Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh in conversation with Kelvin Haizel: on Imaging, Imagining, Dreaming, and more.

Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh (IUB): What does it mean for you to be able to dream and/or exercise imagination in the context of your artistic work?

Kelvin Haizel (KH): My art practice revolves around the image (in both still and moving form) and just like dreams or imagination, gravity can give way to the free flow of signs in these spaces. The 1992 Hollywood film “Death Becomes Her” directed by Robert Zemeckis, and starring Meryl Streep (as Madeline), Bruce Willis (as Dr. Menville), and Goldie Hawn (as Helen) offers an excuse to respond. In the plot, both Madeline and Helen drink a potion which gives them eternal youthfulness, on condition that they take care of their bodies. But what they soon find out is that they became living corpses of themselves after drinking the potion. Their eternal youthfulness is only preserved through death. And since they no longer had Dr. Menville to run routine repairs on their bodies they became Frankensteins of their old selves. In the closing scene, they both fall from a staircase and break into several parts, and Helen’s severed head asks Madeline’s where she parked their car. Isn’t this potion akin to photography in its attempt at preserving life only by bringing death to its subjects (àla Barthes)? In essence, they enter a space where natural laws do not apply. They became photographs. They escape reality to where gravity has no hold on what is possible. And isn’t that exactly what dreams, imagination and even nightmares, afford the living? Perhaps it is the way dreams and imagination, like images, can circumvent the force of gravity, that offers the most liberating potential for me in my practice.

IUB: In a way, what you describe reminds me of Oscar Wilde's novel 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' where a semblance of eternity is preserved in a painted portrait. How does this perspective you derive from mediums such as photography and cinema (with the literary example as well) shape your conception of time-- literal, virtual, fantasy, etc?

KH: It is interesting you mention ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’. Although I am yet to read Oscar Wilde’s novel, I have treated myself to the 2009 British fantasy-horror drama film titled ‘Dorian Gray’ after Wilde. In this film, the young Dorian Gray’s painted portrait is not only a representation of him, but it also becomes the real thing that ages (affected by time) while Dorian himself remains youthful (the perfect picture). However, whatever Dorian Gray does affects his portrait. For example, when he cuts himself, it is the portrait that bleeds. This is to say that the Picture is not just a dead or frozen moment in time; it lives parallel to, participates in, and affects reality. It is an eternity that lives in the temporal. Something even more exciting happens; Dorian’s scars prior to the portrait also disappears. Although eternity is, in a sense, a moment which lasts forever (unchanging), his is an eternity that goes through changes. It is as though the picture crosses over to the mortal world to edit itself— like an eternal God coming to die and resurrect. One could relate it to how pictures of today cross over from screens into our literal space as Hito Steyerl suggests. We could also turn to the contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius for a second. Just as the judge of Zeuxis’ genius was signaled by a bird, Dorian’s decaying portrait was hinted at by maggots. Furthermore, in Zeuxis’ painting, the bird flies into an illusion of painted grapes, whereas in Dorian’s portrait one maggot drops from the portrait and lands in front of Dorian. In this sense, the portrait does not only pierce through the screen into reality, but reality also pierces into the eternal picture to affect it. Time in this regard is not conceived as moving from The Flintstones to The Jetsons, but in the more complex sense of heterochrony. I guess these are some of the things I pay attention to as I decoy images in my work.

IUB: Right, Wilde’s novel comes to terms with such immanently conflicting notions of time. Taking you up on the “decoy”, how exactly has this technique been employed in your work? Since your oeuvre involve layering various image forms, perhaps you could demonstrate through a particular work how this is achieved?

KH: I’m glad you took the bait! My most recent work “Birdcall 961: Appendix C” (2020) which was presented at the maiden Stellenbosch Triennial earlier this year should suffice. In this project, a line drawing is made by cutting a path into an 18m wall of plasterboard and lighted with an LED light strip. It appears to be a light drawing (another kind of photograph). And the path is also not arbitrary, it is a transcription of the path made by the Ethiopian airline flight 961 as it hovered in the sky until it crash-landed in the Comoros Island (1996). The path indexes hours of movement plotted into a single moment. It becomes a bundle of time spread out before one’s senses. No longer a succession of unfolding activities. Unlike a ‘whatever-Wood’ film where centuries are compressed into two hours on the big screen, here, not even a millisecond is lost. The entire duration of the hijacking ordeal is encountered in a single burst of light. In principle, this could even be an experience that relates to, and at the same time surpasses, real-time processing given that while the light drawing is only a skeuomorph, it is also a bunch of codes that temporarily find their material expression in the LED lights and plasterboard in the exhibition. There are no delays, the codes transcribe duration without breaks, the moving image becomes one with the still, duration becomes an event.


