Untangling the Perils that Tangle Us, is a group exhibition showcasing twelve emerging artists, working on the African continent and global diaspora, whose expressions engage the complexities of blackness as the world emerges from a global pandemic.
Conceived as a liminal space in history, the exhibition seeks to present an unburdened yet authentic imagery of the black lived experience either to re- imagine historical gaps and erasures, challenge contemporary narratives or to create alternative futures, one that transcends the current view on race, nationality or national belonging and offers a more diverse transnational, transcontinental and transcultural perspective.
The exhibition seeks to reframe blackness through a visual dialogue and exchange of ideas and perspectives and features multidimensional works in painting, photography, video and sculpture. The exhibition is accompanied by a soundscape composed by Nigerian based Joey Ekunwe and Osemwengie Ekunwe. The exhibition supported by the Arts Council England through the National Lottery Project Grants.
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BLACKNESS, THE DIASPORIC AND THE AFRICAN CONSTRUCT
EXCERPT OF CURATORIAL ESSAY BY JUMOKE SANWO, CO-CURATOR OF THE EXHIBITIONThe Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie aptly described how she encountered 'blackness' for the first time, when she moved to the United States in 1997, 'I wasn't black until I came to America, she recalled, 'I became black in America.' To many including Adichie, identity on the continent is less burdened by racial othering, but based on other forms of ethnicity, religion and gender, but never about the color of her skin or how that impacts her positionality in the society.
Before Adichie, other artists, thinkers, literary icons, and musicians of African and African American extraction have engaged this subject to varied degrees, and in many forms; to understand the origin of blackness, is to look critically at the racial dynamics within America, rooted in the philosophical and socio economic construct, which situates 'whiteness' and the privileges it denotes, at the pinnacle of socio-political order.
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Hanging over these artists, especially at a time like this, is the burden of a collective identity; to be Nigerian, African or Black? political or aesthetic? gendered or fluid, to fully embrace or discard the imposition of blackness, to find a connection between black art, black aesthetic and black movements or to explore the variety and the complexities of their lived experiences that may not sum up to a whole?. With a geographical spread across three continents Europe, Africa and the Americas, living and working across Nigeria, United Kingdom, United States and Canada, the partcipating artists absorb the dynamic spatial and temporal aspects of their lived experiences, while moving away from the compounding need to produce a range of stereotypical representations, stemming from the burden of past struggles of the movements, as they examine their present in divergent geographical contexts, engaging ‘beyond the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity’ [Gilroy 1992].
In the canon of Art history, the representation of blackness is often set within associated attitudes, towards the commodification of the black body and the experiences therein. It disallows the complexity and the ever shifting phenomenology of the BIPOC, and the leeway to emerge in its variation. The curatorial premise of this exhibition liberates the artists from the burden of expectation, and provides them the room to transcend the expected; national belonging, geographical and bodily autonomy. For them to embrace the complexities and the fluidity of transnationalism, ‘an extension beyond the sovereign jurisdictional boundaries of nation-states’; by representing the complexities of their experiences.
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The recent push towards a radical shift in national and global consciousness, emerging from recent movements such as the Black Live Matters and TheEndSars protests, challenged the policing of the ‘black’ and in the case of the ENDSARS ‘the Nigerian body’ critiquing existing structures of oppressive social orders.
This period of uncertainty has shifted and emboldened many artists of color, to reexamine their autonomy, redefine their own positionality in the global context, informed by their lived experiences, reshape their craft and practice and utilize it as a tool to expand and bridge the gap of under representation, using art as a medium’ to interrogate erasures.
Armed with artistic freedom, they untangle themselves from the burden of expectation to adopt a more palatable, less complex identity, while they consciously focus on the complexity of what Daniel Lionel Smith described as the ‘Black Aesthetics, an open, descriptive expression[Smith1991] with many possibilities.
It is the year 2021, and these artists, who happen to be black, are choosing how to explore their being, their ‘identity, their lived experiences and creating what Tracy Ellis defined as the “the New Black Aesthetic” (Ellis 1989) in other words a post-black aesthetic.
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It’s not that self-representations by Black or African people didn’t exist. The Benin Bronzes, which are the subject of repatriation requests, are good examples of self-representation. But these types of artwork were systemically demeaned, erased, banned, destroyed, or removed. In short, made inaccessible. It left the Black body like a “virgin” territory, akin to the way the African continent was described back then, ripe to be shaped in any fashion in the collective imagination. And at every turn, the Black body was reduced to stereotypes, or characters not worthy of being named and identified.
HANOU AMENDAH - WRITER (OBATALA)
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PAST: RE-IMAGINING HISTORICAL GAPS AND ERASURES
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"Igba" is a performance piece that was enacted in 2019 and was documented and arranged in video. Chukwudubem invited a random selection of nine Black men who had no prior association with each other to his studio. After getting to know one another, the artist instructed the participants to partially undress, as well as make bodily interactions predicated upon a sonic scape. As Chukwudubem performed abstracted melodies (vocal and piano), the men moved through the curated space; Initially, the movements made were of a reluctant, rigid, and protective dynamic, however, they eventually became comfortable with touching one another as time went by, and subsequently eased into an improvised celestial rhythm. This performance was a ritualistic unlearning of stringent approaches to gender and sexuality amongst men of African descent.
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PRESENT: CHALLENGING CONTEMPORARY NARRATIVES
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" In this piece a young black girl is painted with a bloomy sunflower plantation behind her which often begins in early July in many parts of Africa. This piece is one of my unending attempts to nullify the existing negative narrative, ideologies and imagery of black people and their communities that has summed up a large part of the representation of black people and their environment on a global scale.
As humans I believe a huge part of our perception, learning, cognition and activities are mediated through vision. Hence why I have chosen to represent black people and their environment with vibrant flourishing scenes."
ADEGBOYEGA ADESINA
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FUTURE: CREATING ALTERNATIVE FUTRES
