"Black People Are The Silence They Cannot Understand" the title of the group exhibition that opens the GDA program in 2024, is a translation of the work ‘Black People Are The Silence They Cannot Understand’ (2001–2002) by the recently deceased American artist Pope.L (1955-2023). The exhibition takes as its starting point excerpts from an interview* with art historian Darby English by Folasade Ologundudu:

For example, you can’t take the reality of abstract art without engaging in the discourse about abstract art, which ironically is the most discursive art of the modern era. And you can’t take the reality of a Black artist doing abstraction without dealing with the very abstraction of Blackness as a matrix of identifications and projections, equally real and unreal. But most of what you read about Black artists doing abstraction erases this complexity to produce a more cohesive and less conflicting narrative about race and representation. I fear that abstract Black artists won’t receive the visibility and understanding they deserve until we renounce the categorical ways we look at things and the categorical tones we adopt to produce and share culturally specific knowledge. The true radicality of this choice requires a facilitating environment that still doesn’t exist.

The exhibition features the works of Bruno Baptistelli, Carolina Cordeiro, Juliana Dos Santos, and Thomaz Rosa.