At 52 Walker in New York, you’ll find the artist kneeling at the altar, at all times. What is he waiting for?
Entering EJ Hill’s solo exhibition at 52 Walker feels like stepping into a chapel. Heavy burgundy velvet curtains block one’s view of the gallery’s centre, evoking a soft-walled confessional, with a wooden pew positioned outside. Facing this central installation hang four framed ‘paintings’ from the series Vigil (all works 2025). In each frame, Hill has mounted eight church kneeler pads vertically like minimalist abstractions. One pad in each composition bears deep impressions where knees once pressed into foam. These indentations archive what can be seen as acts of spiritual and social submission, mapping where flesh met devotion, where bone pressed into doctrine.
The source of these material traces can be found inside the installation. Through a narrow gap in the curtains, visitors glimpse Hill himself kneeling in sustained silence during gallery hours. This partial view invites more intimate engagement: viewers can peer through the opening or enter from the back for fuller access. Hill – a Black, queer artist who was raised Catholic – knows intimately how religious institutions reserve their harshest disciplines for certain bodies. He has long employed acts of physical endurance to interrogate how marginalised subjects might reclaim joy within systems designed to deny it. Marking his return to durational performance after seven years, this act of kneeling feels distinctly private compared to his previous public marathons, such as when he stood for months atop a plinth or lay prone on a roller coaster-shaped sculpture. Behind the velvet, his breathing remains steady as each hour of stillness passes. The longer he endures this religious posture, the more powerful and ecstatic his performance becomes.
The dialogue between the Vigil impressions and Hill’s living presence forms the core of Low-slung Promises on the Tongues of the Devout. Both bear witness to institutional pressure to perform devotional rituals, yet, by constructing his own confessional and drastically overstaying the typical duration of confession, Hill appropriates gestures traditionally associated with obedience to refigure submission as a site of potential resistance.
Two neon works expand his performance’s historical scope: Symbol for a Stylite outlines a classical column crowned by a cartoonish cloud, wryly nodding to fifth-century ascetics who performed self-denial atop pillars. Symbol for an Anchorite, a glowing vertical rectangle, references medieval hermits voluntarily walled into church cells. While Hill partakes in solitude and self-control commonly associated with hermeticism, he does so not to escape from society but to engage with it. Unlike historical figures who sought divine connection through isolation, Hill’s confinement behind velvet creates a charged space of collective recognition.
Elsewhere in the gallery, acrylic and ink paintings of flowers and clouds provide relief from the sombreness of the performance, creating productive friction against the austerity of Vigil. With the inclusion of these unabashedly vivid, pleasure-inducing works on paper and panel, the exhibition argues that refusal and ecstasy exist not in opposition but in generative tension.
Through these visual allusions – and the simple insistence of a body that kneels on its own terms – Low-slung Promises… rewrites the grammar of redemption. Where traditional salvation demands suffering as down payment for grace, Hill’s works subvert this transaction. His endurance becomes not penance but a method of claiming the joy that was always rightfully his.
Low-slung Promises on the Tongues of the Devout 52 Walker, New York, through 13 September
