Physical, remembered, or imagined, portals allow us to revisit the connections that tether us to each other. The door to the Level 2 Gallery at The Shed marks the first portal of this exhibition, welcoming visitors to the multidimensional world created by 12 artists’ projects selected as part of Open Call’s fourth edition. Poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant’s concept of mondialité, or “worldmentality,” guides the connections between artists in this exhibition by introducing a vision of global belonging rooted in relation, difference, and poetic entanglement—a vision of a world shaped not by sameness but by the unpredictable interplay of differences, instead of the national boundaries and fixed identities that typically divide us.¹

The works in the exhibition inhabit thresholds where histories of migration, colonialism, and spirituality converge. Across installation, film, sculpture, painting, sound, and performance, the artists offer layered meditations on displacement, memory, and belonging. They reveal portals not merely as physical passages but as sites of transformation, imagination, and return. While confronting the lasting impacts of colonial extraction, migration, and environmental instability, this exhibition gathers artists who engage with histories and rhythms of cultural inheritance, including beliefs, traditions, knowledge, skills, and material objects. The portals and realms created in the exhibition open passageways between past and present, memory and material, displacement and belonging, representing a constellation of interrelated yet irreducibly distinct identities, each contributing to a dynamic, shared humanity.

The Door of No Return, located at Cape Coast Castle and Elmina Castle in Ghana, was the name given to the final exit points for enslaved Africans leaving their continent during the transatlantic slave trade. At these castles, enslaved Africans were held before being shipped to the Americas. Historically, for people in the African diaspora, the door has represented a permanent severance from their homeland, embodying the loss and dis-placement that is part of the enduring impact of slavery. Yelaine Rodriguez and Luis Vasquez La Roche’s Residence Time | The Sea Is History excavates this rupture through a mixed-media sculptural installation that reimagines the Door of No Return as an archaeological ruin (and not as a marker of a singular moment of departure) that holds the sediment of history and survival.²

“One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes,” writes poet Dionne Brand in her own book A Map to the Door of No Return, a hybrid work of memoir, history, and theory. “History is already seated in the chair in the empty room when one arrives.”³ The door, for Brand, marks a fracture in time and space—a place where the past is both lost and carried forward, endlessly revisited. Brand’s notion is a contemporary reassessment of Afro-syncretic knowledge and concepts of architectural and ancestral memory. Similarly, Rodriguez and La Roche’s work is a powerful symbol of the diaspora’s collective memory and an offering to the Yoruban orisha Yemayá, ruler over the seas, mother, goddess of the home, fertility, love, and family. The installation’s door is a portal for the retrieval of ancestral memory, African cultural influences, and Afro-spiritual practices found in Latinx communities.

Tropical Limerence by Patricia Encarnación layers video and ceramics to meditate on love, power, and exoticism. Psychologist and philosopher of science Dorothy Tennov coined the term “limerence” in the 1970s, describing it as a kind of obsessive infatuation, “an uncontrollable, biologically determined, inherently irrational, instinct-like reaction.” Drawing on Tennov’s theory, Encarnación complicates this idea with postcolonial historical weight. She expands the understanding of limerence to be no longer only about love, but also power, projection, and dominance. In Tropical Limerence infatuation reveals itself to be a colonizing impulse, one that exoticizes the desired other and possesses the infatuated under the guise of affection.

Encarnación’s work becomes a site of reclamation, shifting the gaze of commodified images of desire, tropical aesthetics, and material culture to highlight the stories of women and men who have suffered under patriarchal systems. The film and ceramic installation explores the spiritual and psychological violence that comes with being seen as “tropical”: vibrant, erotic, consumable. The “tropical” here does not refer to a specific place or ecosystem, but to an illusion fabricated from centuries of colonial desire and economic exploitation. The personal histories captured in the installation’s film reveal perspectives on Caribbean objects like machetes, shells, landscapes, and bodies that are rooted in the nuances of tropical aesthetics in order to subvert them. Through Encarnación’s work the limerent subject occupies a third space of reclamation through dialogues between personal and communal histories.

Mel Corchado’s cast-sugar garments embody Borinquen’s (Puerto Rico) colonial history, the exploitation of its land and labor. $TICKY $IN$ uses sugar, the refined product of sugarcane, the cash crop of Borinquen’s slave plantation system, as a material vessel of transformation. Corchado’s collection of sugar garments creates a world in which fashion design might confront narratives of identity and shift political consciousness in service of decolonization. The artist explores the ties of Borinquen’s garment manufacturing industry to US defense contracts, reflecting a dependency on the United States as a colonial entity. The organic, viscous, malleable nature of the material evokes the degradability of land, bodies, and resources within the fashion industry’s imperialist, extraction-driven production practices. Corchado molds the sugar to take the intimate shape of the human body, crystallizing the connections between the commodity’s colonial past and its ties to identity and desire.

