Nydia Blas uses photography, video, and collage to examine intimacy in the lives of girls, women, and mothers. Blas’ work reveals the personal and collective experience of discovery and reclamation of the body through gestures, costumes, and performance. This diptych image is taken from the series for black girls who want to die but would never hurt themselves (2012-ongoing), and features a confrontation between two young girls on a carpeted terrain. Here, fighting is epitomised as an intimate encounter, a physical performance in which power is made and restructured–someone will win, and someone will lose. Whether they struggle for respect, attention, honour, or simply out of frustration, we do not know, but afterwards they will have found the words to say it.

This work is presented as a part of There are no parts, an exhibition curated by Letticia Cosbert Miller that brings together artists Nydia Blas, Widline Cadet, Jasmine Clarke, and Michèle Pearson Clarke, who each explore the complexity of Black girlhood through photography.

Here, girlhood is understood not merely as a temporal encounter, but as a framework through which we, regardless of age and gender, are able to engage with the meanings and lives of Black girls. Girlhood is a liberatory and creative space in which one is continually being and becoming, acquiring knowledge of self, and seeking practical ways of coping with and resisting cultural constraints and expectations. From the mundane to the magnificent, Black girls are responding to representations of and attitudes towards class, gender, race, ability, and sexuality. This exhibition displays those responses–the devices, gestures, and embellishments by which Black girls manifest their ideas and create their own, new images of self.