The Black Feminine and Black Masculine Principles of Selfhood.
The two latest exhibitions at Nottingham's New Art Exchange explore notions of Black femininity and masculinity shaped by society, gender, and most of all, by love.
Lauren Dei reviews Laced: In Search of What Connects Us, and Cut & Mix, connecting the dots between curatorial practice and self actualisation.
Simnikiwe Buhlungu, ‘ Notes To Self: A Mixtapentana (Laced Mix), 2021. Photograph: Reece Straw, courtesy of New Art Exchange.
No fixed self
Know thyself
Freedom to Embrace
Experience
From ‘Laced’, by Loren Hansi Gordon
We as people are made of many component parts – parts that have been pulled apart and put back together in ways we could never have imagined over the past two years. Plans were put on hold, events postponed, flights cancelled. And all we could do was wait, interrogating the things that make us ‘us’ during the stillness.
The way we put ourselves together, hold ourselves together, is forever changed. For those of us who love and live the arts, curators and programmers assemble the things that hold them together so we can get a little bit of ourselves back each day.
The New Art Exchange, Nottingham, kept its pre-pandemic promise to curators Loren Hansi Gordon and Ian Sergeant, whose plans for group shows were post-postponed many times. A gallery with a rock solid commitment to the community, international level professionalism and cited as The Blackest Gallery in the Midlands (direct quote from De’Anne Crooks while I munched on chana curry chatting with them during the opening night), not only did NAE rise to the challenge but managed to kit out both shows to launch at the same time. Laced and Cut & Mix look at the Black feminine and Black masculine principles of selfhood, cutting, sampling and lacing together the connections and ideas behind notions of self dictated by gender constructs, by society and most of all, by love.
Laced is a scatter-pattern of associations, turned exhibit.
As a busy content strategist in a communications agency at the time, Loren formulated the concept for Laced between working 9-5 and parenting her young children, grabbing spare moments to think about the show between walks to and from work, or when driving in her car. Notes on her phone were the holding space for her evolving collection of ideas and inspirations – these grew into the poem etched on the wall that leads into the show. Now studying a Masters Degree in Service Design Innovation at Ravensbourne College, as Loren finishes up her dissertation on improving women’s experiences in public health, her immersion in design-thinking has her constantly considering how to centre her curatorial practice on the people involved.
Lerato Shadi, ‘Series #5’ 2021. Photograph Reece Straw, courtesy of New Art Exchange.
‘There’s a line in the poem that I borrowed from Rahima Gambo whose film is in the exhibition” Loren says. “‘In the realm of being and experience’ – which spotlights the actuality of being in the exhibition. How do I want people to feel as a result of this? It’s a form of service design around the artists, or in the language of design, ‘the users’. I saw a limitation to more traditional methods of curating that broadcast an elite form of knowledge: ‘You will find this interesting and culturally relevant because We say so’ as opposed to ‘How can we explore this together?’ Very didactic instead of creating a dialogue with the people that it’s there to inspire and entertain.”
Loren’s career has transitioned over the past few years. After studying art curating for a decade, Loren left her role at Tate in 2015 and set up the international exchange residency programme for Future Assembly, an invitation for artists to immerse themselves in a different country, culture, context and ecosystem. New Art Exchange has supported Loren’s career for a number of years – after doing a talk at the gallery in 2014, she was invited by curator and researcher Paul Goodwin to co-curate the Untitled exhibition in 2017.
NAE then expressed an interest in executive producing Future Assembly, which includes an opportunity for the artists taking part to exhibit their work – Michaela Yearwood-Dan and Simnikiwe Buhlungu were on the programme; a conversation about Laced evolved from there, and the two artists now join the line-up sharing their lived experiences in the show. ‘Laced’ has a number of linguistic relevancies, with a nod to the lace market industry Nottingham is famous for, as well as Ada Lovelace, designer of the world’s first computer algorithm, who lived and died in the city. There are a number of other inspirations around the world too.
“I was thinking about this idea of a network, figuring out how to connect a collection of women artists from Africa and the diaspora. I’m very much into the etymology, history and cultural resonance of words; ‘lace’ opened up so many avenues for wordplay and association. Lace is how we wear our hair – lace front wigs for example – or West African lace in high fashion culture. In the poem, the line ‘lace is also to be tainted and adorned’ encapsulates the contradictions of being a woman. In some ways, we’re shrouded as impure and hidden away, but we’re also adorned and put on an unattainable pedestal.”
Rahima Gambo, ‘A Walk landscape VII, Maiduguri, Nigeria’ 2018. Photograph: Reece Straw, courtesy of New Art Exchange.
