art

Ebony G. Patterson, A View Out --->

"Ebony G. Patterson’s multi layered practice – in sculpture, installation, performance, and video – uses beauty as a tool. She employs opulent, hand-embellished surfaces and brightly colored patterns to seduce the viewer into bearing witness to the violence and social injustices imposed upon the invisible and the voiceless. In these works, Patterson presents richly-clad figures amid a lush environment of plants, evoking her own investigation of gardens, both real and imagined, and their relationship to postcolonial spaces. Interested in how gardens – natural but cultivated settings – operate with social demarcations, Patterson investigates their relationship to beauty, dress, class, race, the body, land, and death."

art works, exhibits, etc

Background Image
Kara Walker: Grub for Sharks: A Concession to the Negro Populace, 2004.
"Grub for Sharks is a reference to the practice of throwing slaves to their death in the sea, in an attempt to lighten ships before a storm – schools of sharks were known to trail ships for this reason."

In recent years, the term post-colonial has been challenged many times in the United States where people of colour still face institutionalized prejudice despite having had a person of colour as President. Kara Walker has brought the past to life with black cutouts on white walls. I found that this connected well to the framing text of this week by Anne McClintock (The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term “Post-Colonialism” (1992)), and the treatment of colonialism as a concept in the past, present and future"

"Central to her work is Black history, its telling and re-telling, and the effect this has on African-Americans today. She attacks racial myth and stereotypes, exploring issues such as slavery, sexuality, oppression and domination."

<< Mini-documentary (subtitles in English available) about the exhibition: 'Hier. Zwart in Rembrandts Tijd' ('Here. Black in Rembrandt's era') in the Rembrandtshuis in Amsterdam (closed due to the Corona-virus).

This mini-documentary addresses the large variety of paintings of Black people by European artists in the 17th century.

Dutch newspaper article about the exhibition: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2020/04/14/de-jongen-met-de-veer-en-andere-afro-amsterdammers-uit-rembrandts-tijd-a3996700

Flamboya
Vivian Sassen

"Viviane Sassen's first monograph, Flamboya brings together photos from various trips to Africa. Although Sassen grew up in the Netherlands, she lived in Kenya from the ages of two to five as her father worked in a local hospital. Her first return to the continent was in 2001 at the age of 29. Flamboya includes primarily portraits that Sassen made collaboratively with her subjects, some spontaneous and others performative."

The response to Flamboya was mixed. Though it remains Sassen's most famous work to date, it was also heavily criticised for depersonalizing the subjects and thereby underlining their Otherness. According to the artist Stanley, “she frames the black body as an object and not as an individual.” Thus, it seems as if these photos are reenacting colonial violence; the colonizer - the white photographer - is fixing the colonized - people from the African diaspora - in the inferior position of the Other.

But maybe there is no such stable interpretation of these photos. Maybe there are multiple perspectives of construing their meaning. The first perspective is the photographer, the second is the photographed subject and the third is the viewer. There may be a gap, what one could call a third space in which the experience of (post)colonialism and ways of being of (formerly) colonized subjects can be contested, reconfigured and re-imagined.

"As it happens with memories or thoughts, photographs are not isolated: they form a fluid stream of associations and connections."

Group 2 (May 1, 2020)
https://www.vivianesassen.com/works/flamboya/