On Identity: African Artists and the Diaspora
on 'Identity'
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| Kelvin Haizel, things and nothings, 2017. Installation view at the 11th Bamako Biennial. Courtesy the artist and Dawit Petros |
C& - In your work you examine extensively the condition of the image today. By doing so you also engage with your local environment in Accra. How important is that local/national perspective to you and your work?
Kelvin Haizel: The image in our contemporaneity has become a very complex and coded entity that does not only exist to index things, but has brought about a series of real objects in the material world. Indeed, images, in many ways have become objects in and of themselves. Consequently, the image has become ‘matter’ that is not to be perceived only with visual apparatuses and faculties, but a wide range of sensibilities are needed with which to engage the image. Even new vocabularies have to be developed to articulate what it is that we refer to as ‘image’ in this time. If, per Hito Steyerl, the image has literally crawled of screens, canvases, walls, billboards, etc. and has materialized as a part of our reality, then it is equally plausible to say that the ‘image’ also becomes some[thing] we may bump into, when backing up to see the expanse of a blank wall. The image-become-object may even pass through us because it assumes imperceptible multiplicities of material being. One can imagine, with the advent of 3D food printers, for example, it is even conceivable that the image becomes what can be eating and digested to become nutrients running through our bodies, only to become excreted and so on. The object that an image becomes in our literal space then, is what has held prominence on my radar of interest for some time now.
Let us pause for a second and imagine cutting and pasting any food from around the world advertised on the internet, editing it in Photoshop and printing it for lunch! In the process, we no longer edit only visual temperature, but temperatures of the image that can literally burn and bruise your tongue or give us novel culinary experiences. And if the object of such an image enters our physical space, containing the Barthesian Punctum, which exist only to prick or wound a viewer’s faculties of perception, then it is even imperative to begin arming ourselves against the threat(s) of what we cannot even anticipate. For the Punctum in actuality, lays outside the ambit of our control. Imagine entering a gallery and coming out without one eye because you encountered the Punctum of an image-become-object! May we not now need new kinds of paramedics on standby at museums and gallery openings, equipped with new means of rescuing us from the various havocs that will constantly be wrecked on us by these new forms of active, if not activated images? Exhibition announcement may have to be accompanied with disclaimers in case of any possible injuries. Artists and gallerists may now more than ever have to employ special image security, to prevent their images from running out before the opening. It is an exciting world to anticipate.
These potentialities go to indicate that our environments, whether they are local or global, are already plagued with images as objects, some of which are inherently vicious, causing small pockets of ruptures to the norms of our physical realities. If we are to consider localities in such potentially globalized terms, then anyone’s locality should be important. We, however, have to be careful not to play into that type of “National perspective” that could be smuggling in fascist tendencies via the backdoor. We are acutely aware of the rise of the Right all over the world, and we have to be vigilant against its cancerous spread even further.
By the fact of vesting interest in a subject or object as complex as the image, it is implicit that my practice engages ideas and concepts that are at once local and global. This is the reality we all currently share. Although the image is admittedly policed differently in diverse geographies, we all participate in several geopolitical sites at one and the same time, by the fact of our contemporaneity. Accessibility is constantly policed. Therefore what might be possible to escape through a screen in Slovenia via let’s say, YouTube, might read “this video is not available in your region” in Ghana. Who is this that is preventing my accessing of our commons? Whoever it is, censorship and access blocking only occasions inventiveness. Thus instead of waiting for the image to reach my region in due course, I just cast a net over my screen and go on the road in search of the wounds caused by those that have already crossed over. Hoping to return with a bumper harvest, from which I can remix in postproduction, all that I have gleaned. I straddle both virtual and actual worlds and this perhaps, is what brings me to some of the ruptures caused by the image-objects as accidents along the long road between Accra and Kumasi, which I captured in the series “desperately seeking forevers” and exhibited as part of my multi-format installation “things and nothings”. It is a play of the local and the global in complex ways.
C&: Why do you think "identity" (in the broad sense of the word) is a recurring topic with artists from Africa and the Diaspora across generations?
KH: To begin with, I will not necessarily say that it is any real “recurring topic” in the sense that the artists simply enter their studios and say to themselves, “I’m going to produce work about identity”. No. I don’t think this is the situation. Sometimes it is those reading the work who wish to see “identity” in the work of such artists. I am wondering if anyone ever considers that this very notion of “identity” is also at play in Koons or Hirst, with all the furor that the latter’s Venice Biennale work sparked. But for me, identity is a much complex thing and can open up to various possibilities of engagement. Nonetheless, I tend to believe, the question points to the overburdened subject every artist from the global south has had to grapple with in the last thirty, if not more years. It is as if all artists that fall within your above-named category must define and defend their artistic interventions based on a certain rootedness. I hold contrary views to this.
I am wondering if anyone ever considers that this very notion of “identity” is also at play in Koons or Hirst, with all the furor that the latter’s Venice Biennale work sparked.
I guess, to an extent the limits were defined during and after the ruptures in geopolitics that occasioned the multicultural turn in art. One of the pivotal events in an art historical context that instigated the canker of the ‘orient’ needing to re-address issues of identity was William Rubin’s “Primitivism” in 20th Century art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern” in 1984. In a bid to correct or revise the faulty premise of this show, Jean-Hubert Martin also curated the infamous “Magiciens de la Terre” exhibition in 1989, which further perpetrated the primitivist notion, where ‘identity’ was tied to the DNA of artists selected from Africa and the rest of the global south. With the benefit of hindsight, we see that by the multicultural turn of the late 80s and 90s, artists in the so-called African Diaspora, who, needing to assert their equality, did so partly through routing their interventions via the same identity DNA engineered by those ‘inventive’ curatorial mishaps. And those on the African continent also erroneously believed they had to refer their subject matter to some ‘originary’ notions in order to participate in the ‘global’ conversation. In other words, African artists too among other artists in the so-called “third world”, felt an urge to assert and defend their ‘exoticized othernesses’ in order to be given an opportunity to participate. This is how the subject of ‘identity’ has become the default trope, if we may, of artists from Africa and the Diaspora.
