Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s work stretches to the very edge of yearning and holds there, assailed by a quiet tremor. Beneath this surface tension pulse libidinal and psychic drives, traversing the rough terrain of black queer interiority and embodiment. From here, McClodden’s art opens onto an expanse of historical, metaphysical and psychoanalytic enquiries that restore its breath.
In the Biennale Arte 2026, McClodden presents a suite of works orbiting a two-channel film, RUINOUS. The film emerges from her engagement with Percival Everett’s novel So Much Blue, in which an abstract painter plans to destroy a work-in-progress, but stops short. In McClodden’s film, the protagonist (played by and loosely based on the artist herself) moves between a studio shed in upstate New York and, in an unnamed city, the underground worlds of BDSM sex work and academic fencing, where scars are prized.
Moiling in the core of the film is the idea of jouissance: the accumulation of a pleasure so exorbitant that it transgresses the boundaries of the ego and bends towards pain. Presented alongside are a vintage épée, a mask, and three leather panels whose surfaces are marked with cuts not unlike gestural wounds. From these cuts leaks a beauty that articulates itself through its own undoing.
—Zoë Hopkins
