Shikeith’s Phantasmatic Apparatus (2025) has recently been acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia, PA.
This work draws on the visual language of seventeenth-century Dutch vanitas painting and the iconography of alchemy, situating Black spiritual practice within longer histories of ritual, belief, and invention. Scientific glassware, a vintage radio, and ceremonial objects surround costumed figures caught mid-gesture, suggesting a ritual already underway. A white cloth held in the composition carries a dual inheritance, recalling both Christian baptismal rites and diasporic burial traditions where the cloth protects the spirit during its passage between worlds.
The work extends the artist's ongoing engagement with hauntology, a throughline across his work that investigates how unresolved histories continue to inhabit contemporary structures, technologies, and systems of belief. Phantasmatic Apparatus was shown in Shikeith’s solo exhibition, People Who Die Bad Don’t Stay in the Ground, at the TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image in Philadelphia, PA this past November. In these works, Shikeith chronicles the enduring legacy of historical traumas and their persistent reverberations across successive generations, actively resisting attempts at erasure and historical amnesia.
