freedom's daughter
Full Gallery at Bottom
When attempting to understand and empathise with someone’s lived experiences, codifying them according to race is tricky, if not problematic. In this way a lot of complexity, nuance and richness of experience is lost. This is not to say that identity and identity politics do not matter, but rather to acknowledge that most of our existence is entangled and therefore our ways of thinking and speaking should be rooted in an expansive agenda —drawing on a multitude of factors such as background, class, race, mental health, family history, what we have seen, heard and breathed etc….over and above a simple focus on the body.
That being said, the art world seems hellbent on measuring and ascribing value to art works based on the artist’s ‘heritage’ (read race) and ‘place of birth’ (read forced distinction between the so called Global South and Global North) —constantly finding ways to dissect and other work created by black artists under more and more inventive names; African art, outsider art, traditional art, craft etc. These classifications and categories matter to the extent that they impact on the scale to which an artist can contribute towards the global art discourse and the extent to which they are rewarded for that contribution.
This classification and ascribing of value, known as art history canonisation, has long been a manner in which the world prioritises stories and art. This lens, through which we view art and express our expectations of what is good art, can be very limiting —when visual artist Amy Sherald unveiled her painting of the former US First Lady Michelle Obama at the National Portrait Gallery in 2018, gasps were audible and the backlash ferocious, all because Obama’s skin was painted in stylised shades of gray. There were expectations of how Michelle (as a dark-skinned black woman) should be depicted and how Amy (as a black female artist) should interpret and express reality….the tension between the individual, the work and the historical moment. To this day stereotypes and archetypes render an artist black and inform the manner in which the work is read.
Once again, a lack of imagination in terms of what belongs in the canon is limiting, especially with regards to works and artistic practices that defy categorisation such as in the case of multi-disciplinary artists Grada Kilomba and Tabita Rezaire, whose work concerns itself with decoloniality, new knowledge production and speaking the unspeakable. How do you canonise something that fundamentally questions, undermines and disrupts your linear manner of thinking?
We can think of the art history canon in two layers; a) what stories are deemed important and who is included in those stories and b) who are the creators of the stories we deem important — both layers inspecting ideas around how and by whom black bodies are represented.
Throughout centuries, black people were not represented in art, particularly in painted portraits that were often reserved for the privileged few. The earliest instances where black people were depicted in art includes perverted anthropological and ethnographic images and representation of the black individual as either savage, mute or a backdrop and an extension of the landscape. Centuries later black bodies are still mined for trauma, their expression tied and shackled. The personal is political when all work is read within the context of politics and history. This is why the work of artists Kerry James Marshall, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Sonia Boyce, Dada Khanyisa and Lorna Simpson are important —all of these artist are finding expression in different mediums and articulating different facets of the lived black experience while authoring themselves into the history books on their own terms.
When acclaimed visual artist and activist Zanele Muholi found herself confronted with brutality and attempts at erasure of her experiences as a black queer body, she turned the lens towards herself
- firstly through her community by documenting a monograph Faces and Phases (2008-)
- and later her very personal project, Somnyama Ngonyama – Hail the Dark Lioness (2012-)
Muholi is claiming her own representation and inserting herself in her story. In season nine of the documentary film series: Art in the Twenty-First century, Muholi is caught on tape articulating the following:
Can I own my voice? Can I own me, because my mother never had an opportunity to own her own voice until she died? There are a lot of beautiful humans out there who get to be on the cover of magazines and they are loved dearly. Why are ordinary people only featured in any magazine when there is tragedy? Why are there no images of queer people, especially queer black people, and yet people are told that you have a right to be? I just wanted to produce images that spoke to me as a person……I’m boiling inside. Like any other great man I want to be counted in history, I want to produce that history….I want to basically say ‘this is me’.
Muholi is one of many black artists actively committed to wrestling against racial, sexual and class oppression within the art world. Taking into account history, memory and creation, these questions remain—what are the circumstances under which black bodies can be depicted?
What are the circumstances under which black artists can create?
When black artist create art, does the work have to carry meaning and become so heavy?
Perhaps Yes….. because for you to be holding a paintbrush or pressing the shutter, millions of men, women and children were bought and sold….millions of enslaved men, women and children are part of your story.
Perhaps No…. because in the pursuit of artistic freedom, political freedom or any kind of freedom, it should be enough that millions of men, women and children were bought and sold…..that millions of enslaved men, women and children are part of your story.
Made by Many
Article x Nkgopoleng Moloi | Photography x Anthony Bila