Blackness As A Site Of Dreaming & Possibilities
By Something CuratedReflecting on the Hayward Gallery’s major summer show, In the Black Fantastic, which ran from 29 June –18 September 2022, Ivorian-French multidisciplinary artist and writer Keren Lasme unpacks the ambitious exhibition’s highlights.
“This is the domain of the Strange, the Marvelous, and the Fantastic…” — Suzanne Césaire, Tropiques (1941). Affixed on one of the walls of the Hayward Gallery, these words by writer, teacher and surrealist artist Suzanne Césaire prepare us to dwell in the Black interior — a metaphorical, multidimensional dreamscape existing for the reimagining of the Black experience and conjured by In the Black Fantastic, an exhibition curated by writer and curator Ekow Eshun, featuring the works of Nick Cave, Sedrick Chisom, Ellen Gallagher, Hew Locke, Wangechi Mutu, Rashaad Newsome, Chris Ofili, Tabita Rezaire, Cauleen Smith, Lina Iris Viktor and Kara Walker.
The exhibition was inspired by Ekow Eshun’s fascination for the wildly imaginative ways through which Black creative figures have responded to centuries of violence directed towards Black people. It brought together contemporary artists from the African diaspora whose works advance cultural liberation by tapping into the realms of the fantastical, the mysterious and the mystical.
Each work presented In The Black Fantastic looked at race as a fictional construct that considerably affects reality by defining Black people as alien and inferior. Going beyond these social constraints, the artists used fantasy as a tool of refusal and resistance while borrowing elements of spiritual traditions, myth, science fiction, folklore, alternative futures and ceremonial pageantry, to conjure a Black experience that is both ordinary and extraordinary.
Ultra Wet – Recapitulation, an immersive video installation by Guyanese artist Tabita Rezaire creates a timeless sacred space, for the transmission of knowledge on sexuality, the divine feminine and masculine which are in opposition to heteronormative notions of gender.
New Orleans-born multimedia artist Rashaad Newsome looks at elements of African antiquities, cyborgs, abstraction and surreal ideas to create heroic Black bodies that are free from social constructs of race, gender, class and sexuality. The large scale watercolours of Ellen Gallagher which are in conversation with a 1641 painting of an “African male” by Albert Eckhout are inspired by a mythic Black Atlantis called Drexiciya. They depict an underwater realm populated by creatures who are meant to be the descendants of enslaved pregnant women thrown in the ocean during the middle passage.
From sculpture to art installation, painting, video art and collage, these works are cathartic, wild, ecstatic, strange and visceral. They envision new possibilities and paradigms, offer nuanced ways of seeing the world and conjure new realities, cosmoses and narratives that are glorious evocations of Blackness, Black presence and Black lived experiences.
Feature image: Hew Locke, Installation view of In the Black Fantastic at Hayward Gallery, London, 2022. Photo: Keren Lasme