Author: raquelvillarperez.com

(First published in Africanah on 9 November 2019)

Autograph has on display the first major solo exhibition in London of Lina Iris Viktor entitled Some Are Born to Endless Night – Dark Matter. Running until 25 January 2020, the show presents a survey of well-known pieces from the series A Haven. A Hell. A Dream Deferred, which I won’t talk about in this text, and lesser known works such as Constellations, Materia Prima, and Dark Continent, an ongoing series for which Autograph has commissioned four new works.

I must admit that Viktor’s work is not one easy to digest. A simple interpretation of it would limit its narrative to that of a fairy tale of sorts: a lone naked woman is portrayed at night-time freely inhabiting a dreamlike exotic forest; that is the perfect backdrop for activating erotic fantasies in the viewer’s mind. Nevertheless, Viktor’s work is far from innocent or unsophisticated. To unfold the many layers and to decrypt and decipher the symbolism behind the artist’s work requires a proactive and open-minded intellectual entrepreneurship.

A welcoming quote by the artist at the foyer of the Rivington Place building already distils what visitors are going to encounter a few steps later in the ground floor gallery: ‘I only see the absolute beauty and the depth of black… Black to me is the proverbial ‘materia prima’: the first matter, blackness as source, the dark matter that birthed everything’. Not surprisingly, the use of black, the many grades of blackness, hues, nuances, and glares is at the forefront of this immersive exhibition; it takes over the canvas space, invades the gallery, and is only interrupted by glitches of gold and white.

The first works the visitor encounters are those from the Dark Continent series. These are characterised by the portrayal of a lone naked woman surrounded by foliage and flora of sorts. As it happens with most, if not all, of Viktor’s compositions, Lina herself appears as the portrayed character. We have seen in previous works, (displayed in the upper gallery at Rivington Place) how the artist already experimented with revealing and concealing sensible body parts using black paint. In the newer works, the British-Liberian chooses to extend the blackening of the body: in some images it is almost covered in its entirety, in some other, the artist favours a dialogue between the different shades of the black paint and the colour of her own skin. The intentional use of this limited colour palette directly links with the idea stated at the entrance of the building: the understanding of black as absolute beauty, as the materia prima. The artist challenges and negotiates the destructive connotations that historically and socio-politically black has had within societies: black has been equalled to dirtiness, soiled, hostile, evil, illegal and many more. Viktor elevates black to a valuable and precious condition, as a powerful asset from where everything is born.

The title of the series Dark Continent references the idea that explorers at the end of the 19th century had of Africa: a mysterious place wherein savagery was to be expected. Informed by ethnographic photography at the time whereby black bodies were captured and portrayed as vulnerable objects for scrutiny and to satiate the curious gaze of the whites, the artist uses the blackening of the black body as a mode of shielding it off, as a way of ‘creating a layer of distance and disidentification between the figure’s body and the potentiality or potency of desire’. (1) In a sense, Viktor intends to desexualise the woman and de-eroticise the composition by using the black paint. However, in my opinion, this is not so clearly achieved and its interpretation many folds. There is no doubt that a beautiful naked woman is the focal point within the frame; thoughtful at times, sensual at times; I believe her poses are not innocent but rather carefully crafted. Some would argue that the artist uses strategies of self-objectification to attract and retain the visitors’ gazes. Contrarily, a mindful consideration would understand the work as an unapologetic gesture of claiming back the agency of not only the woman’s body, but the black woman’s body. According to the artist, she embodies a universal figure representing humanity whereby histories and narratives can be interwoven, and futures devised.

As suggested earlier, in the majority of the works the figure appears immersed in her own world, her own thoughts, oblivious to what is happening outside the composition; yet there are two images in which she gazes at the viewer engaging in a moment of recognition with the audience, recognition of viewership. This is particularly visible in the series Materia Prima, which was the genesis of Constellations and Dark Continent. The woman that Viktor’s performs is presented as a powerful authoritative figure who reclaims space and respect.

