"The exhibition “Make Room” opens with a work titled Hysteria (2022) — featuring a cubist-faced figure wearing a striped-and-polka-dotted dress raised above the waist, exposing her vulva. Having the viewer consider a Black female body devoid of shame is the perfect gesture to honor the “make room” title, and American artist Tschabalala Self does just that, carving out space using textile, paint, canvas, and thread. Her first solo exhibition in a European museum — in Dijon, curated by Franck Gautherot and Seungduk Kim (on view through January 22, 2023) — showcases many new works in which the body is flagrantly depicted. On her website, Self criticizes the “voyeuristic tendencies towards the gendered and racialized body; a body which is both exalted and abject.” Her approach to representing it is as politically infused as formally considered: she gives her figures power as a countermeasure to the disempowerment so prevalent in racist societies past and present."