SUNÉ WOODS ENGAGES WITH MOVING IMAGE THROUGH THE FORM OF VIDEO ART

aquí todo está vivo, 8 minute single channel video projection, color, sound, dimensions variable 2025, illuminating an understanding of Nature as a wise teacher, contemplations of the climate catastrophe that is the result of imperialism, capitalism, and industrialization, as well as the acoustic pollution that have whales in anguish. 

The title is derived from the Jaguaconda mural in Nuquí, Chocó, Colombia,  a short boat ride away from Coquí where I spent time observing the work of Dr. Natalia Botero Acosta who studies humpback whales in the Gulf of Tribugá. The people who live in Coquí are descendents of both African and of the indigenous Embera Dobidá and hold sacred knowledge of plants, song, and community.

Weather and the Whale curated by Rachel Nelson, Ari Friedlander, and Alex Moore is on view at the Institute of Arts & Sciences until March 8, 2026.

Deep gratitude to my ancestors, Pachamama, the language of dreams,  the humpback whales in the Gulf of Tribugá, the muralists of Nuquí, Colectivo Florece, Jagua Colectivo, Seta Fuerte,  The Friedlander Lab, Francisco Acosta Carrizosa, drone operator; Reyna Hernández-Roque, dancer; Eric Elterman, audio mix; Cruzmélida Martínez Quinto, Genaro Moreno Bonilla, Kaleth Martínez Marines, María Camila Medina Martínez, Neymar Valencia Pretel, Silvia Quintero López, & the people of Coquí,  Rachel Nelson, Alex Moore, LuLing Osofsky, the IAS team, Inyosi Sebenzekhaya Nia O. Withersppon, Alexis Pauline Gumbs ‘s Undrowned, Ben Okri’s Tiger Work, Michaela Harrison’s whale whispering. 

A.C. Swaminituriyasangitananda’s voice through one of her recorded discourses urges those present in the Sai Anantam Ashram to consider the concerns of the soul. ‘The soul requires worship of God in the same way that the physical form requires food and water,’ writes Shankari C. Adams on the benefits of chanting in her 2018 biography of Alice Coltrane, Portrait of Devotion. 

On this day in meditation, 11 minute,  two channel video projection installation, color, sound, 2025, in conversation with the teachings of Alice Coltrane Swamini Turiyasangitananda.  

Purusha Hickson, Shankari C. Adams, and Radha Botofasina, all devotees of  Alice Coltrane Swamini Turiyasangitanda are included along with sounds and movement that were created specifically for the work with my community.  Symbolic imagery and sacred sites or rituals were depicted from India, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Niger as well as local sites in Los Angeles and the Angeles National Forest.

The Sai Anantam Ashram founded by Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda was a space that was open to people of all traditions and many symbols and practices from spiritual traditions and systems such as Islam, Ifá, Lukumí, Christianity, Hinduism and Tantra are among those included in this work. 

Monument Eternal is organized by Erin Christovale, curator with support from Nyah Ginwright, curatorial assistant at the Hammer Museum February 9-May 4, 2025

This project was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. Deep gratitude to Ayler Fielder,  c. Scoti Scott, Siana Ọrun-Walker, Purusha Hickson, Shankari C. Adams, Radha Botofasina, Jaya Moss, Camille Wade, Kofi Jas Wade, Nia Lee, Meena Murugesan, Caleb Mose, Toxosi Saudade, Johnny Arreola, Emelda Lawson-Bekkal, Inyosi Nia. O. Witherspoon, Eric Elterman, and Freesounddot.org org.  

This work was made during and after the January California devastating wildfires.  Additional material support from Sylvia Hansen, Nanci Amaka, Arthur Fielder, and Rema Ghuloum. 

Aragonite Stars, 14 min. 44 sec., five channel video projection installation, color, dimensions variable, 2018-2022, with audio accompaniment by the musician Meshell Ndegeocello.  

Aragonite Stars is a contemplation of the possibilities of transformation through bodies of water such as oceans, hot springs, and in vessels that are understood as human.   The organisms in my work embody an existence where healing is through a reconnection to their nature within.

These interspecies transmissions are energetic pathways to understanding planetary imbalances that deeply affect all living beings. The work is informed by traditional healing practices such as shamanism and the writing of Octavia E. Butler.

Audio Accompaniment by Meshell Ndegeocello 

Sound Contributions by Meshell Ndegeocello, Sofía Córdova, Suné Woods & LaMont Hamilton. Mixed by Eric Elterman

Performers: Rebecca Watson, Leo Vice, Sundiata Touré, .Turay, c.Scoti Scott, Michelle Scott, Monique Ruffin, Pat Pitts, Thera Pitts, taisha paggett, Kira Ori, Jasiri Nkalati, Tianna Nicole, Simone Moore, Meena Murugesan, JOI, d. Sabela Grimes, Ana Foxxx, Ayler Fielder, Desmond Faison, Skyler Harvey, Crystal Cotton, Christelle Baguidy, Kaya Arnoux, Zen Ajani, Erin Zadrozny, alea adigwem, Suné Woods

Created during the COVID pandemic in Los Angeles, guided by Baldwin’s  Here Be Dragons  and his life work, Suite Number Seven, 4 min. 28 sec, single channel video, 2020, is a meditation on isolation, teenage survival, interspecies exchanges through water and movement, the invisible visibility of the unhoused in Los Angeles, androgyny, and the multidimensional existence of transition both through death and escapism.

