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