Lick Dirt, Kiss Bone

Lick Dirt, Kiss Bone

Season I, 2026 International Residency Exhibition

Curated by NARS Curatorial Fellow Courtney Zoa Brown.

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February 27 – March 17, 2026

Opening Reception: Friday, February 27, 6-8 pm

NARS Main Gallery

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NARS Foundation is pleased to present Lick Dirt, Kiss Bone, a group exhibition featuring work from the Season I, 2026 International Residency Artists: Melika Abikenari, Obadah Aljefri, Jieun Cheon, Priyanka Dey, Christopher Paul Jordan, Arom Ju, Colby Lamson-Gordon, Yutong (Leah) Liu, Fe Lugo, Asli Narin, Hyunjin Park, Sabrina Herbosa Reyes, and Chanya Vitayakul, curated by NARS Curatorial Fellow Courtney Zoa Brown.

Lick Dirt, Kiss Bone brings together the Season I artist-in-residence at NARS Foundation to explore how knowledge moves across bodies, geographies, and generations. Treating memory as embodied, the exhibition positions dirt, bone, and spirit as material witnesses, asking how we remember collectively and through movement when survival becomes a mode of transmission. It engages speculative futures, haunting, and remembrance through the lens of innatism, the belief that knowledge is embedded at birth.

Lick Dirt, Kiss Bone positions the exhibition itself as an active archive, where body, material, and space function as witnesses and modes of choreography. Across sculpture, painting, and film, memory operates as a method for sensing, activating, and collectively reimagining inherited knowledge across time and place.

In this exhibition, knowledge emerges not as something fixed or formally taught, but as fugitive, affective, and continually in motion. Through abstraction, mapping, and reclamation, memory is rehearsed.

Situated at NARS Foundation in Sunset Park, a neighborhood where living communities and contested futures coexist, the exhibition foregrounds site as a threshold.The site amplifies what has been rendered invisible, allowing it to surface.

The exhibition asks where knowledge resides and how fate, intuition, and memory are carried within the body, the object, the spirit, or the spaces between them. It considers what it means to remember collectively when histories are fractured, records fail, and survival itself becomes a mode of transmission.

By foregrounding the self, the body, and the environment as sentient witnesses, Lick Dirt, Kiss Bone proposes remembrance as an ethical and relational practice, an insistence on presence, care, and the right to be felt and remembered across time, terrain, and loss.