminal space existing between autonomy and control.
In SELF MUST DIE, Fordjour interrogates the inevitability of actual death, made more urgent by the realities of a global pandemic, and points to the aspirational death of the artist’s ego brought into focus by a burgeoning career. It is both cultural manifesto and personal declaration.