Events

Performance:
Halily - by Hakim Onitolo
25 October, 7 - 8pm

Based on Langston Hughes’ Slave on the Block (in The Ways of White Folks, 1933 (1)), in which the poet devastatingly satirized the patronizing Negrophilia of a certain type of Bourgeoisie, Halily proposes to look at the objectification and exotification of the Black Body in visual arts and literature. Commenting on the way the racialization of scopic desire is embodied in certain conventions of visual representations, (i.e. the conjunction of exposed Black male flesh and vividly coloured, ornamental, exotic flowers), Hakim Onitolo’s live performance asks the viewer to take pleasure in the visual combination of black flesh and exotic bloom, and to question the politics of that pleasure. Incorporating video and sound elements, Halily looks at how compromised emotions such as pornographic fantasy filter through the visual documentation of the trade and its legacy, and the implications with regards to achieving a “truthful” representation of the realities of slavery.  

(1)In this short story, The Carraways, a couple of Greenwich Village poseurs, are delighted when, following the sudden death of their cook, Luther comes to their house to perform domestic duties. For Anne Carraway, he was "the most marvelous ebony boy . . . a boy as black as all the Negroes they'd ever known put together". Luther is perplexed by this obvious fetishism, but willing to let Anne pay him for allowing her to gaze at and make an image of his "splendid body"…

Produced in 1992, Rites of Passage refer­ences historical and contemporary issues of the diaspora to demonstrate the initial impact of Slavery and the intensity and the reverberation it still has today. With a particular personal and emotive significance, Rita Keegan’s video piece has a strong au­tobiographical base and is a response to the distanced under­standing of the trade offered by histori­cal documentation. Five generations of Rita’s family photographs are employed, dating back to 1830 onwards. Mixed with historical images, such as maps, ships and oil paintings, they emphasise the abstract quality of historical, supposedly objective representations, as opposed to the immediacy, and tangible reality of emotionally charged, overtly personal visual testimonies such as family photo­graphs.

Moderated by Michael McMillan, this hour long talk proposes to examine issues inher­ent to Rita’s work, such as the legitimacy of sourcing artistic documentation in culturally biased historical collections. Interrogations around the subjectivity of the visual testi­mony, its ownership, the relation between author and “poseur”, as well as the context in which the image is produced; and how it translates into contemporary terms, will be tackled, with the view to ultimately answer the question: Whose History?

Free event, booking required, please contact 198

Agnes Poitevin-Navarre’s Colour-Coding series can be interpreted and contextualised within the tradition of naming and representing metisse (mixed race) indi­viduals, a model anchored in the slave trade terminology and iconography as exemplified by the Casta paintings of the 18th century and the idea of the ‘color line’ identified by W.E.B DuBois. Launching a visual exploration of the politics of mixed race self-identification, Agnes Poitevin-Navarre playfully investigates the ambiguities of racial appearance and perception (historically defined by eurocentric taxonomists), by defining the landscape of her subjects’ faces.

Moderated by Paul Goodwin (Black Urbanism project, Centre for Urban and Community Research, Goldsmiths University) this hour long talk proposes to examine issues inherhent to Agnes’s work, such as poetics and politics of representing race; and the symbolism of the land, food and language as markers of one’s identity. Two hundred years after the Abolition of the Slave Trade, the national census in England has identified the mixed race population as the fastest growing ethnic minority group. The coining of an adequate terminology and visual codification is urgently required! Colour-Coding Metisse Identity tentatively charts such a journey.

Free event, booking required, please contact 198.

Film Screening:
Blacks in Wax by writer Marcus Wood
29 Nov, 7 - 8.30pm
Can we make Art out of the Middle Passage? Screening followed by a discussion with Marcus Wood (University of Sussex, author of Blind Memory, 2000)

In Baltimore City in 1979 Elmer and Joanne Martin, two African-American academics and social activists had to make a decision. Should they spend the $12,000 they had saved on the down payment for their first house or on four wax figures of great African Americans?

Mary McCloud Bethune, Frederick Douglass, Nat Turner and Sojourner Truth were made, the house had to wait, and the Great Blacks in Wax museum moved from a dream to a beginning. Over the next 28 years the Martins built one of the most confrontational, unusual, and aesthetically different museums in the world. The Great Blacks in Wax, now based in a complex of buildings in Baltimore, is like nothing else. It challenges black and white assumptions relating to the history of slavery, the memory of slavery and the development of a black Diasporic consciousness in North America.

Marcus Wood’s ‘Great Blacks in Wax’ meditates about why this unique institution was made the way it was, and shows how the people who made it were prepared to come head on at the unspeakable aspects of the memory of slavery. The pure emphasis on slave agency, slave creativity, slave suffering and the ability of the Black Slave Diaspora to take control of the memory of slavery are timely reminders in 2007 of how the British Establishment has failed in its attempts to remember the trans-Atlantic slave trade.