The sugar garments are not only malleable but tantalizingly opaque. Glissant, in Poetics of Relation, proposes a notion of “opacity” as a necessary right, an insistence that identities shaped by colonialism and diaspora cannot be fully known or reduced by this history that often cuts one off from traditions and origins, as with the kidnapped Africans forced to pass through the Door of No Return in the transatlantic slave trade. Out of this fractured history, Glissant writes, “Opacity is the force that drives us to create, to imagine, to relate.”⁴ This right to opacity ripples through Corchado’s $TICKY $IN$, where sugar becomes a second skin.The opacity of the garments’ caramelized and darkened melted sugar stands in for the unseen bodies exploited by colonialism in its historical production.

Chelsea Odufu’s Gold with a Mind of Its Own also confronts the extractive violence of colonialism. In this experimental film installation, Odufu uses dance and movement to trace the haunting residues of gold extraction in Côte d’Ivoire. She links the movements of American and African Black dance and the exploitative labor of gold mining as two distinct yet interconnected sites of colonial extraction and erasure in her work.In recent years, Côte d’Ivoire, plundered by the French and other European powers in the colonial era, has turned to a private gold mining sector in the hopes of diversifying its economy, which in 2017, according to the IMF, had Africa’s fastest growing economy.⁵ Gold is now the most exploited mineral in Côte d’Ivoire. The gold-colored industrial chains and gold mining axes in Odufu’s installation serve as reminders of the bodily violence associated with the wealth and glamour the material brings especially within Black cultural aesthetics. In the film, Odufu also centers a doorframe in the central space of the image, which marks a crossroads between realms, connecting the spiritual and physical worlds in Afro-diasporic traditions.

Across diasporas, cultural traditions create bridges between places and times and offer alternative modes of communication. Jarrett Key’s Hair Painting No. 40 (in three parts) consists of a multimedia installation that documents a live performance in their “Hair Paintings” series.Inspired by oral history traditions that pass on knowledge outside of traditional modes of literacy, Key uses their hair as a paintbrush and their body as a tool to develop a visual language for the transmission of knowledge.In doing so, Key honors their grandmother, Ruth Mae Giles, who couldn’t read, and her wisdom, which the paintings impart. Key creates this new visual language by transforming the English alphabet through gestures, symbols, and cultural references to notions of lineage and love.

Key first devises a system that subverts the English alphabet, translating letters into Black vernacular words or phrases: A corresponds to “amen,” B to “baby,” C to “chirun,” etc. These letters are then transformed into corresponding gestures that Key makes in painting. The expressive gestures convey an archive of family stories, research on Black folklore that Key carried out in the Library of Congress, and references to gospel songs.In creating these works, Key carries their deceased grandmother’s memory with them, remembering her singing “your hair is your strength” during their youth in rural Alabama. The “Hair Paintings” series calls up an ancestral portal, a record of memory, and a place of innovation and reimagination.

Where the emotional becomes inseparable from the geopolitical, Marwa Eltahir delves into love, grief, and desire as sites of personal and collective reckoning. Her immersive, audiovisual performance installation, 99 Names: My Liberation Is Tied to Yours, examines these themes using imagery from the Afro-Arab diaspora. Centering queer narratives in her writing, visuals, and performance, Eltahir troubles traditional structures of Muslim and Nubian cosmologies— confronting patriarchal hierarchies, cherishing sisterly bonds, and tapping into spirituality as a connecting force. The work centers Islamic imagery as points of departure for the audience, referencing the ritual of calling on the 99 names of Allah during prayers, supplications, and celebrations of remembrance.

The work also invokes the mystical and embodied cosmologies of the contemporary Sudanese diaspora during Sudan’s political turmoil. Islamic prayers are confronted with diasporic and cultural traditions as Eltahir references the image of the Kandakas, the women revolutionaries of Sudan. 99 Names is inspired by the Afro-Arab sonic rituals of oral storytelling, creating a communal installation space where audiences can gather and be comforted by the kinetic stories that bind us. Storytelling is used as an act of transformation, where audiovisual worlds blur the boundaries between the personal and the political, the intimate and the structural. Eltahir uses audiovisual technologies as spiritual tools to channel ancestral knowledge through meditation, prayer, and memory.

