An Otherwise Heaven Exhibition

About An Otherwise Heaven

Heaven is often positioned as a place of eternal riches; imagined as an exclusive gated community with gold plated roads and endless mansions, heaven is made seductive through images of wealth. Glorious Blasphemy Issue 2, titled "An Otherwise Heaven," is both a zine launch and group exhibition exploring: what can heaven be when not held hostage by the greed of the capitalist imagination? Here, we annihilate and reform heaven into a blasphemous paradise, one that centers Black/queer/trans dreaming.

Between the zine and exhibition, this spiritual exploration curated by Temi Ibitoye features a total of 17 Black, queer, and trans artists.

"Sacred. Secular. Spirituality." (2024)

Western ideologies are full of fictitious dichotomies: man and woman, good and evil, the sacred and the secular.  The truth is much grayer —much queerer— than Western thought would have us believe.  

While a heteronormative gender binary dictates how “modern” subjects dress, love, emote, and move, ancient cultures historically accepted, and even revered, queer and nonbinary people. In the U.S., while white, protestant churches prioritize gentility, stillness, and formality, Black churches have always been filled with the exultation and fervor of people catching the spirit and dancing as a means of worship. While the Western world praises sobriety, indigenous peoples throughout the American have used psychedelics to gain enlightenment for centuries, and African spiritual traditions have used alcohol as a part of all manner of religious and cultural rituals.

 This collage is a reflection on what it has meant, physically and emotionally, to decolonize my spirituality, learning to embody “an otherwise heaven” here on Earth. Exploring diasporic movement traditions and divination systems from West Africa to the U.S., this collage depicts the practices and places where I find bliss; it is a record of an embodied shift in how I understand freedom. In its totality, this collage is a meditation on what liberation feels like in my body and how I might cultivate it in the world around me. Using recycled magazines, thrifted books, old newspapers, found materials, and poster-printed images, I have used a variety of paper-based materials to create a dimensionality, vibrancy, and harmony that reflects how I picture an anti-colonial afterlife.

October 4, 2024 - October 24, 2025 (Da Vinci Art Alliance - Philadelphia)