Kelvin Haizel. "Birdcall961: Appendix C". Stellenbosch Triennial, 2020. Installation view. Dimensions:18m x 6m x 2m. Image credit: Kelvin Haizel


Kelvin Haizel. "Birdcall961: Appendix C". Stellenbosch Triennial, 2020. Installation detail. Dimensions:18m x 6m x 2m. Image credit: Kelvin Haizel

IUB: Did this work involve sound?
KH: Indeed, not only sound but the tactile sensation of braille-as-image is also brought unto the same surface to complete and perhaps complicate the total picture. Siding with other senses to escape
the “stifling hegemony of sight” (Bonaventure Ndikung)i, my approach to the image has always been, however subtle, to disturb this over-dependence on the ocular. In the work cited above, transcripts of the conversation between hijackers of the airplane and the pilots were translated into brail form and fixed unto the same surface occupied by the light drawing. In this way, sound finds its loudest expression in image terms via the silent tactility of the brail form.



Kelvin Haizel. "Birdcall961: Appendix C". Stellenbosch Triennial, 2020. Installation detail. Dimensions:18m x 6m x 2m. Image credit: Kelvin Haizel

IUB: Fascinating. It seems to me that the image operations at play in Birdcall 961: Appendix C — whether as sound, felt, still, or moving— at once point to sources beyond themselves, in terms of the quasi-documentary approach, while moving beyond this kind of conformism to verisimilitude with the freedoms exercised in the artistic decisions to transform them into ambivalent image-things in their own right. Now let me zoom in on your work with moving images. The postproduction work Bangbang33ii (2016) is a silent video where you summon a similar poetics by highlighting the tensions at play between still and moving images. Tell us about the techniques and methods used in this work as well.

KH: Sure, but please permit me to take a slight detour before I jump into this piece. In Thomas Neil’s attempt to offer a kinetic theory of the imageiii, he dismisses the conception of the image as mimetic, a representation, a copy, and so on; to which I also subscribe. He proposes that the image is “the mobile process by which matter folds and reflects itself into various structures of sensation and affection”. Essentially it is a folded matter. Image is then not extrinsic to material, it is, in fact, all material. My approach to the work Bangbang33 shares a similar logic. To produce another possibility of a material manifestation of the image received by way of digital technology. The piece is a 20minutes moving image developed from an initial 1.32 seconds 720p video, downloaded from YouTube. The otherwise hurried viewing of the latter is substituted for the delayed contemplation of the former. By increasing the duration of the video from 1.32 seconds to 20 minutes on the editing timeline, the moving image slowed down completely into what seemed like still frames pulsating into being. What would have been sensed in seconds now lasts 20 minutes and moves at a painfully slow pace causing the frames to behave at certain moments as if it is a still composition. Also, it remains a “poor image” per the class system of images as it gains weight in terms of file size (something associated with HD, 4K, and other higher classes of images). One could say, its digital matter had folded unto itself too many times through the duplication process the video goes through as duration expands. In effect, its weight inhibits mobility; both as moving image sensed on a screen, and as a digital file to share from one device to another. Consequently, Bangbang33 approached stasis as it gained weight relative to duration. To infer from Neil’s proposition then, Bangbang33 is paradoxically matter folded unto itself too many times, thus appearing both as still and moving image.



Kelvin Haizel. “Bangbang33”,2016. Exhibited in Spectacles. Speculations... 2018. 20 minutes. Video still. 60' flatscreen monitor. Installation view. Image courtesy Kelvin Haizel.

IUB: And so, in a sense, this visual image is always in the process of becoming: it is both still image and moving image, and not any of them in particular. Let us move on now to the braille. How did this felt image come to factor into your system of montages and what does it give to your work?

