Join us in the underground as Artist-in-Residence, filmmaker and artist Devon "Vonnie" Smith presents the 1st iteration of "Kurudi", an Afrosurrealist and Science Fiction video installation.
Kurudi
Opening Reception: July 9 | 6:00pm | $15
Exhibit: July 9 – 23 |Various Times | Donation
Kurudi is Swahili for return. The Drexicya are an underwater race of half-human-half-amphibian ocean dwellers who are looking to inhabit land. They are seeking a return to functioning as fully human. Kurudi is a speculative video installation that follows Drexciyan researchers as they investigate human behavior, culture, and ecological stability, with a particular focus on Black gesture as a site of embodied knowledge. Through fragmented transmissions and archival‑style surveillance, the Drexciyans analyze how movement, rhythm, and improvisation within Black life might signal whether Earth can sustain future Drexciyan existence.
Kurudi, blurs myth and science, the installation frames first contact not as an invasion but as an investigation—an encounter shaped by curiosity, distance, and the politics of observation. Kurudi invites viewers to consider who is observing whom, how Black gesture becomes legible across species, and what it means for a world—and a people—to be deemed habitable.
Synopsis for Main Video in the Exhibition
When a group of Drexicyan travelers rises from the ocean to test life on land, their bodies begin to fail, revealing a poetic struggle between longing, survival, and a world that cannot hold them.
About the Artist
Devon "Vonnie" Smith (b.1991, Northside Milwaukee, WI) is a research-based cultural worker, who uses various modes of documentary production to preserve Black diasporic histories, with intentions of disrupting and dismantling systems of erasure. His cinema practice deviates from conventional forms of storytelling and narrative, and instead utilizes experiential aesthetics to engage viewers and participants in the work. Smith is currently based in Dallas-Fort Worth with his wife and three children. He is a Professor of Practice in Film Production at SMU.
Smith has shown work at Milwaukee Short Film Festival in Milwaukee, WI; Milwaukee Film Festival in Milwaukee, WI; Gallery 400 in Chicago, IL; Hayti Heritage Film Festival in Durham, NC; Experimental Tuesdays at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in Milwaukee, WI; National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.; Violet Crown Theatre in Dallas, TX; Angelika Theatre in Dallas, TX; and the Luminal Theatre in Brooklyn, NY.