art projects78th Street Studios, Cleveland
Strange, inherently
Strange, inherently
Strange, inherently
A group exhibition exploring the tension between who we are and what we've been made to become.
September 17 – October 16, 2026
Sama / سما
78th Street Studios, 3rd Floor
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 17, 5–7 PM
On view for Third Fridays: September 18 and October 16
By appointment: Email hello@samaartprojects.com or contact us via our website www.samaartprojects.com.
A group exhibition exploring the tension between who we are and what we've been made to become.
September 17 – October 16, 2026
Sama / سما
78th Street Studios, 3rd Floor
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 17, 5–7 PM
On view for Third Fridays: September 18 and October 16
By appointment: Email hello@samaartprojects.com or contact us via our website www.samaartprojects.com.
It’s strange to be human right now. In the body, in the quiet moments, in the space between who we are and who we perform being. We are encouraged to curate identities, stage belonging, and feed the machine, all while the ground beneath us - our communities, connections, cultures and selves - continues to shift.
And we've fallen in line. By design, by algorithm, by the forces that profit from our participation and sense of self.
When does order become control? When does connection become surveillance? When does data become a portrait?
Strange, inherently is the founding Sama / سما group exhibition, bringing together artists whose work sits with the strangeness of being human in this moment. Artwork as witness, as prophecy, as longing, and at times as protest. The works gathered here ask what it means to be alive when our value has been outsourced to systems that cannot know us, and question whether adaptation is survival, surrender or erasure.
The exhibition moves through the body - its memory, its autonomy, its connection to cosmos, its capacity to hold what systems of power would rather dissolve. Creation myths surface here too - the body dismembered, the cosmos made from that rupture, the personal mapped onto the cosmological. One work imagines a world after years of conflict over bodily autonomy - a figure reduced, marching on - confronting what remains when women's sovereignty over themselves is legislated away. Several works turn inward, tracing the interior landscape of becoming: the pressure of adolescence, the long work of self-worth, the quiet labor of learning to love a younger self.
Others look outward - at the forces that fragment, manipulate, and control. Skills and identities erode as artificial intelligence quietly redraws the boundaries of craft and expertise. A demon's hand moves a man like a puppet. Masked figures sit calmly in a hair salon, reading magazines, normalized into absurdity. Collaged poetry cuts words from old publications to speak of the fru stration that everyday prose cannot hold. These works don't moralize. They observe, with precision and occasional dark humor, how thoroughly we have adapted to what should still feel strange.
Running beneath many of these works is the landscape itself - the decaying rust belt environment of Northeast Ohio, used as a lens to explore broader collapse and renewal. The fragmentation of communities, the cycles of nature interrupted by wealth and power. The region becomes a site of memory, a place where the personal and the political meld into one another over time. As the artists themselves have described: Photographs become archives. Land is left to memory. Shadow as spirit.
Other works pull at the seams of consciousness itself - graphite faces emerging from cable and roots entwined, asking whether we are coming together or coming apart. In a time of severe disruption - social, technological, psychological, political - these images refuse easy answers. They hold the question open.
Strange, inherently does not resolve the strangeness it names. It insists we stay with it - in the body, in the landscape, in our relationships, in the moment of recognition when something that should feel alarming feels, instead, ordinary. The works in this exhibition are acts of attention in a reality designed to scatter it.
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Featuring the work of 18 artists across generations of practice, from Cleveland and beyond.
It’s strange to be human right now. In the body, in the quiet moments, in the space between who we are and who we perform being. We are encouraged to curate identities, stage belonging, and feed the machine, all while the ground beneath us - our communities, connections, cultures and selves - continues to shift.
And we've fallen in line. By design, by algorithm, by the forces that profit from our participation and sense of self.
When does order become control? When does connection become surveillance? When does data become a portrait?
Strange, inherently is the founding Sama / سما group exhibition, bringing together artists whose work sits with the strangeness of being human in this moment. Artwork as witness, as prophecy, as longing, and at times as protest. The works gathered here ask what it means to be alive when our value has been outsourced to systems that cannot know us, and question whether adaptation is survival, surrender or erasure.
The exhibition moves through the body - its memory, its autonomy, its connection to cosmos, its capacity to hold what systems of power would rather dissolve. Creation myths surface here too - the body dismembered, the cosmos made from that rupture, the personal mapped onto the cosmological. One work imagines a world after years of conflict over bodily autonomy - a figure reduced, marching on - confronting what remains when women's sovereignty over themselves is legislated away. Several works turn inward, tracing the interior landscape of becoming: the pressure of adolescence, the long work of self-worth, the quiet labor of learning to love a younger self.
Others look outward - at the forces that fragment, manipulate, and control. Skills and identities erode as artificial intelligence quietly redraws the boundaries of craft and expertise. A demon's hand moves a man like a puppet. Masked figures sit calmly in a hair salon, reading magazines, normalized into absurdity. Collaged poetry cuts words from old publications to speak of the fru stration that everyday prose cannot hold. These works don't moralize. They observe, with precision and occasional dark humor, how thoroughly we have adapted to what should still feel strange.
Running beneath many of these works is the landscape itself - the decaying rust belt environment of Northeast Ohio, used as a lens to explore broader collapse and renewal. The fragmentation of communities, the cycles of nature interrupted by wealth and power. The region becomes a site of memory, a place where the personal and the political meld into one another over time. As the artists themselves have described: Photographs become archives. Land is left to memory. Shadow as spirit.
Other works pull at the seams of consciousness itself - graphite faces emerging from cable and roots entwined, asking whether we are coming together or coming apart. In a time of severe disruption - social, technological, psychological, political - these images refuse easy answers. They hold the question open.
Strange, inherently does not resolve the strangeness it names. It insists we stay with it - in the body, in the landscape, in our relationships, in the moment of recognition when something that should feel alarming feels, instead, ordinary. The works in this exhibition are acts of attention in a reality designed to scatter it.
-
Featuring the work of 18 artists across generations of practice, from Cleveland and beyond.