ZEKARIAS MUSELE THOMPSON: Divine Weightlessness
October 4 - 30, 2025
CULT Bureau (482-D 49th Street, Oakland)
Artist Reception: Saturday, October 4, 12 - 2 PM
CULT Aimee Friberg is pleased to present Divine Weightlessness, a solo exhibition and residency by Oakland- and Reykjavik-based artist Zekarias Musele Thompson. The exhibition opens Saturday, October 4, 2025, from 12–2 PM at CULT Bureau (482-D 49th Street, Oakland, CA), Divine Weightlessness runs through October 30, 2025, and includes works in photography, painting, etching, and site-specific installation, alongside performances and interactive community programming. The opening coincides with the Museum of the African Diaspora’s Annual NEXUS week, which honors the creativity and cultural impact of Black artists across the region.
In Divine Weightlessness, Thompson offers an exploration of identity, relationality, and the ongoing effects of colonial structures, alongside immersive investigations of the body-mind experience. Since beginning to identify as an artist in 2016, Thompson has explored two intertwined approaches. One investigates how Eurocentric and Euro-American colonial systems continue to shape our environments, institutions, and ideas of identity. The other focuses on creating visual and sonic patterns that center the present experience of the body and mind, offering a way to move beyond ingrained cultural conditioning.
The exhibition features a range of works across media and scale. In FREE MUMIA (2019), a photographic portrait taken on the streets of Oakland, a button depicting political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal draws attention to racialized systems and the ongoing persistence of injustice in the United States. In For Noah (2023), Thompson reimagines a bird’s-eye view of the Noah Purifoy Outdoor Museum near Joshua Tree, layering oil paint atop a photograph of Purifoy’s sculpture Untitled, Asylum. By referencing Purifoy (1917–2004), a post-war American artist and social worker known for creating assemblage sculptures from discarded materials, Thompson foregrounds the significance of the past as a lens for understanding the present, while responding to social and political issues such as the Watts Rebellion. This work blends memory, landscape, and abstraction, engaging with Purifoy’s legacy of resilience, activism, and inventive use of found objects, while exploring how historical context informs contemporary experience and agency. In The Meeting Place, a triptych of paintings takes inspiration from barkcloth paintings by the Mbuti people of the Democratic Republic of Congo, while other works on linen engage with Sara Ahmed’s concept of affect as 'traces left on the body and mind'. Site-specific etchings and installations throughout the gallery emphasize relationality, highlighting the presence of ancestors, communities, and the spaces we inhabit.
Says Thompson: "With this investigation, the gallery becomes a site for recognizing the constant labor and performance of the creation of an identity. That of my own, our elders and forebears, as well as the sites we all occupy.... I am inviting humans to engage with objects, histories, and each other—to recognize that our identities are intertwined and shaped by communal experiences."
Throughout the exhibition and residency, Thompson will activate the gallery through participatory performances and a cultural marketplace called Werk Day (Life Forms). On select days the artist will be present on-site for community and public engagement. Visit the gallery’s exhibition page for an updated schedule on ongoing performances and an artist talk.
About the Artist
Zekarias Musele Thompson (b. 1983, Washington D.C.) is an Oakland- and Reykjavik-based artist working in sonic composition, mark-making, performance, photography, collaborative practices, and writing. Thompson’s work explores humanity’s conceptual and emotional organizational structures and how these forms are made material. Thompson has presented solo exhibitions at the Museum of the African Diaspora, The Lab, Gray Area, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, and Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. Group exhibitions and performances include Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, CCA Wattis Institute, Hamraborg Festival, Ásmundasalur, and Open in Reykjavik, Iceland. Thompson has collaborated with artists including Oysterknife, Salimatu Amabebe, Zack Parrinella, Pétur Eggertson, Phillip Laurent, Lonnie Holley, and many others. They are the instigator of the Togetherness Ensemble and co-founder of Working Name Studios, a collectively organized arts institution supporting underrepresented practices. Thompson was a 2024 Emerging Artist Program cohort member at MoAD and holds an MFA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley.