Repetition of movement and ritual practices are captured in Zain Alam’s Meter & Light: Night, a three-channel audiovisual installation enacting the interlocking rhythms of time in nocturnal Muslim life framed in close-up, intimate portraits of whispers in the ear, hands counting off the 99 tasbih beads, a believer seated in muraqaba meditation.In an approach that inspires comparison to the traditional geometric repetition of Islamic art, Alam captures the sacred rhythms specific to life after dark when most others would be asleep. By using a nonlinear approach to encapsulate experience through sound, Alam works within the constraints of Islamic practice (no faces are depicted on screen and no instrumentation is used beyond the human voice) to create a musical choreography that allows listeners to embody the moments between sunset, prayer, and the breaking of a fast.

Meter & Light: Night is the second installment in Alam’s “Meter & Light” series, which explores a distinct sense of Islamic time, characterized by a dynamic and always intentional sense of structure, rules, and repetition.The work explores how contemporary artistic form can create or recover forgotten understandings of ritual and religion in the diaspora.Time itself dilates to form a meditative portal as Alam investigates the ways in which sound can convey the ineffable. Meter & Light: Night is a journey into the mystical life of believers who gather after dusk.

Rooting identity in cycles of language, tradition, and land, Tyson Houseman’s multimedia installation The Six Seasons refuses the flattening gaze of North America’s European colonizers. In a performance that combines projected live video feeds and small, found objects, Houseman arranges these objects at the center of an array of five video cameras.The scenes he creates using glass bowls, twigs, aluminum foil, and other everyday items are projected onto screens, transforming the small object tableaus into mountainous landscapes that represent the terrain as it moves through a natural cycle of six seasons.The performance includes an electroacoustic musical score performed live by Devon Bate and featuring lyrics sung in nēhiyawēwin (Plains Cree) by baritone vocalist Jonathon Adams (Cree-Métis).

The text, written in collaboration with Houseman’s grandfather, who speaks nēhiyawēwin, presents time as nonlinear and cyclical, emphasizing the past, present, and future need for protecting the mountains of their Indigenous nēhiyaw landscape and highlighting the emotional connection between place and time. Juxtapozed with the text written in an Indigenous language, the musicians perform in a European Baroque style. Sound and language become rituals of reclamation: the operatic performance in nēhiyawēwin reconnects to land and Indigenous knowledge systems while the Baroque-style singing subverts norms of Indigenous song and instrumentation. The Six Seasons speaks to notions of opacity within ceremony, disruptions of linear time, and the interwoven relations between humans and their ecologies. Houseman creates a live portal to link Indigenous cosmological teachings passed on by elders about time, space, and connections to the land at a critical moment of ecological crisis in human history.

Across continents and cultures, ancestral connection to the land allows artists to explore the spiritual awareness of ecological systems.AYDO’s (A young Yu and Nicholas Oh) Border Ecologies, a performance-based film and ceramic installation, explores interconnected landscapes of migration. Their work reimagines the Eastern zodiac and ancestral spirituality to address diasporic experiences and to evoke gestures of devotion, metamorphosis, and the sublime. The film features on-site documentation of both the Korean Demilitarized Zone and the US – Mexico borderland through sociopolitical, cultural, and environmental perspectives, mapping the DMZ and the US – Mexico border as twin landscapes of division and relation.

The work bridges two heavily policed landscapes, capturing their environmental precarity and violent demarcations. It also bridges the ancestral and contemporary landscapes of the artists. The sculptural environment of the installation, created by a circular formation of life-size ceramic sculptures of each entity of the Eastern zodiac with the two-channel film playing in the center, is filled with spiritual connections to create a realm that reveals the opacity of the quiet forms of life that persist in these liminal spaces, where flora, fauna, and memory refuse containment.

Laurena Finéus’s paintings and hanging textile sculpture, Together, we could have made Mountains / Ansanm nou ka fè Mòn, reimagines landscapes across time and space. In January 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, displacing tens of thousands of people north of the capital to a mountainous region of about three square miles that was declared public domain as an alternative to shelters. An independent, community-led city emerged in this remote locale that before the earthquake had been a place people went to pray. It offered a quiet reprieve from the city, a place to be alone in nature. They referred to it as Canaan, the name of the holy land where Moses led the Israelites out of slavery.

