Talking Black to the Archive: Responding to Prof Anthony Bogue
This film seeks to map out forms of acts, actions, political movements, acts of resistance and those that have produced fundamental shifts in the status of subordinated, subaltern and marginalised groups (Tina Campt, A New Black Gaze, 2017).
It attempts to capture black interiority from various manifestations of black cultural production. Black interiority, as the inner aliveness of a people against the dominant economy of the gaze (Ladi’Sasha Jones, Black Interiority, 2019).
By making visible and palpable all that is held in reserve - all that power, love, brilliance, labor, and care. All that beauty... that exists outside the white gaze (Saidiya Hartman, Venus in Two Acts, 2008).
I look to artists, writers, and makers that have already started evolving black subjectivity beyond the representation of otherness to inform this offering.
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The collage above features next to the film as a visual regime of the lecture, ‘Black Intellectuals, Critical Theory, Archive and Freedom’ (Anthony Bogue, 2012).
The visuals speak to multiple notions of language and time solidified through historiography, and the representation of African and African Diasporic culture through constructed Western traditions.
As the film penetrates the white gaze capturing ‘fundamental shifts in the status of subordinated, subaltern and marginalised groups’ (Campt, 2017), the collage speaks to the acquisition of the gaze - a thought process questioning the sensory associations one makes with an image, and further, “what critical gaze do you have?” developing an understanding of this life.
Responding to a critical theory that questions the grounds of ‘the source’ / archive in repossession of history (Amilcar Cabral, The Weapon of Theory, 1966), manipulating sources serves to outline the gaps between the image and temporality; space and representation.
Having the human figure encountering black culture and Western representation while countering reality as fiberglass mannequins, the viewer’s ‘critical’ subjective gaze is unknowingly linked to how history has solidified objective ‘facts’ out of fiction. Specifically these dichotomies of culture and power are exposed as controlling barriers to thought - language as a tool of ‘othering’ in the intersectionalities of society (Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre, 1993).
Free to critique the archive’s aspiring power and epistemic displacement of blackness and otherness, the collage and film essay seek within the archive that our history has been placed into and talk black to what exists outside of it.
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Curated by Sibu Mabe and Roxy Jones
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Gif Credit: Nelisiwe Xaba, They Look at Me and That’s All They Think, 2006-date, performance piece.
Image Credits for collage: Yinka Shonibare’s ‘figures’:
Boy Sitting Beside Hibiscus Flower, 2015, Fiberglass mannequin, Dutch wax printed cotton textile, fibreglass, resin, globe, leather and steel baseplate.
Planets in my Head (French Horn), 2019, Fiberglass mannequin, Dutch wax printed cotton textile, french horn, leather and steel baseplate.
Clementia, 2019, Fiberglass mannequin, hand-painted with Batik pattern textile, and steelbase plate or plinth.
Champagne Kid (Fallen), 2013, Unique life-size mannequin, Dutch wax printed cotton textile, leather, resin, chair, globe and Cristal champagne bottle.
Revolution Kid (Fox girl), 2012, Fiberglass mannequin, Dutch wax printed cotton textile, Blackberry, 24 carat gold gilded gun, taxidermy fox head, leather and steel baseplate.
Yinka Shonibare: Bunch of Migrants, 2016, screen print with gold-leaf on hand-deckled Somerset tub sized 410 gsm paper ; Bronze, 2019, Bronze sculpture hand-painted with Dutch wax Batik pattern.
"Slavery” image (no credit available, on The Patriot publication, 14 February 2019)
Film Credits: (in order of appearance)
Kara Walker, I am an Unreliable Narrator ; Toni Morrison, The White Gaze ; swimming scene from Moonlight ; Matana Roberts, I Am ; Petite Noir, Blamefire ; Bell Hooks, Moving from Pain to Power ; Max Roach, Prayer, Protest, Peace ; Sethembile Msezane, Excerpts from the Past ; Nina Simone, That Blackness, Four Women ; Arthur Jafa discussing his cinema ‘Festac 77′ ; Elizabeth Colomba, Four Seasons series ; Neliswe Xaba, They Look At Me and That’s All They See ; Carrie Mae Weems, People of a Darker Hue.
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