The problem is not so much about having to deal with identity in general terms, but it is identity that is shrouded in the domain of the ‘Ethical Regime’ as per Rancière. This remains within the realm of the cultural. Political identity, however, which is produced as a consequence of neoliberal economic policies and biopolitics, where expendable life is part of the normal functioning of the system, is often left untouched in this atavistic DNA. To effect any real change in the realm of atavistic identity, it is imperative to interrogate the truly political. The entire discourse of identity will have to be problematized to such an extent that we can no longer identify what it is in the way that it was known. But this has yet to seep through as did the previously engineered identity DNA.
This canker is not only propagated through the given media and formats of artistic production, but also functions through ethnographically oriented curatorial interests, that tend to drive exhibition production, when art from Africa comes into the picture. This is hugely unfortunate. One only need to look at calls for Art Prizes intended for Africa; or criteria for residency calls for African artists, or texts on the subject of African Art. Even discussions of Contemporary African Art tend to be framed in ethnographic contexts. We are yet to access any real critical texts on African artists that departs significantly from the atavistic.
I find this ‘identity’ subject quite dreary, if it is to be continually seen in uncritical terms, given that almost every artist and even non-artists deal with an iteration of this identity in one way or another. It is imperative for Artists, curators, exhibition makers, writers, interested in exploring identity, to do so in much nuanced ways.
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| Kelvin Haizel, things and nothings, 2017. Installation detail at the 11th Bamako Biennial. Courtesy the artist and Dawit Petros |
C&: How would you refer to your practice when exploring subjects related to your culture or identity? How is it relevant to speak about it in these terms?
KH: In 2014, blaxTARLINES KUMASI, Project Space for Contemporary Art, an artist collective that operates as an incubator of artistic ideas and activities from the College of Art and Built Environment in the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, organized the first in a series of end-of-year exhibitions for the BFA Painting and Sculpture graduating class. This exhibition was titled: “The Gown Must Go to Town”, based on Dr. Kwame Nkrumah’s famous speech, “The African Genius”, made at the launch of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon in 1963. The import of his point, was for academia, symbolized by the ‘academic gown’ to allow its influence to affect spaces outside the boundaries of the university, whereas allowing the environment to also seep through the gown, in a spirit of reciprocity. Subsequent exhibitions organized by blaxTARLINES KUMASI, have continued to champion these ideas.
This is the sort of premise that informs my engagement within the socio-cultural and most importantly political landscape from where I create. Furthermore, as iterated in response to your first question, images have crossed from the screen into our reality and become objects in our daily experience. They come to us from almost every geographical location possible, therefore the environment I talk of is already at once local and global in every sense. For example, when Toyota recalled some 6000 of its Camrys, Siennas, Highlanders etc. for the faulty vacuum assembly in their breaking mechanism, a number of the cars were already running our roads in Ghana. As to if Toyota cared to really recall those that were already operational in Ghana is another story altogether, and this probable negligence, may have also contributed partly to the record high of 20,444 cases of vehicular accidents on our roads in Ghana in that period, majority of which fell within Accra and Kumasi region.
In this sense, the errors of such a giant multinational company, participates in cumulative deaths in my local context, affecting the texture, literally of the social and cultural landscape. If in this instance, our local ports function as screens, then they failed to identify the faulty images, or low resolution vehicles, failing then to prevent them from crossing over onto our roads. My participation in this then, is to critique these neoliberal lapses and invite the wreckages via image-become-objects, into my work.
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| Kelvin Haizel, things and nothings, 2017. Installation view at the 11th Bamako Biennial. Courtesy the artist and Dawit Petros |
C&: When artists from Africa and Diaspora explore themes beyond their "identity", a conceptual artist from Accra is focussing on Bauhaus for example, they are often questioned in the way white artists aren't. How do you think this can be challenged?
KH: I think it rather reflects very poorly on anyone who, especially in this Century, finds a problem with an artist exploring ideas beyond the problematic prescribed context of “identity”. In fact it should be laughable that anyone would expect any artist to uncritically work with “identity” the world over. Having studied at the Department of Painting and Sculpture in Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, my practice is premised on starting with the void. What does this mean? My practice and that of many of my colleagues, does not privilege any particular medium, form or material. In the same way, no singular genre is held in high esteem over another. All the histories are tested so that maybe we will be able to invent practices for futures ahead of us. With such a potentially democratic space and spirit, it behoves on me to conceive possibilities anew. I therefore, have to also be responsible to the sustainability of my practice as well as those of the larger community. In fact one of the exciting young artists who is also operating from our Kumasi community is Tracy Thompson, who experiments with polymers by dissolving polystyrene in gasoline and testing the resulting molten viscous mass against gravity, creating perplexing forms that resemble geological formations, or delicate crystalline simulations. Who reserves the right to tell her she cannot because she is African?
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| Kelvin Haizel, things and nothings, 2017. Installation detail at the 11th Bamako Biennial. Courtesy the artist and Dawit Petros |
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