Swimming in Your Skin Again (Terence Nance, 2016). Courtesy of the artist.
The French word “univitellin” means “of the same egg,” referring to a myriad of things that may look disparate but ultimately share an idea that binds them together. Terence Nance is a writer, a filmmaker, a musician, an actor. Among many other things, he created the HBO series Random Acts of Flyness (2018–2022); he is also the show’s composer and editor. The multi-branched network that defines Nance’s artistic pursuits travels long and deep but are all essentially of the same egg. “The idea of ritual” is what unites his work, he said when I spoke to him over Zoom about “Terence Nance: Swarm,” his new exhibition at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art. “I want to be transported when I'm experiencing art. I want to be pulled into it emotionally, like that ritual of making music or feeling it or being a part of it.” Nance’s films are a chase in pursuit of that feeling: a move away from, in his words, the “logistical and industrial” methods of filmmaking into an environment where the practice can be imbued with ritual and song.
“Terence Nance: Swarm,” a mid-career retrospective curated by BlackStar Projects’s Maori Karmael Holmes, is the first solo gallery presentation of Nance’s work. The two have worked together before on two of BlackStar’s earlier group exhibitions, but “Swarm” is a larger show concentrating only on Nance. Holmes told me that she wanted to work with “an artist who would represent a generation,” and Nance’s name was on the top of her list. “He's one of the most cited filmmakers, as someone who is inspiring the next generation,” said Holmes, who founded the BlackStar Film Festival in 2012, to celebrate and showcase films made by Black, Brown, and Indigenous creators. BlackStar Projects is the larger organizational canopy that organizes programs and fellowships beyond the annual film festival. Nance premiered Random Acts of Flyness in the festival’s 2018 edition.
Terence Nance grew up in Dallas with his mother, Vickie Washington-Nance, a theater director and actor, and Norvis Nance, his photojournalist father. Surrounded by uncles who were musicians, he was raised in an environment immersed in songs and images. He studied fine art in college but, as he recollected when we spoke, “pretty quickly started to use video, editing, and music foundationally. Mostly because of my parents and my uncles and aunts.”
Back in the 2010s, when Nance lived in Brooklyn, he started using the word “swarm” to “refer to us, our community of people, kind of as a demographic marker.” There's a swarm where people of color connect with one another in an organic, spread-out way, and then there’s industry, where the connections are more direct, linear. The industry lives in the city and the swarm lives in the “the borough,” as Nance put it. “[These are] people who make the city operate, the labor that makes the civic reality continue. And I just noticed that people didn't often have fluid, social interactions and spaces to be together and just be themselves,” Nance said. His art is essentially an exercise, through what he calls “resegregation,” to “keep the swarm primed and abundant, so we keep coming together, making things, and being together.”
Holmes, who describes Nance’s art as “facility with whimsy,” chose the show’s name to capture the moment in time when Nance created works while living in Brooklyn between 2012 and 2022, before moving to Baltimore. “I also like the sense of collectivity that the swarm evokes. Everything that Terence does is in collective,” she added.
Installation view of Swimming in Your Skin Again (Terence Nance, 2015). Photo by Constance Mensh.
“Terence Nance: Swarm” plays out on ICA’s first floor in a maze-like dark space punctuated by old family photographs, familial altars, comfortable seats, and multiple screens. A new two-channel video art piece created specifically for this show, Swarm Part Zero (2023), is shown in front of a couch and coffee table—an invitation for the viewer to immerse oneself in familial comfort, wrapped in a warm TV-like glow as if in the living room of a house you know very well. A long, winding monologue by Maleek Rae, a queer Black performer, dives deep into the ways in which Black artists create art that outlives the forces that censor them. Amidst visuals of eternal skyscapes and the sea, the artist’s words find place in the vastness, living free of the constrictions society imposes upon their brilliance.
