London — In a quiet suburb of northwest London in the 1970s, Ekow Eshun and his brother spent their free time in their bedroom reading Marvel comics. Among their favorites were the X-Men, who relaunched in 1975 as a team of racially diverse mutants.
Elsewhere in visual culture, let alone on the streets of London, “our presence as black people in Britain was treated with skepticism and hostility,” says curator and writer Eshun, now 54. said in a recent phone interview.
In the fantastical world of these superheroes, Eshun, whose parents are Ghanaian, found a way to rationalize his experience rather than run away. I’ve never gotten over the weirdness of a racialized society that’s sci-fi,” he said.
Exploring another world as a way of understanding oneself isIn the Black Fantasticis an exhibition curated by Eshun currently at the Hayward Gallery in London. The show brings together a selection of works by an established artist from the African diaspora born between 1959 and her 1989, a temporary solo presentation of his that unfolds like a labyrinth of different environments. is presented as
The first of these is a series of blinding works by Nick Cave in response to acts of violence in the United States. This includes a collection of Cave’s “sound suits”. This is a full body costume that he started making in 1992 after watching police beat up Rodney King on TV. “Soundsuit 9:29” in the exhibit is a new ensemble dedicated to George His Floyd (the title refers to the length of time former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was kneeling on Floyd’s neck). are available).The epic scale and finely crafted sound suits deal with both hypervisibility and invisibility, especially as blacks in a white-dominated society
Cutting through Cave’s space is a dramatic new commission titled “Chain Reaction”. Stretching from the ceiling to the floor, the black resin of Cave’s forearm chains of his cast grip each other, the fragments connecting to create a cohesiveness that echoes the rest of the exhibit.
From Cave’s work, the exhibition spans two more floors and spans the imagination of ten more artists. Hayward director Ralph Rugoff called ‘In the Black Fantastic’ the first ‘landmark’ exhibition in the UK to bring together artists under the umbrella. Eshun avoided calling Black Fantastic a movement, defining it as “a view shared by artists that conjures a new vision of black potential.” But the exhibition also ushers in a new chapter in how contemporary art approaches race and culture.
It is heartbreaking that such a statement is being made in London, once the driving force of the British slave trade and the colonial rule of African nations. Another artist at the exhibition, Hugh Locke, said, “Twenty years ago we wouldn’t have been able to put on a show like this here.”
Some of the artists included in the exhibition, notably Kara Walker, Wangechi Muthu, and Ellen Gallagher, were previously involved in Afrofuturism, a movement that emerged in the United States in the 1990s. Afrofuturism, coined by author Mark Derry in his 1993 essay Black to the Future, is a science that blends his fiction, technology, and fantasy to focus on the African-American experience and the Explore his diaspora concerns and ancestry. (Eshun’s older brother and fellow comic book enthusiast, Kodwo, is a scholar and wrote When work on an exhibition scheduled for 2021 began in 2019, Eshun originally planned to explore Afrofuturism. But the movement’s “ideas of the future that were born not so long ago are the exact opposite for me,” he said.
Instead, Eshun’s Black Fantastic is an attempt to define black creativity and imagination in its own words, based on conversations with the exhibition’s artists.
His reluctance to assign artists to rigid movements was echoed in a recent interview by Itersha Womack, author of Afrofuturism: The Worlds of Black Science Fiction and Fantasy Culture. Womack argues that while Afrofuturism is alive and well, “black creators want to create without limits. There are also Afrofuturists. Some are Afro-surreal. Others are great. You can. Some are all three.
The limits are his explosively colorful life-size studio photographs (2007’show do you want me) is shown alongside his “Ambassadors” sculptures made last year. A ground medallion, a duplicate of the person who was lynched, is dripping.
In a recent telephone interview, Locke, 62, said, “I can understand people like me needing to occupy and control their world. The world beyond their control is limited. ‘ said. He grew up in Guyana in the years immediately following the country’s liberation from colonial rule, and a “dark, bloody past involving slavery and indentured servitude” was out of reach, he said. Said. As a result, “we were aware of other worlds,” he said. “The idea of parallel worlds was like the usual thing that always exists.”
Elsewhere on the show, much of Lina Iris Viktor’s work explores a world made possible by Liberia, a nation founded in 1847 by enslaved Africans from the United States. Her excellent mixes Her media work often focuses on female figures related to Liberian mythology and history, questioning the dangerous allure of utopian expressions of domination and power. For Viktor, one of the young artists who attended the exhibition at the age of 35, the response to the idea of ’Black Fantastic’ was sensuous…needed any further explanation.
The artists in the exhibition are interested in reinventing, adapting and remixing, with a penchant for techniques such as assemblage and collage. This innovative spirit is evident in her 24 karat gold that Viktor applies to her work and in CGI video collages in which Rashaad Newsome stitches together photographs of her black queer body and consumer goods.
American artist Newsom said his collaboration with Eshun was positive overall, but that Black Fantastic doesn’t define his work. It’s my job as an artist to do, and that’s where we always struggle,” said Newsom, 43.
Colleen Smith’s installation Epistrophy on the third and final floor is an intricate arrangement of objects of personal significance to the artist, reflected and projected by nearby screens and monitors. A fitting metaphor for politics on display.
In all works, it is important to open the production process to the viewer. According to American Smith, this transparency positively conveys a sense of “deconstructing the world around us.” The artists on the show “just use what’s already around us to show what’s possible,” she added.
At Black Fantastic, it seems more important to ground the work in real matter than speculation about the future, especially when the future is becoming increasingly difficult to imagine. The art of Black Fantastic is full of references to historical events leading up to the present day.
Walker’s recent film work in the exhibition “The Blasphemy of Prince McVay and Turner” cuts paper on the murder of James Byrd Jr., a black man chained to a pickup truck and dragged to his death. It is reproduced with a doll of. Many of his 1998 paintings of three white men along a country road in Texas evoke both memory and presence, illustrating the diversity of black experiences in which the perils of the past permeate everyday life. doing. Although Eshun is reluctant to codify his fantastics as a movement, this quality emerges as one of his touchstones in the exhibition.
At its core, Black Fantastic addresses the paradox facing all marginalized communities. A way of recognizing the ‘other’ as a construct, and a way of celebrating the unique power of difference and the imagination that comes from it. As a result, much of the work exhibited at Hayward fell somewhere between joy and sorrow, jubilant meets eerie in uplifting melancholy overtures.
“I think it’s a feel-good show about death,” Eshun said in an interview at The Gallery. And how we are denied by denying our humanity.”
He paused and said:
“I wonder and am in awe of an artist who is able to preserve a piece of that history and yet evoke beauty and potential,” he added.
