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Showing posts with label eshun. Show all posts
Showing posts with label eshun. Show all posts

Saturday, 13 August 2022

Artlyst: In The Black Fantastic London’s Best Summer Exhibition

My latest review for Artlyst is of 'In The Black Fantastic' at the Hayward Gallery:

‘In his 2020 Aperture article on ‘The Black Fantastic’, Ekow Eshun used a definition of the fantastic created by the scholar Rosemary Jackson which, “has to do with inverting elements of this world, re-combining its constitutive features in new relations to produce something strange, unfamiliar, and apparently ‘new,’ absolutely ‘other’ and different.”

With ‘In The Black Fantastic’ Eshun has said, in a conversation with film critic Chrystel Oloukoï, he “is interested in how artists from a range of different mediums (visual art, film, music) deal with the idea of race in general, as a social construct that retains a determining presence in all of our lives, through myth and speculative fiction.” He’s interested in “the fantasy of race and the lived reality of race”, but also in “interrogating that condition and looking beyond it” “as a way to describe new encounters, new ways of being and seeing.”

Alongside this facet of the Black Fantastic, Eshun is also interested in “collective memories, cultural and spiritual practices that artists and cultural figures are drawing on in expansive and generative ways, reaching back in time, as well as into the future, reaching towards myth, spiritual belief.”’

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

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Posted by Jonathan Evens at 14:22 0 comments
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Saturday, 9 July 2022

Artlyst - Re-imagining Essex July 2022 Diary

My July diary for Artlyst has mentions for Michael Landy at Firstsite, Elsa James at Focal Point Gallery, George Morl at Southend High Street, and Grayson Perry at Salisbury Cathedral as I focus on the ways in which the image of Essex is currently being questioned, challenged and re-framed by artists and exhibitions in and from Essex:

‘Othered in a region that has been historically Othered’ is a major new film that comes in three chapters moving from initial experiences of being othered, through the Grenadian island ritual of Jab Jab which provides a transformative moment, into a final chapter that imagines a new future for Essex by taking the othering and turning it ‘into a zone of possibility and new dreaming.’ Unlike her earlier films in which the actual stories of othered Essex residents were re-told, these films feature James herself channelling through her performance – she equates this, in an interview with Ekow Eshun, to Christians receiving the Holy Spirit – the experience of being othered and of re-imagining.

Her performances in these films are based both on historical research into the persecution of women as witches in Essex in the mid-17th century by the infamous Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, and focus groups held in Essex with asylum-seekers and refugees, black students, and the LGBTQIA+ community. From the focus groups have come phrases and concepts which have been incorporated into the lyrics and poetry that feature in the films. In this mix of words, sounds and images, James looks within ‘to find the source / of that redemptive’ and asks ‘What would Essex look like if the norm got turned on its head and the ‘Othered’ became the norm?’

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

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Curtis Mayfield - We The People Who Are Darker Than Blue.
Posted by Jonathan Evens at 22:39 0 comments
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