Surreality has become reality. Populations worldwide experience dispossession writ large as war, natural disasters, and authoritarian regimes force migration and regularize loss. Amidst newly fractured communities and an increasingly ubiquitous media machine, social life grows only more disconnected, misinformed, and seemingly unreal. Arms, Feet, and Fitful Dreams, rising star Luke Agada’s newest show, appropriates Surrealist aesthetics to unfurl this strange new reality, centering on the experiences of the contemporary African diaspora.

Installation view, Luke Agada: Arms, Feet, and Fitful Dreams. Courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery.

Though reminiscent of Yves Tanguy and Salvador Dalí’s placeless dreamscapes, Agada’s paintings reference tangible phenomena. The show’s title comes from a New York Times article, “African and Invisible: The Other New York Migrant Crisis,” which describes one overcrowded migrant shelter as a “tangle of arms and feet and fitful dreams.” As Chicago confronts a similar crisis, Agada’s work crucially illuminates the peril and uncertainty these asylum-seekers often face.

All six paintings in the show have been rendered largely in sepia, a color that evokes both faded memories and desert sand. Indeed, the surreal scenes that cohere in each painting hold both psychic bodies and concrete things. These “bodies” are not recognizable human figures: they are distended limbs cast in serpentine patterns, linking spectral African masks with shadowy feet. At times, the pseudo-human tendrils flower into nonhuman beings, merging in one painting with a houseplant and demarcating, in another, a hunched dog. These bodies pool and sink into half-rendered architectures, including walls, windows, and corrugated tin roofs; simultaneously, they intertwine with scraps of detritus, including what appear to be newspaper clippings, oil cans, coffee signs, and clothing tags. With these eerie bodyscapes, Agada portrays African migrants as dispossessed to the extreme. They are stretched thin, dehumanized, haunted by abandoned cultures, and discarded with capitalism’s material and infrastructural waste. In Agada’s work, “fitful dreams” fuse with an even more fitful reality.

Yet these paintings transcend rote recitations of trauma. Agada’s show is grave and probing, not defeatist. His biomorphic amalgamations of body parts, objects, plants, and animals toe the line between wretched dehumanization and a powerful sense of connection; as much as they highlight migrant precarity, his paintings also demonstrate our bodies’ inextricability from nature, culture, history, geography, and other people. Fused with compound environments and amassed from a tangle of limbs, Agada’s uncanny bodies exceed the bounded individual and highlight our mutual intertwinement instead.

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This understanding of identity as both grounded and protean undercuts the nationalism and anthropocentrism through which many interpret selfhood today. Agada’s brushwork modulates between thin washes and dense coats of paint, so that while his soupy limbs scatter across spacetimes, they also faintly push toward us. These figures may represent hauntings from the past or the imperiled bodies of the present, but they could beget the future, too.

Articulating both the psychic and material stakes of contemporary African migration, Agada’s surrealist bodyscapes construct identity with exceptional depth. In a contemporary art world awash with facile multiculturalism, Arms, Feet, and Fitful Dreams offers a refreshingly complex approach to subjectivity and difference.

Yves Cao