“I write for the future because my present is demolished. I fly to the future to retrieve my demolished past. To see what isn’t hard to see, in a world that doesn’t.”

Borrowed from Palestinian poet and physician Fady Joudah, the line to see what isn’t hard to see, frames the practice of this year’s fellowship cohort, a gesture of both clarity and insistence.

The 2024-25 Headlands Graduate Fellows cohort summons histories embedded in clay, rock, metal, fiber, rubber, and fossil fuel, tracing the sediment of memory in materials and moments that predate—and may very well outlast—us. They attend to the folds and fissures of deep time and tectonic force; the layered textures of domestic life under militarized skies; the chemic residue of desire, extraction, and sacred entanglements; the chronic veil of fog as both shroud and shelter; the play and provocation of objects that toy with function and failure.

Extending beyond the wall, the works in the exhibition occupy space in environmental and relational ways, inviting viewers to move through and alongside them. Opacity and ambiguity are deployed as tactical methods of reflection and attunement, guiding more ethical engagements with what is already here. Through careful repetition, transmutation, and unexpected arrangements, these artists set the conditions for encounter, opening new ways of sensing and inhabiting time, material, and relation.

Curators

PJ Gubatina Policarpio

Vanessa Pérez Winder

Participating Artists

Salimatu Amabebe, University of California, Berkeley

April Camlin, University of California, Davis

Leah Koransky, San Francisco State University

Joanna Keane Lopez, Stanford University

Duma Mock, California College of the Arts