KH: It was initially a gift from a friend which took my interest in that direction. In 2016, while developing a piece with sign language at the Disabilities Department at KNUSTiv, I became friends with a young woman who was visually impaired. She told me she woke up one morning to a mild headache and ignored it as a familiar sensation. On her way to lectures that day she collapsed and woke up completely in the dark. Having learned to live with it, she recognizes me by my perfume anytime I am close by and always feels my hand to confirm my presence. Towards the end of my sign project with them, she gave me a medicine package with braille embossment and read it to me as an indication of how she 'sees'. It was the first time I had noticed that this pattern of raised dots which shared the same surface as the printed text, did not conform to the syntax of the printed information. That was the moment of epiphany for me, realizing that the braille contains ‘folds’ directed at expanding possibilities for symbolic communication. The interest for me now is how it can complicate notions of visuality that privilege sight as it cohabits pictorial surfaces. Even overlapping in most cases. The network of relations it brings to the picture always requires one to learn anew. If anything has been more transformative in my approach to the image, then all credit goes to this gift I received. It is this transformative potential in the gift that manifests in these montages as you describe them.



Kelvin Haizel. "Untitled: Brailled medicine packages", 2016. Shown as part of my MFA thesis exhibition “things and nothings”. Installation view. Image courtesy Elolo Bosoka


Kelvin Haizel. "Untitled: Brailled medicine packages", 2016. Shown as part of my MFA thesis exhibition “things and nothings”. Installation detail. Image courtesy Elolo Bosoka

IUB: Now, what can you say about the potency of dreaming and imagining— particularly if we consider that we presently inhabit a world in lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic?

KH: We find that the consequence of this pandemic has transformed our entire social space. Sociality has instantly become a taboo in the realm of the physical, leaving us to regroup only online. We experience one another as pictures. Indeed, we have all literally been translated into pictures. The emergent consolation to this loss is to Zoom in groups, and the way we have learned to cope is to #challenge ourselves to imagine ways to stitch, collage, montage ourselves, and transition from one picture to the next. #dontrushchallenge #fliptheswitchchallenge to name just two. For me, imagining anew is a prerequisite for a post-corona world. What we are left with, is to join Pinocchio in dreaming it was real again. But given that the world that transformed us into pictures might no longer exist, we are compelled to invent another reality, another world. If we think of this pandemic as a portal, as novelist and dissident writer Arundhati Royv has described it, a portal could equally return us to the world that existed prior to the crisis. COVID-19 is something like a solvent, an acid that is dissolving the old world. However we emerge out of it, it will be interesting to consider in what ways we will continue to learn to live as pictures.


*** This interview forms part of the virtual project Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh is collaboratively developing with LABO148 titled New Cartographies: Letters from the “Whole World” (2020) on the theme ‘to dream, to imagine’. See more on https://www.labo148.com/nouvelles-cartographies/



Notes

i See Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, “Of a Photographic State of Being: Delivering the Photographic from Photography”. Streams of consciousness: A concatenation of dividuals. (Berlin: Archive Books, 2019)
ii Banbang33 was featured in the exhibition Spectacles. Speculations... curated by Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh in 2018. See more information here https://iubeezy.wordpress.com/exhibitions/spectacles/works/
iii See Thomas Neil, “What is an Image”. Theory of the Image. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019)
iv Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana.
v See Arundhati Roy, “The Pandemic is a Portal”. Published by Financial Times. April 3, 2020. https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca

We do not look anymore at things that tickled our fancy

A review of the Curators’ Exhibition of the maiden Stellenbosch Triennial

By Kelvin Haizel

Who has time for what tickles their fancy when there is a desperate need for more radical solutions to our precarious condition! Yet, that is what Bernard Akoi-Jackson (Ph.D.), co-curator of the maiden Stellenbosch Triennial seems to expect of us. He writes “Being so busied with bidding other’s will, we do not look anymore at the things that tickled our fancy”[i]. I contend that it is exactly what we should do; bid Others’ will. An Other with a big ‘O’ for that matter. Not many of us have enough carbohydrates to convert into energy to waste on mere pleasures of our yellow sclerae. Today, even the flaneur of 19th century Paris will recognize he risks being swamped by yellow vests in any attempt at merely observing the workers’ protest. So indeed we must bid the will of Others, it is on Others’ will that we can claim any act of true emancipation. Alterity does not necessarily lack authority, its will and by extension, authority is dispersed and distributed among us all. And so we will not be tickled by the feathers of the ‘belly-full’ at the risk of unsettling increasing systemic gaps.  That said, lets not mistaken this subtle poke to equate a flaw of the entire exhibition, there is more promise in the curatorial intent than I have given credit to. Tomorrow There Will Be More Of Us, the title of the Triennial and the guiding ethos around which artists are invited to contribute, spews more guts than merely to what tickles our fancy. Although we also know that many of the claims made by these fanciful art projects with no actual heart to carry through – curators and artists alike – only make us feel good about ourselves than to instigate any real change.

