July 25 - September 6 2025
TICK TACK, Antwerp
July 30
Off-site Screening + Performance
Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin
Emergent Magazine
Art Viewer
Nasty Magazine
O FLUXO
Fakewhale Log
(Schinkel Pavillon above)
Heavily inspired by Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance, Sojourn explores cycles of life, death, and reincarnation as a framework for thinking through history and the burden of its preservation. Through a critique of monuments, memory, and cultural canon, Carpenter asks urgent questions: What gets to be remembered? Who decides? And what forms can remembrance take?
Developed across multiple interconnected formats—a site-specific installation, paintings, a short story, and a film—Sojourn unfolds as a fractured narrative across all three levels of TICK TACK, with each element interpreting the others. This layered structure reflects the unstable nature of historical perspective, and our collective struggle to hold onto truth in the face of erasure.
With this project, Carpenter continues to challenge how we assign value to memory, and who is permitted to leave a mark. Sojourn is developed in part during Carpenter's residency at TICK TACK’s Antwerp studio.
OPENING NIGHT
Friday July 25, 7 - 10 PM
Performance by the artist
TICK TACK, Mechelsesteenweg 247, 2018 Antwerp
TICK TACK OFF-SITE at Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin
On July 30, five days after the opening of Sojourn at TICK TACK in Antwerp, the eponymous film travels to Berlin for a one-night screening at Schinkel Pavillon. This presentation is part of TICK TACK’s OFF-SITE program, realized in collaboration with Schinkel Pavillon and 032c, and coincides with the closing of Carpenter’s current solo exhibition at 032c in Berlin.
The project is dedicated to the memory of Michael Carpenter
“‘Sojourn’ Heavily inspired by the film Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance, Sojourn weaves these elements into a layered meditation on memory, transformation, and the instability of historical perspective.
In the film, Carpenter constructs a fractured cinematic language to explore the fragility of memory and the violence of erasure. Through a poetic interplay of image, text, sound, and spoken word, the film reflects on the cyclical nature of life and death—not as abstraction, but as lived experience shaped by systemic neglect and historical distortion. Following the titular character on their journey from the afterlife to the living world and back again on a quest to find fragments of their lost name. Sojourn presents a layered, unresolved attempt to hold onto what history often pushes aside—especially the lives, voices, and losses of Black communities whose stories are too often overwritten. “
On the ground floor of the exhibition, is a series of steel rods, standing out of cement blocks, with words engraved on the reverse side of the rod. These phrases were gathered from people’s responses to question prompts on my instagram story, asking people to share their first and or most important memories, what their favorite song was, and their favorite lyric. The responses ranged from heartwarming to heart breaking, I’ve thought a lot about the lifespan of information and how fragile information is the forever refreshing environment of social media and the diffulties that poses for preservation of media/history/thought etc. What happens when your 24 hour Instagram story post expires ?
So in an absolute rejection of that ephemerality, I immortalized in steel the personal histories of the audience. Making the exhibition a museum of the viewer, the installation attempts at undermining the traditional notion of who and what is allowed to have a monument. Monuments typically exist to represent a particular person, place, and time that can be known to be problematic, and almost always in the past. And are typically fixed in place, with this installation I choose to honor the living, the same way as the long dead, with stripped down monuments that can be placed anywhere and re-positioned at any time. The ground floor is based the middle section of the exhibition film, which represents the “earth” in the cycle of life and death that is explored by the film’s protagonist. in the story each rod is engraved with a persons memories and when grasped the protagonist receives a transmission of the individuals memories.
The function of the mezzanine of my exhibition ‘Sojourn’ is In reference to a previous exhibition at TICK TACK, titled Storage Space, where works from the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen collection were travelled to Antwerp and exhibited in the space, with the mezzanine having a dynamic exhibition that rotated works every week, and the remaining works were left in an open storage on the ground floor, one of these works was a painting by Gerhard Richter, one of the most highly regarded German painters of all times, and the painting was his most reproduced ever.
So in reference to that work, I created a series of “paintings” in the same dimension as the Richter painting that will rotate every week of exhibition, but except for giving the space to a white European man, I gave it to a series of important historical black figures, many of which I feel were not given the full recognition they deserved, some including political poet June Jordan, whose career was hampered by her public stance against Isr*el, Jean-Jacque Dessalines, a general in the that pivotal in the Haitian revolution who’s actions were arguably more important but less recognized than Toussaint Louveture, and Mumia Abu Jamal, a political prisoner and writer who has spent decades on death row
The Mezzanjne of the exhibition is loosely centered around the idea of “heaven” and the way it distorts our memories of individual through ideas that may or may not fully represent them.
In the basement the structure holding up the image installation is made from beams ripped out of the wall on the top floor of the gallery. of those images are several of influential Memphis rappers La Chat, and the late Princess Loko, who both rapped alongside other members of Tommy Wright III’s group Ten Wanted Men. I found it interesting, but mostly unsettling that when you look up either of these women, Chat or Loko, that there is a particular image that shows up in the search results for both artists (slide 4), but the image is of one woman, not two, so this image is incorrectly associated with one of them, thus making the two artists history almost collapsed into a single person. The image is of La Chat I believe. Imagine someone searching for you only to find someone else, imagine someone puts someone else’s name on your tombstone. This is why the proper preservation of culture is important, and this is most likely the unfortunate result of pre internet lack of documentation.
In the bottom and back most room of the exhibition is an installation comprised of a urine sample cup, the kind used for drug testing, that has been covered in gemstones, and rotates off center in front of a projector casting a reel of two videos, rapper Slimesito flashing his diamond encrusted teeth, and the other is the infamous clip of professional basketball player Ja Morant waving a gun in an Instagram video to a song by NBA YoungBoy, which resulted in his temporary suspension from playing in the league. He was punished for demonstrating an aspect of urban culture that is deemed “unsavory” (even though at the time of writing this DC where i work, is full of troops waving around guns with federal authority).
But what Ja did, similar to what many kids do, replicating certain aspects of urban culture, mostly from Hip-hop, online for attention. Most times, completely removed from and ignorant of the social circumstances and experiences that hip hop and urban culture were born from and depict which acts almost a form of erasure itself.. I first hand witnessed people thrust into lifestyles that came with consequences like have to submit drug tests by urine sample just to stay out of jail. Many people criticized Ja for acting like a street guy when he’s a millionaire ball player
But that’s not to put down Ja, I think that like all things, those kind of behaviors have a time and place, and his persecution was unfair, racist, and double standard. and all acts and aspects of urban culture deserved to be observed, whether or not we think they are “savory”.
The large black abstract painting, is meant to be a literal representation of taking up space with my blackness, with a water like texture representing the depth and complexity of black culture and of humanity being as vast as an ocean.