Who Feels the Violence of Memory? Exposing History, Enfleshing Trauma, at moCa

It was in the gentrified urbanity of Uptown Cleveland that a gravelly, Gospel-singing voice stopped me in my tracks, slicing through the sterility of the neighborhood. It resurfaced time and time again from the distant slap of waves and the swell of bluesy keys, ominous and heavy. This soundscape set the scene for When You Are Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, a current headlining installation at moCa Cleveland. Here, the artist KING COBRA, documented as Doreen Lynette Garner (b. 1986, Philadelphia), masterfully dissects, as it were, the exploitation of Black bodies during the Middle Passage and beyond, and the art world’s role in the reckoning. (FIG 1)

The environment of the exhibition is deeply unsettling, and rightly so. Red gels cover the building’s diagonal windows, casting two bands of crimson light across the floor. Tubes of red neon frame a box scaffolded with steel beams. (Clevelanders might be reminded of the queer gym/club aesthetic of Xavi Aguirre’s installation at Everlasting Plastics, on view initially at the Venice Biennale in 2023 and more recently this past fall at SPACES in Hingetown—the material allusions to erotic architecture not inconsistent with KING COBRA’s own, albeit more gory interest in kink culture.) What the box holds, though, seems to connect the metal scaffolding with that of the slaughterhouse, raising questions about power and pain. More steel beams extend to violently penetrate the shark from above, front, and behind, leaving the body in eerie suspension.

In the installation, pins lock each fragment of flesh to a mesh metal skeleton, visible on the side—a ribcage, a cage—with a red, bubbly ooze of polyurethane foam solidified in its interstices. Puttied silicone surrounds gaping eyes; gills are formed like rows of gummy teeth—while the teeth themselves are made of razor blades. Molded silicone recalls raw, pale flesh, with pockmarks sprouting everywhere, textures as if eaten by rot or acid, meant to mimic some of the various diseases brought by European colonization. The artist intensively experiments with texturing smallpox and syphilis by tattooing the silicone, rendering her own kind of violence upon a white flesh she reclaims and shapes at her will. The pleasure COBRA finds in this process reaches its apogee with her Cracker series (2023), exhibited for her acclaimed exhibition White Meat at JTT New York. Such gleeful humor continues here, as the shark’s maw, reddened with blood, seems to mime the painted mouths of blackface. Whiteness, to paraphrase Amber Jamilla Musser via the Brooklyn Rail, becomes contagion; indeed, whiteness parodies itself.

Approaching the other side of the shark, the true violence of this display becomes evident. The shark is bisected, as if in a natural history museum, to showcase its interior. Skull, spine, and flesh are rendered in various materials, with pearls and beads affixed (a mode I associate both with Kathleen Ryan’s rotting lemons and with Joey Quiñones’s memorials to the enslaved from the Sculpture Center exhibition I reviewed for CAN in January). Glinting with pins, lined with deli-meat-colored silicon, the shark’s innards shine like the silk inside a coffin, rimmed with porcelain pansies in graveside sentinel. It is sickening in the best way: beautiful and ugly, fleshly and entropic.

More jarring even than the uncanny valley of the shark’s pearlescent, moldering interior, is the black mass, mottled with shaven, curly, dark fuzz, engulfed within. As my eyes adjusted to the light, a fear first planted with the gospel music and slapping waves materialized: the dark mass begins to coalesce into amorphous limbs, the two bottom ones swallowed by the interiors of toothsome gills. A brown foot is wedged between flesh and flesh, synecdochizing the enslaved bodies lost to the waves of the Atlantic. With the abject and the severed, COBRA forces us to reckon with the choice slaveholders given to enslaved people during the Middle Passage, and which has faced Black people ever since: behave, conform to a system founded on white supremacy, or be thrown overboard. Choose the Devil or the deep blue sea.

The shark-in-box trope finds its precedent in British artist Damien Hirst’s iconic work, The Physical Impossiblity of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), in which he preserved a tiger shark corpse in a formaldehyde-filled tank for display in London’s Saatchi Gallery.[1] Hirst’s motif became a commentary on sublime confrontation with death itself, the constructed assumption of immortality, and the violence of death presented for public viewing. But this is no mere fabulation of Hirst’s gruesome philosophical machinations. In COBRA’s hands, the shark becomes a behemoth of whiteness, and death is not impossible, but, for the Black body, inevitable. The installation lays bare a horrifying Catch-22. Stay—and live for generations under white supremacy—or jump?

I had the privilege of remaining in this gallery on a calm night fitting of the mourning this piece requires. I was able to hear the conversations of the few people who came and went. Two Black women came in separate waves with their children, gently informing them of the histories the sculpture is meant to evoke. While the children played about, their mothers stood solemn, quieting as they approached the other side. A white couple, on the other hand, faced with this monstrous horror, discussed Damien Hirst, associations of silicone flesh with CPR classes, and the colors. After chatting in front of the sculpture for several minutes, only briefly addressing the wall label’s explanation of the work, they moved on.

What do we make of this? The KING COBRA exhibition marks a pointed turn for moCa from its approach in 2020, in which the museum canceled an exhibition by Shaun Leonardo on police brutality without consulting the artist. That show, which made national headlines, was pulled because of fears expressed by the community that it would serve to re-traumatize Black viewers. Now, COBRA’s work, which deals extensively with Black trauma, is exceptionally potent, and its siting and curation purposeful. Yet its arresting violence, which demands to be beheld by the white person, presents itself in that tidy package–constructed for whiteness and wrapped in the conventions of its civility–that we call the museum. What is missing? It is this we must ask as viewers and as curators. Does the white intellectualism of the gallery still obscure the gaping truth?

KING COBRA: When You Are Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
January 30-August 2, 2026

Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (moCa)
11400 Euclid Avenue
Cleveland, Ohio
Mocacleveland.org

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[1] Contrary to COBRA’s shark, which is meticulously crafted by hand, Hirst’s was caught by Vic Hislop, an Australian fisherman, whom the artist commissioned to reel in, in his words, a shark “big enough to eat you.” Though the fisherman was paid £9,000, his labor remains largely uncredited. Zuzanna Stańska, “The Story of Damein Hirst’s Famous Shark,” Daily Art Magazine, January 16, 2026, https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/story-damien-hirst-shark/.

Sarah Frisbie is a Fellow in CAN’s Broadening the Conversation program for young writers, and a student in the PhD / Art History program at Case Western Reserve University. Broadening the Conversation is made possible by visionary support of Wallace Lanci, and by the George Gund Foundation and the Cleveland Foundation.