Figure 1 Curators' Exhibition. 2020. Exhibition View(Interior). Image: Kelvin Haizel

However, we can jump right into the exhibition with that out of the way!

‘Curators’ Exhibition’, ‘From the Vault’, ‘On the Cusp’ and ‘Concepts of Freedom’ are the four main exhibitions under the Triennial which opened to the public on 11th February 2020. The initial intent was to have the exhibitions up until 30th April 2020 but had to close to public on 18^th march 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Because I participated in the Curators’ Exhibition and had a fairly intimate engagement with most of the projects and artists through their installation process, I find it honest to speak to this part of the Triennial than the others.

The Curators’ Exhibition features 20 contemporary artists from Africa showing works that permit all senses to be tickled at least once. Some humorous, witty, spontaneous, and in a continuous state of flux; others politically charged, gloomy, overwhelming and even sublime upon encounter. There are spaces created to experience the abject and there are contemplative spaces. The multiplicity of experiences offered by the range of media make sure to have you escape the every day (at least for a second) into an imaginative world of possibilities beyond the colored lines in Stellenbosch. If this was at the end of the rabbit hole, Alice would even wonder if indeed this is the land where the horrors of apartheid were engineered, tested, exported, and systemically carried out to its furthest traumatizing absurdities. The former Woodmill now played host to 20 artists’ projects that almost had to compete with the sheer scale of the massive industrial architecture. The projects experienced here are far from modest in terms of scale. The only exception is Bronwyn Katz’s video and sculptural installation Wees Gegroet and Ouma respectively. One would not be wrong in assuming the title of the show to be “go large or go home”. 

Helen Nabukenya’s monumental fabric tapestries Abalamu Baseesa Gwaka float over your head upon entry from one of the two symmetrically opposite exits of the exhibition hall as though they are clouds. Leading to Zyma Amien’s installation of angelic gowns http:404 Not Found made out of 20x20 meters of fabric, which hangs from the trusses. Tracy Thompson’s circular plantain fufu petals Woven Scales hang adjacent Amien’s. Towards the opposite exit from Nabukenya’s installation is I Am You, drapes of differently colored and textured lace fabrics mounted on step concentric rings by Igshaan Adams. What do all the works have in common? If you ask me, I will say, although tomorrow is perpetually elusive, it still needs to be fabricated and these brilliant artists found a way to literally do just that. They seem to be visions of fabricated futures. Working with a group of women from her community in Kampala, Nabukenya shows us that collectively we can colour the clouds. We are assured by Zyma that we can discard the erroneous notion that resources are too scarce to satisfy all of us. She proposes that if the heavens got overly crowded and God sent down 404 naked angels, each one of them can be comfortably clothed with ease. And though Thompson’s fufu might not be ideal for an angelic buffet, it further reassures us that we have enough to even spare for the aesthetics of plasticity. Through such experiments, she simultaneously explores the paradoxes of life, death, transformational and mutational characteristics embedded at the core of material manipulation. These are all speculative visions of a tomorrow that is being woven.

