What does the black body mean in space and time and how do space and time form around the black body? These are the central questions I aim to explore in my work, which spans across artistic and academic disciplines. I investigate the frequency of black life as it might exist in black time — an experience of time which I imagine to be forever linked to histories of subjectivity, to notions of object-hood, to an unresolvable hope, and to eternal resilience.

I use my practice to unpack notions of multiplicity and the surface materiality of skin (as explored by W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Hortense Spillers, and Fred Moten, for example) as black realities. How might these concepts exist in our world? Might their embodiment expose routes to new forms of living?

I work primarily through photography, sculpture, printmaking, performance, and writing, allowing space for each medium to overlap with one another. The form of my work develops in direct response to the concepts I address.

In his book In The Break: The Aesthetics of Black Radical Tradition, Fred Moten writes: “The history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist.” I am simultaneously moved and provoked by this truth; my work, as an evolving whole, further interrogates this idea.

Gala Prudent is an interdisciplinary artist from Brooklyn, NY.
She studied Modern Culture and Media at Brown University and Art at The Cooper Union.