The use of 24-karat gold across the works is definitely something that needs addressing since, on one hand, it occupies such a prominent space in Lina’s oeuvre, and on the other, there have been a few people commenting on how the feeling of overwhelm imbued by the (ab)use of it, made them leave the show rather soon and without an interest in inquisitively looking at the images, attitude which in a way, I found poor.

A fairly contemporary and extended understanding of gold as a highly commodified precious metal associates it with wealth, prosperity, grandeur, glamour, and even power. Nowadays, the idea of gold goes hand-in-hand with notions of capitalist accumulation and gain. The insatiable nature of human beings, ‘has driven the quest for gold, resulting in wars and empire building – from ancient African kingdoms to European colonial projects – large-scale migrations and displacements, and the devastation of the natural environment and those lives and livelihoods that depend on it’.(2) Needless to say that some of the most gold producing countries are located in the Global South including Ghana, South Africa, and Peru.

In opposition to the trivial and devalued appreciation of the precious raw material, Lina Iris Viktor endeavours to re-create the usage of gold in ancient civilisations across Latin America and Eastern Africa. In an interview conducted by Renée Mussai, Head Curator at Autograph and curator of the exhibition, the artist notes how those peoples attributed gold to the sun on earth since it is capable of emanating its own light. They believed gold served as a conduit that guided dead people through their transition to the afterlife and the reunion with the gods, a guide to spiritual transcendence and therefore, was extensively included in mortuary coffins. It is that condition of self-illuminating that informs the artist’s intentions. She extrapolates this quality to the black colour on the woman’s body ‘the darker her body becomes, the more light she emits, like an illumination form within. Her body becomes a purveyor of light.’

In the middle of the gallery space there is an enormous architectural piece entitled The Black Ark, a number of free-standing panels accompanied by blackened exotic plants named Black Botanica and that replicate the flora within the Dark Continent series. This functions as such an intelligent way of crossing-over the bi-dimensionality of the flat canvas on to the tri-dimensionality of an immersive installation that invades and activates the space putting the spectator at the centre of the darkened nature envisaged by the artist. Not only the installation allows for a playful viewing of the works over the walls by intermittently revealing and concealing as the visitor walks across it, but another layer of interpretation could suggest an apocalyptic visualisation of current environmental issues.

The exhibition curator borrows Maya Angelou’s notion of ‘Mothering Blackness’ to describe Viktor’s work purpose, understanding mothering as being caring, nurturing, protective, and kind towards blackness, its narratives, particularities, epistemologies and ontologies: ‘I believe there is some kind of reckoning that needs to happen, a re-gravitational pull in terms of the discussion around blackness… It has been for the most part, a very derogatory and negative conversation’.(3) Enthusiast of 24-karat gold or not, what is undeniable is that Lina Iris Viktor’s work provides with food for thought; she graciously interweaves complex aesthetics with conceptual and political commitment.

For more information on Lina Iris’ work, please visit https://www.linaviktor.com/

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Footnotes:

1. The phrase ‘creating a layer of distance and disidentification between the figure’s body and the potentiality or potency of desire’ is quoted from Dark Sublime, The Value of Blackness. Renée Mussai in conversation with Lina Iris Viktor. Unpublished interview at the time of this publication, facilitated by Mussai.
2. De Witte, M., & Oosterbaan, M. (2013). Introduction Gold. Etnofoor, 25(1), 7-13. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/43264006
3. The phrase ‘I believe there is some kind of reckoning that needs to happen, a re-gravitational pull in terms of the discussion around blackness… It has been for the most part, a very derogatory and negative conversation’ is quoted from Dark Sublime, The Value of Blackness. Renée Mussai in conversation with Lina Iris Viktor. Unpublished interview at the time of this publication, facilitated by Mussai.

