Birdcall961:Appendix C (2020)

 Birdcall961:Appendix C 

Produced on site at the Stellenbosch Triennial Curators’ Exhibition in 2020

Birdcall961: Appendix C was produced on site at the Stellenbosch Triennial ‘Curators Exhibition’, 2020. It is an 18m x 6m x 2m multiple mediums installation. This project is a kind of montage that brings together four image forms (a reportage video, charcoal drawing, an LED light drawing, and brailled pictures) to cohabit the same surface. All these forms have a mock-documentary characteristic that alludes to the hijacked Ethiopian airplane which crash-landed in the Comoros Island (1996). In line with my practice of de-centering the ocular as the privileged mode of accessing images, this constellation, further complicate the experience of image through sonic and tactile forms. The image forms at play are transformed into unsure immanent things through the artistic decisions that bring them onto one surface.

All images by Kelvin Haizel

Babysitting A Shark In A Coldroom

Babysitting A Shark In A Coldroom

From the solo exhibition (2019) resulted from wining the Vontobel award for young contemporary photography. Curated by Urs Stahel and Luisa Baselgia

Kelvin Haizel. “Babysitting A Shark in A Coldroom”, 2018. Four channel video installation on economy class airplane seats and still pictures mounted on dibond. Installation view. Image credit: Bene

This body of work which includes video installation and photography, was developed in the Comoros Island while exploring the idea of encounters in unfamiliar geographies. I travelled to all four islands of the Comoros archipelago (Ngazidja, Nzuani, Mwali and Maore) in two separate visits to experience the island region which I first heard about through the Aljazeera documentary “Island of Death” which captures the migration crisis occasioned by the French annexation of the Mayotte. Surprisingly the archipelago, which is hardly ever visible even on geographic maps became the center of attention in 1996 until it went back into relative obscurity. On November 23rd that fateful day the Ethiopian airline flight 961 which was hijacked twenty soon after it took off, crash-landed in its waters. It made headlines because it was the most fatal airplane hijacking incident prior to the 9/11 attacks. To make the fatal event even worse for the obscured island, the need to preserve 124 bodies from 15 different countries meant that the only coldroom on the island had to be converted into a temporal morgue. This resulted in the collapse of the SOCOVIA cold-room after it housed the corpses. It also affected the major source of economic activities for the youth on the island.

I staged this performative photographic series in that now-defunct coldroom for the series titled Babysitting A Shark In A Coldroom, inspired by the hijacking and an comic illustration by Baba Yussif, a Comorian activist, whose work critique the continued French occupation of Mayotte. Additionally, I filmed the ocean from where the crash occurred and superimposed transcripts of conversations between the hijackers and the pilot onto the video. Together with a downloaded news reportage of the crash captured by a tourist on the beach, I installed both videos on four decommissioned economy class airplane seats.

The project produces its own fictions based on these encounters with such events, places, people, language, narratives, and so on. At the same time it escapes the dependency on such encounters for its meaning by allowing the play of multiple image forms to become the fulcrum of engagement.

Kelvin Haizel. “Babysitting A Shark in A Coldroom”, 2018. Four channel video installation on economy class airplane seats and still pictures mounted on dibond. Installation view. Image credit: Bene

Kelvin Haizel. “Babysitting A Shark in A Coldroom”, 2018. Four channel video installation on economy class airplane seats and still pictures mounted on dibond. Installation detail. Image credit: Bene

Kelvin Haizel. “Babysitting A Shark in A Coldroom”, 2018. Four channel video installation on economy class airplane seats and still pictures mounted on dibond. Installation detail. Image credit: Bene

“Our present theme « to dream, to imagine » brings the concept of ‘virtual time’ to my mind. And the image that goes with it is artist Kelvin Haizel’s « Babysitting a Shark in a Coldroom » (2018) photography series.
For me the image, with all its paradoxes, impossibilities and contradictions, speaks to the radically new laws of visuality, of perception, and of cognition by which our digital paradigm sets for us. Truth is vital and necessary. But the experience of the world today, especially in terms of images, renders the classical truth-false binary inadequate.

The digital image (whether pictorial, sound, gestural, or in any other codified form) connects us to infinite dimensions in terms of time and space. Therefore to dream or to imagine in a world such as this could be a very powerful and emancipatory gesture.”

Text by curator and writer Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh as part of his virtual project in collaboration with LABO148 titled New Cartographies: Letters from the “Whole World” (2020-2021) on the theme ‘to dream, to imagine’

Works in this installation

BASIC I, No. 1-15, 2018 Inkjet print mounted on oval-cut dibond 38.7 x 58.4cm each.

BASIC II, 1-6, 2018 Inkjet print mounted on dibond 92.6 x 139.7cm each

Birdcall961: Appendix B, 2018 Two-channel video installation with aircraft seats. 16.05min

Maria Kappel Blegvad in conversation with Kelvin Haizel

 

                                       

Kelvin Haizel "Ironing Out Difference" Shown in "This is Not Africa: Unlearn What You Have Learned" at the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum.
 Installation view. Image by Anders Sune Berg and ARoS Aarhus Art Museum 

Maria Kappel Blegvad: Ironing Out difference, is presented in this exhibition. It features twenty-four ironing boards covered in canvas besmeared with abstract Pollock-like markings. On the surfaces of these you have added images in orange, all with identical wooden frames in the size of an iPad. When looking closely at these, one sees that you have also embossed text in Braille. Why have you chosen to work with all these layers and various kinds of styles in a single piece? How does this mixture of elements connect to the title? And finally, what does the Braille text refer to or say? 

