Though we may obsess about the past or the future, alternately consumed by all that is not, the primacy of the present forever asserts itself. We almost always believe that the times in which we live are the precipice to a cataclysmic fall, a tipping point to some greater tragedy, a moment when all can slip away and be lost. Ours is, as photographer David Hartt observed, “A crisis of borders, a fold in time, a rupture in space.”

With this in mind, Hartt sets out to curate a photography exhibition that speaks to our times. "This Synthetic Moment" at David Nolan, New York, brought together the works of Liz Johnson Artur, James Barnor, Kwame Brathwaite, David Hartt, Zoe Leonard, and Christopher Williams to explore, in Hartt’s words, “pictures of power and pride and grief and desire and confusion and community and celebration and abandonment.”

Closing this week is a hard-hitting group exhibition curated and featuring the works of David Hartt. The David Nolan Gallery is hosting Hartt and five other artists, as they explore migration and contemporary concerns, desires and rewards around the currently controversial subject. “This Synthetic Moment” runs at the gallery’s New York venue until March 10, 2018.

For "This Synthetic Moment," curator David Hartt presents photographs whose shared imperative is an interrogation of what he refers to as “a crisis of borders.” Through pictures — including one of black models taken in the ’60s but only printed last year, and another of a car bundled in blue tarp like a body bag — Hartt meditates on how both literal and abstract borders like place, time, and observation can affect meaning. In the exhibition, Hartt brings together a diverse collection of artists whose images illuminate the point at which what’s happening in the moment becomes art. Besides some of Hartt’s own photographs, featured artists include Kwame Brathwaite, Zoe Leonard, James Barnor, Liz Johnson Artur, and Christopher Williams. 

From Accra to Harlem, the photographs in an exhibition curated by David Hartt expand the field of representation.  

What are the images that encapsulate the moments, spaces, communities, and myriad experiences of blackness across the globe? What are the gestures, the glances, the ways of being that illustrate “a crisis of borders, a fold in time, a rupture in space. An assertion of gradience”?

The three photos of his own that David Hartt included in “This Synthetic Moment,” a six-photographer show he curated at David Nolan Gallery, are fraught with disembodied melancholy. “Interval XIII” shows a lone auto parked on the street, closely wrapped in what looks like a giant blue garbage bag, and in “Interval I,” a few small, worse-for-wear boats list in the water. But all the other images he chose are of black women and men, and they add up to an exceptionally rich demonstration of racial identity as a continuous act of self-creation.

2017 marks the 50th anniversary of architect Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67project in Montreal. Built as a model housing prototype for Expo 67, the development was an assertion of Canada’s post-colonial identity: cosmopolitan, technologically innovative, and optimistic. Growing up in the suburbs of Montreal, I was captivated by it. Yet despite Habitat 67’s iconic status, its success was almost impossible to repeat. In his 1974 book For Everyone a Garden, Safdie chronicles the various attempts that were made to replicate the Habitat 67 model elsewhere. While more traditional projects were eventually realized in Singapore, Israel, and Massachusetts, there were none that attempted Habitat 67’s ultra-dense frame-and-capsule design or its factory-built construction method. With one exception — Habitat Puerto Rico.