(First published in Africanah on 11 July 2019)

‘Business as usual’ is a set phrase used commonly in the business realm to manifest an ‘on going and unchanging state of affairs despite difficulties or disturbances’. It also serves to title Alberta Whittle’s first solo show at Tyburn Gallery, London. The artist adding a good deal of sarcasm on to it, humorously appropriates and reinterprets the tranquilising sentence to refer to the lethargic and stagnant nature of the art institutions governed by good intentions and mainly lack of commitment towards creating real spaces for diversity and inclusion within the arts. I meet Alberta at Tyburn Gallery where we speak about the business of colonialism and its legacies today.

Raquel Villar-Pérez: Business as Usual has been your very first solo show in London hosted at Tyburn Gallery. Can you tell me more about how the exhibition came about and the choice of the title?

Alberta Whittle: I was approached by Alessandra to bring her some work for her to look at and then she invited me for a solo show to open at the end of May.

I usually tend to use humour in my work, and the title is meant to be tongue in cheek and reference the major themes in my work, which consider contested histories, climate colonialism, trauma and healing but also position widespread ambivalence to these topics. Ambivalence as a response interests me because it reflects such disinterest and discomfort with how privilege is enacted and engaged with. 

In particular, there seems to be an expectation that we’ve moved past these histories of colonialism, imperialism or even recent histories of genocide, or that we need to move past them because it makes people feel uncomfortable. 

There may be moments dedicated to speaking about these difficult histories or creating gestures to consider a parity of representation within institutions and museums, but it does feel facile, it can feel like a performance of sorts. Whereas what I’m hoping for is that we collectively actually become more involved in building institutional change through parrhesia [free speech], open discussions dedicated to reparatory justice, whatever that looks like for individuals or different communities.

The title Business as Usual , refers to this idea of what is happening every day, where there is no any real change happening.

RVP: There are a number of symbols that recur in your work. Particularly, in the works displayed at Tyburn Gallery, there is a prominent presence of the seashore, seashells and pineapples. These could be considered as part of the repertoire of the imaginary of that considered as the exotic . Can you expand on the use and meaning of these in your work and how it is also informed by science fiction? 

AW: I generally feel quite perplexed when people consider the images in my works as exotic because for me they are not exotic; it’s more about one’s perspective! I think the images are much more haunted, for me, in particular when you see the water. I consistently create images in the intertidal zone, where the water signifies moments of arrival or moments of departure, a conflicting zone.

AW: Some collages show specific places in South Africa. A few years ago, I journeyed from Johannesburg to Cape Town, and often felt haunted by the water and the histories of loss it signified. This one in particular was inspired by a view leading down to Seapoint, which I always saw as filled with Dutch ships from the colonial era. 

But I am also looking at the potential healing qualities of water, where the sea exists as a place of healing, but also of loss, because the sea is also a graveyard, it has been for centuries; it existed as an active graveyard during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and it is a zone that is still a graveyard now, if we consider the horrors of the refugee crisis with so many bodies being lost in the Mediterranean. So when I juxtapose images of the water with these collaged layers I am trying to encourage the audience to explore how we relate to these repetitions of loss. It feels as if we are still not dealing with history, because we are constantly repeating them. These crises are echoes of loss.

The seashells become symbols of sexuality, almost vulvic. And these vulvic images of shells contrast with other more phallic imagery, such as the pineapple. Within these tropes are questions around the performances of gender found in the Carbbean where the hypermasculine competes with hypersexualised and feminised images in dancehall culture.

Furthermore, the pineapple comes from this image I saw of Columbus arriving in the West Indies, where the painter would depict Columbus being greeted with ‘natives’ holding up pineapples as a symbol of welcome. The pineapple then was mythologised as a symbol of welcome, which for me is a very convenient myth. So, this idea that indigenous people in the Caribbean or the African Diaspora were welcoming Europeans within the settler invasion is a very troublesome myth. Much of my work deals with myths and attempts to create a puncture within those myths to reveal the varied layers related to power behind the construction of myths.