In weaving together themes relevant to the artists, love freedom and labour were fundamental elements that kept coming up in their conversations with Loren. Freedom and the subject of women in public spaces rose from a talk she had with Michaela about her experience visiting Johannesburg; the comparative freedom to travel alone in London feeling relatively safe was a stark contrast to the climate of the South African city’s streets, which she navigated mostly via Uber as a security measure. And Simikiwe, who on the flip side, was amazed that a 5-minute walk to her apartment in Hoxton from a launch party ending at 11.30 pm was a trip she could make by herself without a second thought. Contending with her own experiences of extreme anxiety in particular public situations, Loren started to think about freedom.
“When I first came across the Nina Simone quote in the video clip I’ve featured in the exhibition, it absolutely connected to my questions about freedom. ‘Freedom is no fear’. So if we are fearful when unaccompanied in public, are we really free? Over the time this exhibition has been in development number of women have been murdered for being alone in public space. It’s hugely relevant on an individual and societal level.” Zohra Opoku’s portraits depict women in beautiful clothing and jewellery whose faces are obscured by lush tropical plant leaves and fruits, a beautiful way to hide while clothed to be seen. Both Rahima Gambo and Simnikiwe Buhlungu embrace their right to walk freely with video and voice recordings as their maps, reclaiming freedoms in the form of undefined cataloguing of experiences. Their pieces lay outside of space and time.
Art of process, art of self-love, the art of being free
Love, labour, liberty
Loren’s poem quotes Ada Lovelace’s aristocratic family motto: ‘labour itself is a pleasure’, a direct link to the production processes seen in the exhibition. Lerato Shadi’s textile series present crocheted shapes sewn onto linen canvases and mounted on stretcher bars, pieces lovingly made after meditation, journaling and fasting for several days. Wura-Natasha Ogunji’s hand-stitched drawings also echo ideas of women’s labour, and more threads link the presence of the Atlantic in Wura’s work to Tabita Razaire’s video Deep Down Tidal, a dive into the memory of water as an observer of the triangular slave trade and how its pathways are mimicked by the underwater foundations of wireless technology.
“And then there is love,” Loren says. “My personal approach is how can we bring positivity and possibility into our experiences – a lot of what we’re talking about is incredibly traumatic and painful. It’s about taking action and changing the world from a space of positive energy. It’s a form of protecting your own heart; it can stifling and paralysing to constantly be in the opposite state of fear.”
Michaela Yearwood-Dan, ‘Freedom don’t come for free’ 2021. Photograph: Reece Straw, courtesy of New Art Exchange.
The love poured into Lerato’s works sit side by side with new paintings from Michaela Yearwood-Dan developed for the exhibition. Bright reds and pinks laced with glitter and statements from Michaela’s stream of consciousness depict love as a process of self-reflection, sometimes cynical and even doubtful, but above all, persevering. Visitors can access J. Muller’s 528Hz healing audio track The Love Frequency by QR code to listen to while exploring the exhibition.
Can I not let my face show without being told I’m unwanted?
Can I not exist at night without the demons of daylight
casting violent eyes on my fragile spine?
This space is supposed to be mine
COAT by Samiir Saunders
In a related yet opposite sense, ideas around the masculine fear of receiving love hang in the conversations of Ian Sergeant’s exhibition Cut and Mix upstairs. An unconventional alternative method of expressing love beyond words welcomes visitors through the doors. “It’s the smell of cocoa butter,” Ian says. “Something that’s so Black in essence you can’t mistake it when you walk past someone and catch a whiff of it. Where I’ve landed in this research is around the theme of love. So this idea of cocoa butter – this ritual of moisturising your skin to protect yourself against the elements – evokes love, understanding and self-care. Love is something that we as Black men find hard to embrace. To hear ‘I love you’ from another man raises questions about sexuality. This protection against being perceived as soft; blocks our ability to both receive and give the love we need.”
Michael Forbes, ‘Auto Portrait: After Rembrandt A Black Man in a Wig and Baseball Cap’ 2018-2020. Photograph: Reece Straw, courtesy of New Art Exchange.
Cut & Mix interrogates notions of race, gender, sexualities, class, place and identities in relation to Black British masculinity. A curator also in the end stages of an impactful academic feat, Ian is editing his PhD thesis entitled Visual Representations and Cultural Reconstructions of Black British Masculinities in 21st Century Birmingham.
“The idea is about breaking down stereotypes of Black men as criminals, as hypersexual, as hypermasculine. Black queer and Black feminist theory is essential for the deconstruction of Black masculinities – the Black woman, the gay man, the gay woman are all potentially erased from the conversation when we’re talking about Blackness and the dominance of masculinity. The Windrush Generation story, for example, is told as though only men came over. There were women, queer people and children who also travelled – and their stories need to be acknowledged.”