Kelvin Haizel: It looks like you made sure to load your glove with enough questions before swinging, but I will do my best to spar with you. To begin with, I must say you describe the formal elements pretty well and I suppose the associations you make by referencing attitudes of the post-war art (Euro-American specifically) from the 1950s until their transitioning from the Modernist epoch into contemporary art proper occurred pass quite well. But since I situate my practice in the contemporaneity, I think I can get away with one cliché by asking us to look for the devil in the detail. Beyond formalist readings, which could even lead one astray into the allusions to Pollock, Ironing out difference could in multiple folds be a proposition to iron out differences (pun intended). It can also be stretched out to be an invitation to engage a discourse of difference, perhaps more intensively, on both symbolic and material textures. The series of paintings/objects is born out of my keen observation and fascination with transactional processes from commercial paint retailers in Accra and Kumasi, Ghana. These retailers mix paint according to the specifications of the individuals who are their clients. Whether it is for a person buying paint in a small tin or a business concern buying in bulk, such as the quantities needed to paint multicomplexes, these retailers serve their clients with great attention. What is more fascinating is that these retailers test each mixture of paint on the walls at the entrance of their stores. These colour swabs then create complex layers of paint over the years. It was these non-art procedures that I appropriated into my own process. I distributed raw canvases to these retailers across the cities of Accra and Kumasi and asked them to smear their paint swabs onto the canvases instead of on their walls. Thus, a certain direct correlation between painting as mark making and painting as a by-product of an economic activity emerged out of the engagement, which resulted in the canvases that you refer to as ‘pollockesque’. What one might consider painted canvases covering the ironing boards are a by-product of these commercial processes from the local paint retail economy. Devoid of any notion of representation, the gestures are somehow ‘pure’ in the sense that they emanate from people who are going about their business with no recourse to artistry. The work takes off from this economic basis on which the layers build up with each transaction. Stretching them over the top of the ironing board is a droll way to transliterate the verbal expression of ‘ironing out differences’ into a sculptural dimension on the one hand and also a way to introduce text to the sculptural object on the other, since the dock provides an island for that. As you rightly described, the dock, which would have been the part that receives the most heat, now bears Braille elements, being paragraphs taken from various portions of Dr Kwame Nkrumah’s Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for De-Colonization (1964). And it was purposefully selected because of Nkrumah’s proposal of a materialist approach to egalitarian politics in this book. But that is as far as I go in volunteering further information on the Braille element. The form invites publics to learn the language system in order to access what is referenced, otherwise it is equally valid to engage them as pictures or perhaps veils with nothing behind them. It hints at the responsibility of learning as a necessary step to flatten out the creases (to wit, ironing out differences), in order to better engage one another. Will you consider my dance steps as a fair attempt or need I bust more moves?

Kelvin Haizel "Ironing Out Difference" Shown in "This is Not Africa: Unlearn What You Have Learned" at the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum. 
 Installation detail. Image by Anders Sune Berg and ARoS Aarhus Art Museum 

Kelvin Haizel "Ironing Out Difference" Shown in "This is Not Africa: Unlearn What You Have Learned" at the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum. 
 Installation detail. Image by Anders Sune Berg and ARoS Aarhus Art Museum 

Kelvin Haizel "Ironing Out Difference" Shown in "This is Not Africa: Unlearn What You Have Learned" at the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum. 

 Installation detail. Image by Anders Sune Berg and ARoS Aarhus Art Museum 

MKB: Thanks a lot, I am very pleased with your thorough answers and deft dance around my many questions. With regards to the latter, I understand that I have to do some mental exercise and learn Braille in order to receive the last key required to unlock the final layer of your piece. However, if I may, I have one last question in my glove that I would like to throw in your direction. Could you please explain why you, in addition to the ironing boards, also chose to add a series of light bulbs installed with motion sensors so that they light up whenever someone enter the space. 

KH: First of all, this light installation is part of a new body of work that I am currently developing tentatively described as “highlights and exposures”. This series of sculptural installations are similarly created by translating parts of ‘important’ texts into Braille form and following the logic of cell arrangements in Braille to produce what I will think of as  “estranged sculptural forms” made with lightbulbs and other materials. Lightheartedly the work borrows from the attitude of ‘highlighting’ essential words, statements or arguments whilst reading. So one is literally encountering a highlight when you are exposed to this constellation. But it also finds a reading in photographic language where highlights are produced, resultant to exposures. The motion sensor is present to activate that exposure, the moment of encounter with light. Perhaps we can think of it as another kind of photographic apparatus but one that does not translate subjects into ‘corpses’. 

Kelvin Haizel "Ironing Out Difference" Shown in "This is Not Africa: Unlearn What You Have Learned" at the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum. 
 Installation view. Image by Anders Sune Berg and ARoS Aarhus Art Museum 

Kelvin Haizel "Ironing Out Difference" Shown in "This is Not Africa: Unlearn What You Have Learned" at the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum. 
 Installation detail cropped. Image by Anders Sune Berg and ARoS Aarhus Art Museum 

Note

This interview was originally published in "This is Not Africa: Unlearn What You Have Learned"  exhibition catalogue. The exhibition opened to the public on 21st April 2021 at the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Denmark