In many of my collages the image of me holding pineapples repeat and although there has been a reading that I am inspired by the Statue of Liberty, what I’m actually doing is semaphoreto spell out the word ‘welcome’. But rather than face the water and offer welcome to the settlers or colonialists as it has been depicted in 18th and 19th century prints, I face the viewer to spell out the words ‘welcome’, so that the message of ‘welcome’ becomes garbled or confused becoming ‘unwelcome’ rather than ‘welcome’ because they would be reading it from behind, and it wouldn’t make any sense.

AW: The silver figure is actually this phantom, this idea of being haunted by histories but also where black life can almost feel like embodying a haunting in the afterlife of slavery where there is still so much discomfort around working towards decolonial actions such as institutional change though reparations, cultural equity and parity.

I often feel very conflicted by Frank Wilderson III’s research on Afro-pessimism, whilst I find it some days incredibly sustaining and does bring a lot of my theories to life, I struggle with sitting in that pessimism, I do struggle with sitting at it and I am trying to be optimistic for a different way of being, which is way for me the idea of collage becomes a way of shape shifting, and it becomes a way of manoeuvring. 

Kamau Brathwaite’s research has been deeply inspiring within all of my research, especially his work on ‘Tidalectics’, which invites us to approach our understandings of the world with an oceanic worldview. Connected to his theories on sound and ‘riddems’ as methods to approach the contours of history is the limbo, constructed aboard slave ships and in plantation yards. My friend Camara Taylor also uses the image of the limbo as a dance form and as a visualisation of survival techniques for black people within their work. Similarly, in my recent film commission, between a whisper and a cry, echoes of the limbo are present amidst imagery of hauntings as embodiments of black life.  

And the limbo becomes a visualisation of ways in which, we, as people of colour, we black people have to manoeuvre in order to survive in the face of white supremacy – we literally had to bend our backs to survive, so the silver figure which repeats across my practice presents the optic of history resurrected from the depths of the ocean. It is this phantom of ourselves that we are being haunted by.

A few years ago I was in a residency at Hospitalfield, in Arbroath, Scotland, and I became exhausted by being so easily identified as the Other, as a black person within this very small town. Growing up mixed race amongst my black family in the Caribbean, I never felt comfortable claiming Scottish identity, which felt alien to me. Yet, recently I realised that Scottish ancestry is evident on both my black Caribbean mother’s side of the family as well as on my white father’s side of the family. So I decided to confront this history by using masquerade in the collage work, wrapping myself in rainbows. By dressing myself in traditional Scottish clothing, such as kilts or Arran jumpers becomes a form of masquerade where I’m assembling these tropes together but directly interrogate Scotland’s role within the slave trade in a very personal way. Within this collage the vulvic shapes of the conches alongside the pineapple, which becomes a phallus, are used as a means to speak about mythologies of welcome between settlers and indigenous people, as well as rapes by overseers and plantation owners throughout colonialism.  

RVP: Would you frame your work as afro-futuristic, understanding as Afro-futurism in the way the Mark Dery [Black to the Future] laid it out: ‘Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture—and, more generally, African American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prothetically enhanced future’?

AW: Most of my research is related to Afro-futurism, but much more connected directly with a Caribbean Masquerade tradition. As a Caribbean person living between borders, Afro-futurism and how it relates to British or Caribbean identity feels different from the North American sensibility defined by Dery’s Afro-futurism. Working from a Barbadian perspective, methods of Masquerade in carnival as a means of assembling objects and images together definitely informed my aesthetic as well as my processes of making. Carnival always presented a kind of conflict between being extremely attracted to it but also actually quite frightened of the noise, and the pressure to perform, so it is really odd now that I now do performances.

The possibility for moments of transgression in masquerade, especially related to speculative queer futures is a significant thread within my practice. Drag and performance permeates Mas or Carnival and definitely dancehall culture, which has informed how I prepare my collages, especially earlier ones in my Big Red AKA series where I use drag as a means to confront the expectations of gender within the Caribbean. These early works also became moments for me to develop my performance practice in a more dynamic way. 