‘Cut and mix’ as a curatorial technique stems from French ethnologist Claude Levi Strauss’ concept of ‘bricolage’ – in referencing ancient craftsmen whose freestyle usage of materials and tools in making something new is cited as primitive, he challenges westernised ideas of the scientific and the concrete. It was art historian Kobena Mercer’s description of the Blk Art Group ‘cutting and mixing’ in their artistic practices during the late 70s and early 80s that resonated with Ian; his MA focused on the late Donald Rodney, a former member of the Blk Art Group whose collaged arts practice focused on gender, sexuality, emasculation and sickle cell disease, which he sadly passed away from in 1998. Ian produced an exhibition around Rodney’s work in 2016, which led to masculinity as the focal point of his PhD. As part of his research, Ian worked with Birmingham-based Black men’s organisation Menologues to hold conversations with a group of Black men directly, centring their voices in his work.
“It was important for me to gather a group of Black men varying in age range, ethnic backgrounds and heritages. I wanted to hear about their vulnerabilities and their issues with mental health, education, sexualisation, queer identities and whether the difficulty of being a Black gay man in the Black community may have changed from past to present.” Sampling some of those conversations, Ian and UK DMC Champion DJ Psykomanthus have created a soundscape of music and musings, played out during the exhibition’s launch. Cut & (Re)Mix is a Spotify playlist that attendees can add tracks to overtime.
Curator and writer Ekow Eshun acted as Ian’s mentor during the developmental stages of curating the exhibition; his influence prodded Ian towards important questions about the story of the exhibition, what was at stake in respect of the show, and why it matters to the artists involved. The show presents a mixture of analogue, digital, sculptural, photographic and video offerings from some of Ian’s most revered artistic idols-turned-peers.
Antonio Roberts uses code and tech to explore the representation of Black men in the early days of video games as overly athletic and aggressive; Keith Piper’s film Go West Young Man is the digital iteration of an artwork he first created in the 70s – his work epitomises the cut and mix approach by prioritising thematic exploration over an attachment to any particular media, splicing photography, painting, installation and digital media within his practice. At first, I do not notice that the songs covered by male singers in Beverley Bennett’s film are originally sung by female artists, which might say something about the collective desensitisation to male omnipresence. Sounds and smells are fused with touch to add another sensory element to the exhibition.
“Amartey Golding’s works include a chainmail textural suit – I want people to feel the weight, the coarseness. His work has such a breadth of variety, I felt like a kid in a sweet shop choosing what to include in the show. Marlene Smith’s piece around memory displays the embodiment of masculinity in wearing her late father’s garments – there’s a sensory element in watching her do that.”
Amartey Golding, ‘Foxtails’, 2015. Photograph: Reece Straw, courtesy of New Art Exchange.
My queerness spits in the face of that notion
that lightness is the only gentle energy,
that darkness is cold and heavy and dense like a dying star
From ‘Queer Noir’ by Samiir Saunders
A key win was securing Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s work from Autograph ABP for the show. “I was overcome with joy when that happened. Because of the Blk Art Group movement in the 1980s, Rotimi’s work represented a pivotal shift – in sexuality and in foregrounding a Nigerian voice where Caribbean voices were more commonplace. His piece Golden Phallus reflects Frantz Fanon’s social observations that the Black man is his penis. Also alluding to sexuality, the playfulness in Michael Forbes’ photography raises questions without having to declare ‘I’m a gay man.’ It’s about inquiring into how we become who we are in relationship to others – that’s how our identities are formed.”
Rotimi Fani-Kayode ‘Nothing to Lose I (Bodies of Experience)’ 1989. Photograph: Reece Straw, courtesy of New Art Exchange.
As NAE’s former learning and engagement manager from 2009-2011, Ian’s connection to the gallery is always underpinned by thinking of ways to engage a wider audience. Spoken word and film are part of the exhibition programme, with offerings from choreographer Lanre Malalou, mixed media poet Samir Saunders, Cut & Mix featured artist Amartey Golding and award-winning filmmaker Iggy London, who is currently writing his debut book MANDEM.
Ian looks at curatorial practice as a form of call and response. “I put out a call to the artists, they’ve responded with the work. They put out a call to the audience, they respond with their attention. Even the call and response with Loren’s show downstairs and the conversations that link the two exhibitions is so beautiful. Everything is integral to each other.
“I didn’t want to go down the route of the bad man image with this show. There are more Black men living mundane lives than there are involved in criminal activities, but you don’t hear about that. A moment I remember from the Black men’s group conversation was someone saying ‘at the end of the day, I’m just a guy.’ In reality, the minute you walk into a space, the construction of Blackness overrides the opportunity to be ordinary, which is what so many Black men strive for. I wanted to host this show in a space that reflects the intention of the exhibition, and NAE is that. It’s about being able to just bowl up somewhere and not feel a type of way.”
Laced and Cut & Mix are showing at the New Art Exchange, Nottingham until 8 January 2022.