For Nance, artmaking is an act of fortification. It is how he protects himself and his swarm “against this sort of the violence of this moment, which is a proxy war.” Toni Morrison said, as Nance reminded me, “the purpose of white supremacy is to keep you from doing your work.” His art is defined by that refusal to adhere to those restrictions. “I'm in a constant battle to remove my emphasis from the results,” he said, “and then put it on the actual practice of it. Having this show at this moment allows me to evaluate the processes that created all these things.”
There is a marked lushness and beauty in all of Nance’s work, especially in the 2015 short film Swimming in Your Skin Again, also a part of “Swarm.” Set to music by Nance’s brother, Norvis Junior, the film is about Black childhood as it takes wings on the precipice of puberty. The carefree joy that is typical of that age pervades through the viewing experience through screens and their reflection, angled to form a cuboid. The anger at the harsh realities of the world outside the film seeps in too, but never in a way that overpowers the beauty. “Rage as a response is only useful if it can be transmuted, into some sort of healing action, and I hope that healing extends out to those around me,” Nance said.
Sitting through part of the six-hour-long From the Void (2010–2022), a fast-moving collage of audio, video, animation, and recreated news bytes, was reminiscent of watching Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS (2019), a “news-creation machine” which imagined a celebratory universe of Black news. Nance’s never-ending collage is a scrapbook of Nance’s life works. It is funny, sad, and enraging, in quick succession, looped in an eternal cycle. It is the piece, Holmes said, that “encompasses the dozens and dozens of projects that he's been involved with.” The singular egg and through line, again, is the sense of ritualistic coming together, of watching the story of a community unfold.
In the exhibition, Univitellin, Nance’s 2016 short film, is reimagined as a multi-channel projection witnessed from a seat that slowly revolves while ensconced within a circular screen. The work is a star-crossed romantic tragedy that unfolds on the streets of Marseille, as Nance walks the line of both parodying and paying tribute to the conventions of the French New Wave.
Univitellin (Terence Nance, 2016). Courtesy of the artist.
Nance uses the jump cuts and the discontinuous plots of the movement to convey the love affair but undercuts the all-pervasive whiteness of the French New Wave by using only Black actors. The seat of the audience is in constant motion, so we are constantly seeing fragments and putting them together in our heads. It doesn’t always come together to form a coherent plot, but that is barely the point when the circularity of the story envelops us. Nance calls Agnès Varda, François Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard “people who thought about [filmmaking] in a way that I could relate to, specifically around its possibility, and essentially to express the problem of cinema and its industrialization, of its power as a propagandist tool, and how, especially in the moment that they were working, it was so effectively used as a tool for genocide.”
Histories often imply France's social culture is definitively “revolutionary,” because its modern history emerges from a radical moment that killed a monarchy. There is this sense of assumed equality that, as Nance said, “has created such a paradoxical spell; in how they deploy culture in a way that creates something like the French New Wave, but also has a kind of semi-conscious re-colonial effect.” With the story of the Black French lovers, Nance addresses that paradox, which he also lived through during his stay in Paris in the early 2010s.
Aminata M'Bathie, the female lead in Univitellin, is beautiful and funny, always carrying forth with the mischief and independence we’ve celebrated in much of the French New Wave, epitomized by Jean Seberg in Breathless (1960). The women in the family photographs in “Swarm” are beautiful too, as we see them peeking out of niches and alcoves and in the altars, among healing crystals and crochet doilies. “There's a clear relationship that he's interested in, with the spirit world, and with the past and present and future,” Holmes observed, “And there is a deep love for Black women, which is something that's appealing to me.”
Nance’s art, along with family altars, is essentially an act of immense vulnerability. It is a practice that opens up the swarm he has built around himself: The love and need to sustain a community of artists and art lovers. As someone whose artistic arc is far from being complete, the ICA show bookmarks an important chapter in Nance’s artmaking—his swarm has now taken flight to Baltimore, where Nance now lives and creates. Last year, he released his debut full-length music album, V O R T E X. As a new swarm opens up, Nance looks to connect with the earth beneath his feet and the “immaterial spiritual beings” who help him confront self-doubt and go on making art.