The story of this contemporary Canaan evokes the memory of maroon communities formed by formerly enslaved people who had escaped to live freely in similarly remote areas. Finéus represents the recent and distant history of Black geographies, maroon thought, and migration in her hanging textile sculpture. The work highlights Brooklyn’s Haitian migrant stories by building new mountains out of stories of displacement. The hanging sculpture made collaboratively with migrants in New York City uses naturally dyed textiles and ceramic seeds of Haitian plants to transform fragile materials into vessels of memory and resilience, conveying the dreams, sacrifices, misconceptions, and collective scars of the migrant experience. The portal opened by Finéus’s paintings and sculpture connects two realities: Canaan in Haiti and Brooklyn in New York City.

Painted wooden kites float above the landscape, defying gravity but also carrying the weight of immigrant stories, in Lily Honglei’s KITES: A Poem by an Immigrant. The painting series is inspired by traditional Chinese kites and visual traditions updated to depict the urban landscape of Chinese immigrants living in Flushing, Queens. Wood panels are hand-cut in various shapes, such as a bird, butterfly, dragonfly, moon, or cloud, which are popular motifs of East Asian kites.Inspired by their cultural heritage, the duo’s work highlights the Asian diaspora, especially working-class Asian immigrant experiences and history reflecting the artists’ family sagas and community life. Through a contemporary visual art language, Lily Honglei creates images that honor the immigrant worker, from depictions of work on the railroads, which first brought Chinese immigrants to the United States, to present-day food delivery drivers. The floating images Lily Honglei creates coalesce into a celestial installation that captures the dreams and losses borne across generations and borders.

In Elevar La Cultura NYC, Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez pays homage to immigrant street vendors by transforming coolers into a neo-Mayan pyramid, embodying both ancestral knowledge and contemporary resilience.Utilitarian ice coolers become a towering 20-foot-tall pyramid, elevating a tool of everyday labor into a sacred material for an ancestral monument. Textiles from various immigrant communities in New York City and spiritual objects fill the coolers, and the work is activated by a mural of an Indigenous woman looking towards the heavens that honors the beauty and resilience of immigrant street vendors. The use of fabrics of mixed heritage from South and Central America and Haiti, as well as mud cloths from different parts of Africa, represents a diaspora of people that have much in common, not least their resilience. The open-faced coolers also contain ceramics, prayer hands, candles, healing stones, and flowers—objects that bring people together to celebrate each other. Marka27’s immersive sculptural installation merges Indigenous traditions with urban energy to mark a site of offering. Placed in the center of The Shed’s outdoor Plaza, Elevar La Cultura NYC opens a portal to the public, allowing the people of the city to enter the artistic worlds created in the exhibition. The work connects the everyday life of the city and the artistic realms imagined by the artists. It extends an open invitation to The Shed to discover the diverse, yet interconnected artistic realms of New York City.

Across these projects, the figure of the portal emerges not merely as a site of passage. Yelaine Rodriguez and Luis Vasquez la Roche, Patricia Encarnación, Mel Corchado, and Chelsea Odufu confront the lasting impact of colonial extraction. Ancestors and traditions are revisited for their wisdom in the works of Jarrett Key, Marwa Eltahir, Zain Alam, and Tyson Houseman. AYDO, Laurena Finéus, Lily Honglei, and Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez explore the possibilities to be found in liminal spaces and landscapes of migration. Through sculpting, weaving, performing, and painting, these artists transform everyday materials into vessels of remembrance and resistance, creating openings between past and present, memory and material, displacement and belonging.

The exhibition embodies Glissant’s world-mentality, where no single narrative prevails and relation itself becomes the condition of possibility. These works by artists living and/or working in New York City remind us that identity, memory, and belonging are shaped not in isolation but in the unpredictable interstices of history and the present.In doing so, the exhibition Open Call: Portals subverts the typical understanding of its title. Portals open a third space where we might linger, inhabiting the forgotten and the imagined.

Dejá Aaliyah Belardo (she/they) is a curator and painter based in NYC, originally from St. Croix, US Virgin Islands. Currently, Belardo holds the position of associate curator, visual art and civic programs at The Shed. Belardo’s goal as a curator is to support boundary pushing artists as they establish themselves in the art historical canon, especially those who have been historically marginalized. Belardo’s professional experience has included work for major arts institutions in New York City like the Whitney Museum of American Art and Pace Gallery, and they also completed the Museum Professionals Seminar with The Studio Museum in Harlem. Belardo curated the 2025 Pratt MFA Thesis Exhibitions. They have participated in jury panels for residencies, spoken in public program panels, and worked on independent projects with various emerging artists, galleries, and nonprofits in the Caribbean and New York and across the United States, as well as maintaining a studio practice of their own.