This is Suné Woods's commissioned contribution to Meshell Ndegeocello's project: Chapter & Verse: The Gospel of James Baldwin.

music: Down at the Cross by Meshell Ndegeocello; audio editor: Justin Hicks audio engineer: Jack DeBoe

performers: Christelle Baguidy, Ayler Fielder, Malchiah Grace-Hewitt, XLSŌL

camera: Suné Woods, Erin Zadrozny, Meena Murugesan

drone camera: Dena Drones Media, d. Sabela grimes

A special thank you to: Saalim Muslim

Falling to get here, writes Fred Moten, is based on the idea of the asymptote. The description of a curve, a line whose distance from that curve gets closer and closer to zero as it tends to infinity. Asymptote is also articulated as a not falling together. Woods is interested both in the intensity of this interplay between (absolute) nearness and (untraversable) distance and in what is entailed in the tendency to infinity. These are fruitful terms for the investigation of intimacy, which is a matter of concern not only in what the video represents—the joy and pain of black relation; the political and economic pressure that renders such relation impossible; the miracle of the persistence of such relation in the face of impossibility—but also in the form and practice of representation. Woods is concerned with how sound and image (don’t) go together and with how sounds and images, each in their own realm, are already infused with this (not) going together. To the extent that this whole problematic of going together is Woods’ object and her aim, and is, more generally, our object and our aim, she offers Falling to get here as a contribution to the making and practice of a big, black, experimental band.

Writer Fred Moten has made some text and sounds that, rather than functioning as commentary to the video from outside of it, has been been integrated by Woods as a kind of artistic and crticial accompaniment in, and sometimes out of, sync with her images.

Falling to get here, 9 min 39 sec., single channel video projection, color, sound, dimensions variable, 2017.

Performers: Christelle Baguidy, Siana Walker, Dwayne McCrae, Fred Moten, Monique Ruffin, James Sims, Erinn Anova, and Suné Woods

We was just talking, 5 min 5 sec, single channel video projection, color, sound, dimensions variable, 2017 navigates a montage of tactile and sensorial terrains within intimate and ecological relationships and explores their interwoven conversation. Found footage that hold spiritual or social resonance live alongside a sequence animals and human convergences.

“We was just talking” are the words of Tasha Thomas shared in an interview speaking of her boyfriend’s death. She was interrogated aggressively by Beavercreek, Ohio police after her boyfriend John was murdered by police officers. The title is holding space for the unimaginable grief of losing their loved one to unimaginable violence inflicted by the state. Woods ancestral land is in Ohio and some of the footage recorded for this video was in Ohio.

Utilizing all the senses, being guided by animals, and wellness modalities such as acupuncture and massage are shown as strategies to navigate systemic structures of state violence.

The bulbous enclosure is a structure made of bed linens and allows for viewing the moving image projection with two or five people at a time.

A Feeling Like Chaos , 4 min 6 sec, color, sound, 2015, two channel video projection installation attempting to make sense of a continuum of disaster, toxicity, fear, and political systems that sanction violence towards its citizens. The performers in the work take on roles such as conjurer, guerilla, healer, and sage. One of the driving questions in making the work was how does one maintain intimacy during turbulent social conditions, during what feels like chaos?

the escapists, 4 min 7 sec, single channel video projection, sound, color, dimensions, variable, 2015 made during the circulation of videos and images of Black people being murdered by police officers. the escapists is acknowledging the water as a place to find sanctuary, to breathe, to swim with the wisdom of the ancestors, the cellular knowing within our skin, to have necessary portals of respite and escape.

Working with two actors, Simone Vicari-Moore and Kim Estes, we create an awkward and tender discourse between a father and daughter reconciling their choices and experiences through profound vulnerability and intimacy. Conversation, 10 minute,  a two-channel video installation, color, sound, 2014, using a transcribed dialogue between a father and daughter.  The project research began as a series of conversations I had with women both approaching and well into their thirties who described relationships with their fathers as complicated and also came out of the process of my own father and I healing our relationship.

camera: Arthur Fielder; sound: Caleb Mose; production assistant: Erin Zadrozny

Würzburg, 1 min 26 sec, single channel video, color, sound, 2013, named for a city in Germany occupied by the United States after WWII.  Children born from relationships with American soldiers, particularly Black soldiers and German women were often given up for adoption, German mothers were refused public assistance and American fathers in the military were discouraged to acknowledge their children. Learning of this history through my father, Frederick Woods, inspired my desire to explore how two strangers briefly share time, space, and their bodies. The languages, German and English, in this piece are meant to articulate what can be felt through voice and what is often lost in translation.