“I am an outsider looking in. But in the garden of my good days, no body is wrong. Here every flower grows ragged and sideways and always.” - Safiya Sinclair

Sister Mine: Between Holding On and Letting Go is the first solo exhibition in the UK by Ivna Esajas, produced in collaboration with Metro 54, Amsterdam. Centring the life, world, and dreams of Black women, femmes, and beings, Esajas transforms the "solo show" into a pluriversal world. The characters Esajas draws are in dialogue with other artists, theatre makers, choreographers, poets, activists, and visitors—inviting them into a collaborative artistic process to attempt, shift, dismantle, and question the concept of the "solo exhibition," while also blurring the lines between individual authorship and collectivity.

Ivna Esajas creates intuitive drawings on canvas that sit in the grey, fricative area between painting and drawing. Esajas experiments with presentation formats, processes, materials, and techniques in her new works. She draws from experimental Black feminist and artistic traditions influenced by 20th-century artists like Faith Ringgold. Focusing on figures, still lifes, speculative narratives, and time machines that explore the everyday lives and worlds of Black people and Black imagination. Esajas claims space using these works—both literally and figuratively—to show that the "fiction of Black identity," shaped by the legacies of colonialism and slavery, can be interrupted by the stories we tell about ourselves.

Sister Mine borrows its title from the novel of the same name by the prolific Black sci-fi writer Nalo Hopkinson. In Sister Mine, the characters are beings who live extraordinary lives in symbiotic relationships, bringing together different Black artistic traditions that explore the materiality and capacity of imagination beyond time and space. Between Letting Go and Holding On echoes the poem Conundrum of the inimitable James Baldwin. It questions how one knows the difference between the two and what it means to be in that in-between space. Truly holding on to if it isn't the balance of holding on and letting go? It is this inquiry into the inbetweenness that resonates with Ivna’s practice.

Intertwined with the storyline of Sister Mine is a soundtrack of spiritual, revolutionary and political jazz by Black women, employing the sonic space to augment Ivna’s world building process. Featuring: Abbey Lincoln, Alice Coltrane, Angel Bat Dawid, Brandee Younger, Dorothy Ashby, Jazzmeia Horn, Mary Lou Williams, Matana Roberts, Meshell Ndegeocello, Minnie Riperton, Monnette Sudler, Moor Mother, Nala Sinephro, Nina Simone, Nubya Garcia and Thandi Ntuli.