Surely it is not only Thompson who reminds us of death. Death as a common denominator to our mortal quests is hinted at almost every corner of the exhibition. Some artists remind us that our mortality might just be another reason to be cautious in our optimism towards the future. It is echoed in the most obvious sense in Ibrahim Mahama’s Strangers in a Line, an installation of 10 ginormous coffins made from scrap wood stained with bitumen. Kelvin Haizel’s Birdcall961: Appendix C equally points us in a similar direction. An expansive light-drawing which references an airplane hijacking that crashed in the Comoros Island in 1996, leading to the death of 115 occupants of the Ethiopian airline flight 961. A further hint at one of the possible outcomes if one is bent on reaching their destination at all costs. Perhaps what was chasing them necessitated how fast they had to run, or in this case to crash. Bernard Akoi-Jackson writes “For whom acts of deliberation and patience are no longer virtues, what needs to be done always needs to be done, damning all costs”. Sometimes that is what one needs to ably poke at the real, encounter death, and if the universe is on your side you arrest life again. A Zombie-like figure fashioned from an adult body-scale mannequin and rubber tubes by Patrick Bongoy, Trail (Figure 2), sits midway between Mahama and Haizel. The uncanny sculptural piece installed like a paused figure in motion is suggestive of another kind of death even though evidently it is materially inanimate. It alludes to a subject in a permanently trancient state. The kind that results from being denied any form of visibility in order to move. It exists within the interstices, the invisible, the living-dead, the undead. Like Schrödinger’s cat, it stubbornly insists on being both alive and dead at the same time, inhabiting what became known as a state of indeterminacy.[ii] It equally exemplifies the political and racial underclass whose labour keeps the pristineness of Stellenbosch in such clinically white beauty. The eeriness of such structural whiteness is perhaps most felt upon entering Euridice Kala’s proposition of a “‘new’ habitat” Untitled: Still we are…ancestral people built on site. Of course, the artist intends this to reflect 3 principles for decolonizing architecture. She cites the round exterior, democratic points of view and multiplicity of use as the means to do so. However, I am particularly taken by how it injects local politics into what could be described as aesthetics of light and space art. The aperture created to allow natural light in could be a sly quotation of a James Turrell, although we can equally acknowledge that the land on which Kala’s habitat sits is marked by traumatic dispossession that is still a site of contestation. Whiteness here might equate death to Others. 

Figure 2  Curators' Exhibition. 2020. Exhibition View(Interior). Image: Kelvin Haizel

If Kala’s eerily whitewashed space typifies the whiteness of Stellenbosch, Stacey Gillian Abe’s Sylvia’s Letters to My Future Self 2017-ongoing invites us to another kind of habitat; a shack built with found corrugated roofing sheets and repurposed materials. The shack is the default shelter for the underclass in the townships in South Africa. Which is not so different from the likes of shelter for segregated ghettos in close proximity to developing urban cities across the globe. Abe does not only bait the predominantly wealthy spectators on the triennial’s ‘guest list’ to romanticize the perilous living conditions of the black and colored; she jolts us all into confronting the historical antecedents of such places by evoking the ghost of Sylvia Boston (Salem Washington County’s first black slave). There is no power in Abe’s shack, and you might see Silvia if you have the guts to stay there long enough after dark. Spooky right! Don’t be scared yet! Walk back into the factory and go stand at the very center of Sethembilie Msezane’s red circular room filled with lit candles, a plait of hair, and a bell. Say a word here and you will run for cover with all the vibrations bouncing off the metal walls right back at you.

Figure 3 Curators' Exhibition. 2020. Exhibition View(exterior). Image: Kelvin Haizel

Of course, we cannot lose sight of the many pieces that directly speak to power, the one thing that drives us all, perhaps! Reshma Chhiba proposes an installation of ten red-hot tongues fashioned out of steel frames, fabric, cushion stuffing, cotton and nylon thread. Titled Mother Tongues, it immediately speaks to the acknowledgment of and acceptance of difference as a starting point, while at the same time the consistency of the sizes alludes to a general sense of re-inscribed vision of equality. The red is as much aesthetic as it is charged with codes of gender politics and revolution. The site intervention by Victor Ehikhamenor Power House literally takes on the Woodmill’s now-defunct generator house in a critique of power. If you have seen any Instagram post of a group of spectators turned participators playing a game, know that it is Ronald Muchatuta inciting a form of collaboration that beckons all to get involved. He asks us to be kids again, to be inventive with no apologies, to face our dreams and leave reality to cowards[iii].

It is only in facing the unreasonableness of our dreams that new visions can be crafted into reality. Tomorrow is indeed for dreamers who speak to power unapologetically. So whether we are fabricating new futures, or speaking to optimistic visions, let us first dream in spite of recurring currents. What seems to be urgent is how to direct our visions towards total emancipation. It is important to be there, to be present with, and to act in will of all, to bid the will of Others. If you ask me;

“I wanna be there when the people start to turn it around

When they triumph over poverty

I wanna be there when the people win the battle against AIDS

I wanna lend a hand

I wanna be there for the alcoholic

I wanna be there for the drug addict

I wanna be there for the victims of violence and abuse

I wanna lend a hand

Send me”

 Hugh Masekela. “Thuma Mina” 

Notes

---

[i] See Khanyisile Mbongwa and Bernard Akoi-Jackon: Stellenbosch Triennale: Tomorrow There Will Be More Of Us. Edited by Khanyisile Mbongwa (Cape Town, with Tip Africa Publishing Ltd), Exhibition catalog. 

