For more than fifty years, BAMPFA and the UC Berkeley Department of Art Practice have partnered to present an exhibition of work by graduating MFA students. This year, six artists—Viviana Martínez Carlos, Priyanka D'Souza, Arianna Khmelniuk, Jasmine Nyende, bryant terry, and Zekarias Musele Thompson—present works of deep research, shared inquiry, and experimental making.
Titled The Currents Beneath, the exhibition draws on a metaphor of moving just below the surface—suggesting ideas, feelings, and forces that may be hidden but stir us nonetheless. These artists examine the layered ways meaning seeps between the senses. Echoing the writer Aruna D'Souza's call for a politics of "imperfect solidarities," one which honors complexity and eschews legibility, the exhibition embraces solidarity without the erasure or flattening of differences.