Oriana Koren

The World Has Made Me The Man of My Dreams (2019) – 
digital black and white print
12 x 18 in.
$750

ARTIST STATEMENT

This is my loose interpretation of a portrait of Meshell Ndegeocello from the late 1990s.  When I fantasized about ‘looking visibly queer,’ I imagined myself as Meshell, dressed in blue jeans and a white ‘wife-beater,’ looking both tough and gentle.

This portrait was the beginning of my exploration into ideas of possession and a term I’ve been referring to as ‘vessel-ship’ as documented in Black Indigenous religious practice, particularly in Haitian vodou. When I take a self-portrait modeled after another queer Black person, where do they end and I begin? How are our bodies evidence of what we are capable of becoming? How do our trans/gressive bodies allow us to participate in the sacred act of creation and self-making?

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Oriana Koren (they/them) is a polymath artist based in Chicago. Koren’s work explores the body as a form of archival knowledge by merging language, memory, and the image as auto-fiction. Koren’s work revisits and revises one’s personal history allowing for the recreation and redemption of a self/body fractured by performances of race, gender, and sexuality in the context of societal legacies of erasure, abuse, and trauma. Informed by the theory of ‘wake-work’ as described by theorist, Christina Sharpe and ‘re- memory’ as explored by writer, Toni Morrison, Koren’s work explores revision, repatriation, reclamation, and redemption. Oriana is a 2024-2026 Chicago Artists Coalition BOLT/HATCH artist in residence and a visiting lecturer at Stonybrook University.

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© Oriana Koren