I think Afro-futurism and how it addresses forms of queer speculation really appeals to me, because of the way it makes us understand new technologies of the body, explore knowledge transference, and maybe similarly to Kamau Brathwaite, explore sound and ‘riddems’ as a method for expanding spatiality between the present, past and futures. The way I think masquerade connects with sci-fiction is by expanding on notions of shape-shifting, where traversing to another realm, or exploring the possibility of embodying another materiality as a means of flourishing or surviving or achieving a new spirituality is very sustaining within my practice.   

Spiritual practices, linked to masquerade inspire much of my approach to making and thinking through my research. I think my work is very much a mash up, a mash with masquerade and afro-futurism.

RVP: I am really interested in the dialogue established between two of your works: (UN)welcome, that references the Statue of Liberty, and Meditations on Welcome, which I presume alludes to those who get to enjoy the paradisiac landscapes of the Caribbean, and who tend not to be the locals. I believe the dialogue is not only established between the two works, also placed next to each other in the gallery wall, but also enters in to the discussion of the present migration crisis, as the media puts it, not to mention Brexit. Tell me more about these works.

AW: The idea of welcome or hospitality is a very emotional concept for me. I have begun identifying more and more as being a first generation British Caribbean person with my right to be here; however, especially with the Windrush situation and Brexit my position feels especially precarious. In relation to ideas of welcome and the hostility, which I have experienced being here, claiming space is a driving force within my research for my practice, and above all questions of power and what conditions are in place with welcome and whom is welcome offered to.

If we consider borders, and the desire for borders, which is embedded within capitalism and white supremacy, how is that going to change with the current climate crisis? In my most recent work, between a whisper and a cry, looks at forms of decolonialisation and the climate related devastation that is accelerating in the Global South; the hurricane seasons are getting so much longer, flooding, cyclones and earthquakes becoming more drastic, and even in the UK, heat waves happening in February. So linking this extreme havoc of climate change with colonialism and borders feels very pressing in my work, making me wonder how relationships with borders may become even more tense, because essentially the Global South is already dealing with climate change because they are the vanguard, experiencing catastrophe before the West; so how do we understand welcome and who gets to offer welcome when climate change related catastrophe will manifest as land is disappearing and communities and countries literally fleeing. That is very emotional for me.

RVP: You are not only an artist but also a curator, and educator; in my opinion your work is illustrative of non-told stories/histories and possible futures. What are your views on how art may be of help to the current state of affairs?

AW: I’m very lucky that I’ve been part of the Transmission Gallery committee since 2015. I’m leaving now but this collective working with more than 11 individuals who sat with me on the committee has impacted my thinking in more ways than I can count. The work of the committee which is rooted in working towards decolonisation has led to some positive impact. There have been changes in the sector, where institutions are looking much more responsively towards how do they understand representation and hopefully redefining their constituents. But intention is not enough, there has to be commitment to change, and I’ve seen that commitment coming from different pockets across the sector, which is a source of optimism.

As part of the work we are doing at Transmission, we have been challenging who our constituents are and have been working to open the gallery to communities who wouldn’t necessarily want to participate in contemporary art. This is a long-term commitment and the work is just beginning, but we are hoping to create some new strategies where, rather than existing as a conventional gallery space, we are straddling relationships akin to community building. Hopefully these changes can make people feel much more embedded and connected. 

Within some of my other curatorial projects and social practice research I hope to open up conversations, so there is a sense of ownership around institutions, where these rarefied environments aren’t just for a privileged few but hopefully can become much more accessible and open to interrogation.

I’ve been lucky to be part of change but also witness change, but most of this is down to the energy and drive of the individuals I’ve worked with, who are highly committed to facilitating institutional change. And I think it is important for the sector to see that commitment in our programming and the work we are doing. However changes have to happen on a higher level, they have to change on a managerial level, and recognition of real change, is when you see people making decisions who are PoC [People of Colour].

Talking to Alberta Whittle was an exercise of enlightenment, vulnerability and open-heartedness; our conversation let me reconsidering my positionality in the world, my privileges. It shook me out of my comfort zone and my preconceived ideas and opened a myriad of possibilities to interpret the world I live. Diligently researched, immensely wise and witty, Busines As Usual is food for thought in a beautifully crafted collage form. 

