Nari Ward Tackles the Immigrant Experience at Deste Foundation’s Hydra Fete

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It’s late June and art types are absconding to their preferred summer haunts. For me, that’s Hydra, a street-cat-laden Saronic island where the sun is as potent as the water is clear, and where collector Dakis Ioannou‘s annual Deste Foundation fete marks the solstice with style.

On June 23, throngs descended on Deste’s unvarnished cliffside project space—aptly titled the Slaughterhouse, given its origins as an abattoir—where Nari Ward unveiled “Until That Day,” a suite of 10 new works exploring migration and memory, particularly among the Afro-Greek community. (It’s on view through October 31.) The Aegean shimmered below, a backdrop that gave the show a sharp geographic charge—not everyone reaches new shores by yacht.

The immigrant experience is a recurring theme for the Jamaican-born, New York-based artist, best known for large-scale assemblages made of urban detritus. The central sculpture, Fire Hose Man, is a towering structure of old luggage bound by lengths of fire hose, a touchstone object in Ward’s practice that carries connotations of both crisis and relief.

In the cramped stone room, I struggled to take in the whole thing, overwhelmed by its hulking presence as I moved around it, slipping between other viewers and the close walls, all of us slick with sweat from the climb up the cliff path. The sculpture’s magnitude is the point. Ward sees migration as a defining reality of the modern world: uncomfortable but ubiquitous. The pervasive anti-immigrant rhetoric of our current political moment thrives on the inability to see the big picture, forcing a one-sided view of something that exists in the round.

The remedy to such a myopic view is community, something the rest of the show cultivates quietly. Outside the space, visitors played dominoes at tables of scorched poplar, a tree associated with resilience and rebirth in myth. Unmoving flags made of emergency blankets stood at attention along the path and on a rocky outcrop by the sea-facing wall, claiming the land for all people rather than one nation.

Curators Cecilia Alemani, Ann Temkin, and Larry Ossei-Mensah mingled with artists including Raúl de Nieves and Maurizio Cattelan—a perennial island pilgrim—as well as locals. As the sun set, the Athens-based singer Aggelos Aggelou performed atop the slaughterhouse roof, where Jeff Koons‘s large, grinning sun sculpture spun in the breeze.

Drawing on Greek rebetika and African diasporic traditions, Aggelou recited from Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I‘s 1963 U.N. address: “Until basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race; until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion.”

And to Hydra, until next year.