FOR-SITE in partnership with Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, proudly presents Attentive Earth at the Guardhouse, a new installation by Oakland-based artists Muzae Sesay and Alexcia Sundra, on view at The Guardhouse at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture from September 17, 2026 through January 24, 2027. The installation opens with a Public Reception on Thursday, September 17, from 6–8 PM, with remarks by FOR-SITE Founding Executive Director and Curator Cheryl Haines at 6:30PM.
In the collaborative exhibition Attentive Earth, artists Muzae Sesay and Alexcia Sundra construct a provocative future where humanity’s connection to the planet has been completely severed, leaving society isolated from nature within a reality of fully commodified public attention. Staged inside the historic former guardhouse at the entrance to Fort Mason, the installation uses short-form video, painting, and archives to bring this speculative world to life. The narrative follows an underground group of scientists who discover Earth's sentient structure and occupy the complex, turning it into a protective fortress. Driven by curiosity for fleeting, unnoticed gestures, these researchers study how to recapture lost attention and preserve what has been fractured by our dissociation from the natural world.
Serving as the field office and archive for an "Attentive Realignment Center," the transformed guardhouse functions as a repository where artifacts and memories are collected and documented. By gathering these fragments of existence, the project reveals what lies beyond perceptual fatigue, forming the foundation of a therapeutic practice designed to rehabilitate human focus. Ultimately, Sesay and Sundra use the center to cultivate a shared, communal awareness, illustrating that rediscovering overlooked moments is essential to the architecture of belonging. By directly engaging with Fort Mason’s history as a coastal defense site, the artists powerfully prompt viewers to question what in our modern world requires fortified protection.
Muzae Sesay is a visual artist whose practice focuses on understanding our collective relationship to space, memory, community, and the perceived truths within them. Utilizing skewed perspectives of space and shape collapsed into two-dimensional planes of color, Sesay creates surreal geometric interiors, exteriors, landscapes, and structures, presenting a situation in which to be experienced and explored. Inspired by ideas of cultural reflection developed by questioning the validity of remembrance, his work often depicts worlds created in response to a social introspection and/or an attempt to perceive a shared reality. The work’s goal is to provoke social reasoning and induce the viewer’s agency in the navigation and narration of the imagery. Born in Long Beach, California, Sesay has exhibited at major venues like the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and San Jose Institute for Contemporary Arts. His public art projects include several large-scale murals and painted basketball courts in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Alexcia Sundra is an artist and filmmaker who constructs speculative environments that appear to have arrived from alternate timelines. Working across sculpture, film, and installation, she uses design, earthly materials, and familiar objects to make imagined realities tangible. Her practice engages time, attention, rest, and memory to examine the forces shaping our relationships with the Earth and one another—and to bring what has always been present back into view. Rather than presenting alternative realities from a distance, Sundra builds spaces that allow viewers to inhabit them, however briefly, and envision more liberatory forms of collective life. These ideas move fluidly across her work: as an artist and designer for Venus Blues at Minnesota Street Project, she created an interactive sculptural wall and immersive environment, while her film work includes Into a Space of Love, a magical realist documentary presented by Frieze that traces the legacies of house music rooted in New York’s underground culture. Her screen credits range from studio productions including Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), Uncut Gems (2019), and The Matrix Resurrections (2021). Sundra’s work on independent shorts including Self (2022), Companion (2023), Pop Monsters (2024), and Hope (2026) has received recognition at prominent festivals including BlackStar Film Festival, SFFILM Festival, Seattle Black Film Festival, and the New York African Film Festival. Sundra also served as Director of Alumni Programming at BAYCAT, where she created a screenwriting fellowship for women, LGBTQIA+ creatives, and storytellers of color.
Muzae Sesay and Alexcia Sundra at The Guardhouse is presented by FOR-SITE in partnership with Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture. The Guardhouse Program is made possible thanks to generous support from the ARB Fund.