For more information on Mónica’s work, please visit www.albertawhittle.com

(first published on Africanah on 8 April 2019)

For the past ten weeks, Autograph has been home to one of the most visceral and remarkably dolorous, yet intimately relatable and, somehow, life-infusing exhibition that I have seen in my entire career. Phoebe Boswell’s last body of work gathered under the title The Space Between Things awakened an entire set of emotions ranging from empathy and grief, to admiration, courage, and hope.

I first encountered Boswell’s work when I was being assessed for one of my first jobs working in the African arts arena in London, a year after I relocated to the British capital. I was simply asked to design a portfolio with Phoebe’s works. I remember those early works in the artist’s career, The Mechanics of Illusion series. There was something unsettling about them: the unswerving reference to a human being, in this case, like in many, the artist herself, the blurred lines, the distortion, the anguish of feeling as if being permanently in the quest for something, whatever it might be.

I have followed Phoebe’s blossoming ever since; I have trusted her work to the point in which I even put my naked body to serve at her Mutumia’s militia, a project about women’s who use their bodies to protest when they are not permitted to use their voices. The Space Between Things seemed a promising show I wasn’t going to miss.

I entered the exhibition as soon as I approached David Adjaye’s building Rivington Place. The architecture of the building functions as a kind of shop front window, and contrarily to what has been the layout of previous exhibitions, Phoebe’s show didn’t count with a moveable temporary wall covering the space between the privacy of the gallery and the publicly of Rivington street. Instead, it offered a panoramic preview of an immense self-portrait of the artist in overlapping poses that travelled across of the three walls of the main gallery at Autograph, setting an imaginary line of the horizon.

Once inside, I was entranced, not only for the mastery of the drawings, but rather because of the imposing, powerful, and unapologetically raw presence of the artist. The work entitled On the Line absorbed my self, making me feel minuscule. Phoebe was everywhere, looking at me sometimes, not defiantly but rather as kind of reaffirming her self; looking away some other times, contemplative, caring for and nourishing her (wounded) self. In an interview conducted by Debbie Golt, the artist manifested the importance of the use of soft willow charcoal for the mural, since its frailty resonates with that of the human body, which she addressed in the show. Boswell pointed out the non-permanent nature of the piece, and how she trusted the public to take care of it. Listening to her words made me think of our humanity; my trust, and expectancy that we are here to nurture and elevate each other; it made me think of how we continuously fail at it, but above all, of the irremediable hopeful state of knowing deep inside me how much we can succeed at it.

Phoebe’s art practice crosses over between traditional drawing, and interactive technologies in which the audience participates in signifying the piece. Indeed, accompanying her multi-layered portrait there were a series of floor-mounted TV screens distributed across the gallery presenting different scenes of her work Ythlaf. The footage displayed the artist being sweetly swayed adrift by the seawaters. A number of sensor pads that were activated by having people standing on them and released spoken word works, completed the interactive installation.

She Summons an Army was the next piece as I moved through the exhibition. It consisted of a series of drawings on paper depicting naked women with eye-shaped heads captured in playful motion but above all, performing acts of support and care for each other. Sistren-hood and the use of the woman’s naked body as a means of power are both re-occurring themes in Phoebe’s work.

The exhibition continued upstairs; if so far feelings of life-affirmation, self-reassurance, camaraderie, and care stemmed from the show, in this second part of it, Phoebe’s pain and sorrowfulness spread all over your deepest self and heart, encroaching them. The dark and small room functions as a space where the traumatic experiences are exposed; that is the moment of physical and emotional rupture, the genesis of The Space Between Things . 

