American Gurl: home — land – clashmusic.com

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles is now showing home—land, the latest chapter in American Gurl, an evolving curatorial project by Womxn in Windows; a platform that spotlights the perspectives of cis, trans, and non-binary women through moving images, using video art, film, and performance to deconstruct and redefine the American Dream. 
What started as an annual public exhibition of women-made art films in storefront windows is now on a mission to support intergenerational and cross-cultural dialogue. Co-curated by Womxn in Windows founder Zehra Zehra and multidisciplinary artist Kilo Kish, American Gurl expands on the themes introduced in Kish’s musical project of the same name.
“With this project, I am interested in exploring how we can reimagine the American Dream to include women of colour and our hopes and desires. These moving images represent the intersection of our past and present, exploring new ways of dreaming through their fusion,” Kilo Kish explains.
Running till May 4, 2025, home—land invites viewers to reflect on the ways in which home is shaped by memory, migration, and identity. “It’s time to embrace the multiplicity of the American Gurl and share it with the world,” Zehra tells CLASH. 
This presentation features six short films showcasing artists Melvonna Ballenger, Shenny De Los Angeles & Amanda Morrell (iiritu), Ella Ezeike, Solange Knowles, Alima Lee, and Cauleen Smith. Each film in home—land resists the tempo of a world obsessed with acceleration. Refrains loop like prayers. Every shot is delicious and rich in texture. If you listen closely, you may hear the birds and insects chirping, the trees swaying in the distance. In an era of short-form spectacle, these films insist on duration. This is not an aesthetic choice but an ethic: a commitment to slowness as a form of devotion.
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Solange Knowles speaks of home as something that cannot be contained in walls. “Home transcends physical spaces, carried instead in objects, sounds, movement, and the solitude of personal devotion,” she says. In Shakersss.mov, filmed in Yucatán, Miami, and New York, Solange films herself moving her body, and gazing back into the camera. Like Frida Kahlo, Solange turned her pain and introspection into radical testimony. 
Both artists have moved through the world with disabilities – Kahlo’s lifelong pain from a near-fatal accident and Solange’s struggles with an autoimmune disorder – and yet, neither allowed the limitations of the body to define their creative output or reach.
If Solange’s work shows how home is carried within the body, then the other films in home—land explore how land carries the imprints of those who have moved through it. They ask us to consider what lingers. For Ella Ezeike, Words We Don’t Say was born from different places that shaped her identity.
“Being born in America to Nigerian parents and spending my young adult life in London, I was able to draw from these experiences and cultural nuances to make a film that was deeply personal but also rooted in my shared experiences with the women in my life,” she says.
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Alima Lee’s work speaks to the insular and generational reverberations of colonisation. “The effects of colonisation have echoed through time in a way that we are hearing it and feeling it more loudly every day, with every injustice. With my film, I have introduced a spiral of time, a reverberation letting us know many things have not changed and will continue to stay the same unless we resist.”
Her work forces us to listen to study, pay attention, and recognise that the violence of the past is not confined to history books but is still unfolding in real time.
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And then there is the land itself, the grieving mother. Shenny de Los Angeles offers gratitude and sorrow. “It’s unearthing to reflect the times through this work when you’re trying to survive it. But the beauty of this film is that it offers a moment of stillness. A moment to be with the land. To witness the sound of Mother Earth grieving. For us. For herself. For her children.”
Melvonna Ballenger’s words – “your liberation is my liberation” – remind us that no one is truly free until everyone is. And in her meditation on rain, she braces for impact. “Rain always provokes a change: rain, I know you’ll come again another day, but my spirit you can’t sway.” 
This exhibition comes on the heels of the recent fires in Los Angeles, which destroyed Black neighbourhoods in Altadena and exposed the fragility of our relationship with the land. In bringing these conversations into an artistic space, home—land urges us to see how all of our struggles are all interconnected, and to bear witness.
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From February 14th, SaveArtSpace launched public art installations for each selected artwork on billboard ad spaces in Los Angeles, CA.
The residency with MOCA culture:LAB runs through to May 4th.
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Words: Najma Sharif

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