A black and white video showing what looks like the surgery of an eye presides the room. The footage corresponds to one of the many surgeries the artist had to undergo in order to save her right eye after an unfortunate accident at home. In the video, the surgeons are implanting donors’ cells behind Phoebe’s cornea in order to fortify it. The video is modified digitally to make the blood seem ink in reference to drawing, distinctively, the main medium used by Phoebe. On the floor there is the visualisation of an angiogram that depicts the artist’s broken heart, which occurred only three weeks after the accident in her eye. On the left, her video-work Rapture. I learnt later, it was the undecipherable sound of the artist’s voice what filled up the space; like breathing.

In the last days of the show, I had the great opportunity to encounter Renée Musai online, Senior Curator and Head of Curatorial, Archive & Research at Autograph, who generously shared with me her thoughts on how the show had come about. She informed me that they “had been following Phoebe’s remarkable practice for several years, and had been talking internally about presenting her work at the gallery for a while,” so after a number of studio visits and in-depth conversations between Phoebe and herself, they offered Phoebe to present her work in progress at Autograph occupying the two gallery spaces in early 2018. Renée referred to it as “a profound and courageous body of work that constitutes an emotive – personal yet universal, too – interrogation of trauma, the fragility of the body and what I describe as the ‘poetics of endurance’ – it’s also, crucially, an affirmation of resilience, healing and survival. Deeply poetic, beautiful and profound – one of the most honest, courageous and generous artistic endeavours I have had the privilege to be involved in, during many years working as a curator. The idea was for Phoebe to inscribe herself, her story, her being into the very skin of the gallery walls, mark-making in its purest form, if you will – raw and transient – thus the commissioning element became a temporary 25m wall extended portrait of the self, her largest site specific drawing to date.”

As a junior curator, I have followed Renée’s career for several years now. I admire her sensibility, the love, and care put into each show that opens at Autograph, also the scholarship that stems from them, as they are deeply thought-provoking, moving, and very pertinent to the contemporary art discourses within the Global. Bearing in mind that every exhibition has its particularities that makes it special, I also wanted to know what it had meant for Renée to curate such a visceral and almost redemption-like exhibition that was Phoebe’s show and also for Autograph: “Curating Phoebe’s exhibition and working closely with her has been a real privilege, and without doubt a life-affirming and a profoundly touching experience curatorially. When I first visited Phoebe’s studio, and she so generously shared her story and current work, I knew that this project would require us both to be open and flexible about approach and ultimately, presentation – it became a very organic and intimate process, one that required a large degree of trust and commitment on both sides. I try to advocate for black women’s practices as much as possible in my curatorial work … and I’ve long admired Phoebe’s immense talent: she is, in my view, without doubt, one of the most remarkable and important contemporary artists working in Britain (and beyond) today – the collaboration has been profoundly rewarding both personally and professionally: an incredible artist, and human being. And for Autograph as an organisation, enriching and transgressive – in terms of medium as well as subject matter – part of a series of new chapters to come, which I hope will offer new openings, new beginnings, new explorations with brilliant contemporary interdisciplinary practitioners such as Phoebe Boswell.”

After observing the drawings of the sea with its the different tempers and moods that escorted the room of trauma, I led myself back downstairs to the main gallery. What a beautiful realisation was to notice tiny photographs of  Phoebe and her family at different stages of her life, attached to the walls of the staircase; those who were by her side during some of the darkest moments of her life. Are those ‘spaces in between things’ occupied by our most beloved ones? Aren’t they who hold our hand through our processes of healing and celebrate with us our catharsis?

Back to the main gallery I let myself be nested by Phoebe’s redemption again. I realised that the images of the artist floating, are images of her healing process at her family home in Zanzibar. I connected the therapeutic use of her Indian Ocean, to the emotional healing power of the Mediterranean Sea when I am back home, the idea of trauma that we all carry upon ourselves, our link to our most beloved ones: my parents, my sister, that are also away… I have connected previously with Phoebe’s work, particularly when it has addressed notions of not-belonging and women’s body as a mean of power, but, I must admit, never to at such deep level. Extremely poetic and utterly relatable, Phoebe’s seminal exhibition has meant a place for solace and shared emotions of our most intimate selves.

For more information on Phoebe’s work, please visit https://www.phoebeboswell.com