[ii] See Daniel Rubinstein: The Grin of Schrödinger’s Cat: Quantum Photography and the Limits of Representation. Edited by Daniel Rubinstein, Johnny Golding & Andy Fisher (Birmingham, the United Kingdom with ARTicle Press). p.g.39.
[iii] I borrow this thought from Slavoj Zizek who concludes a paper in defence of psychoanalysis stating “…as Lacan put it, the Truth has the structure of a fiction: what appears in the guise of dreaming, or even daydreaming, is sometimes the truth on whose repression social reality itself is founded. Therein resides the ultimate lesson of The Interpretation of Dreams: reality is for those who cannot sustain the dream”. Slavoj Zizek: Freud Lives! Lacan.com. 25 May 2006. Accessed on 8 April 2020 https://www.lacan.com/zizfre.htm

Babysitting a Shark in a Coldroom

Comoros Encounters

2019

 “Throughout his work we experience an artist who, like a virtuoso, subtly underlays the various encounters depicting the social, political and economic situation in the Comoros with a multi-layered pictorial discourse. He realizes the images as stray migrants of our world of experience – an encounter, a collision of ‘image’ and material ‘reality’, a running together, a meeting between two universes, each influencing the other.” Urs Stahel

Kelvin Haizel. Part of  a 15-piece wall installation "Babysitting a Shark in a Coldroom I" (BASIC I) series. No. 2. Inkjet print mounted on oval-cut Dibond. 38.7x58.4cm. 2018 

Kelvin Haizel. Part of  a 15-piece wall installation "Babysitting a Shark in a Coldroom I" (BASIC I) series. No. 4. Inkjet print mounted on oval-cut Dibond. 38.7x58.4cm. 2018

Kelvin Haizel. Part of  a 15-piece wall installation "Babysitting a Shark in a Coldroom I" (BASIC I) series. No. 12. Inkjet print mounted on oval-cut Dibond. 38.7x58.4cm. 2018

Kelvin Haizel. "Babysitting a Shark in a Coldroom II" (BASIC II) series. No. 2. Inkjet print mounted on Dibond.
92.6 x 139.7cm. 2018

Kelvin Haizel. "Babysitting a Shark in a Coldroom II" (BASIC II) series. No. 5. Inkjet print mounted on Dibond. 
92.6 x 139.7cm. 2018

Kelvin Haizel. "Babysitting a Shark in a Coldroom II" (BASIC II) series. No. 6. Inkjet print mounted on Dibond. 
92.6 x 139.7cm. 2018

 You may follow the following links to view the different reviews and perspectives shared by different publishers.


https://www.monopol-magazin.de/barrieren-und-blutiger-ernst
https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/afrikanische-kunst-kelvin-haizel-gewinnt-vontobel-preis-ld.1466675
https://www.contemporaryand.com/de/exhibition/kelvin-haizel-babysitting-a-shark-in-a-coldroom-comoros-encounters/
https://www.vontobel.com/en-ch/about-vontobel/impact/vernissage-for-a-new-gaze-2-on-aspirations-in-blue-white-and-red/
https://ursstahel.ch/kelvin-haizel-babysitting-a-shark-in-a-cold-room
https://www.artlog.net/en/kunstbulletin-4-2019/kelvin-haizel

https://www.fotointern.ch/archiv/2019/03/08/vontobel-foerderpreis-a-new-gaze-2-geht-an-kelvin-haizel/

On Identity: African Artists and the Diaspora

  

Full Interview with C& for the  Print Issue #9: Round Table
on 'Identity'

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 20^th 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.

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.

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?

Kelvin Haizel, things and nothings, 2017. Installation detail at the 11th Bamako Biennial. Courtesy the artist and Dawit Petros

You may also follow the link below to see the extracts published on C& webpage. 

https://www.contemporaryand.com/magazines/kelvin-haizel-the-question-points-to-the-overburdened-subject-every-artist-from-the-global-south-has-had-to-grapple-with-in-the-last-thirty-years/  

"things and nothings" at Afrotopia, 11th edition Rencontres de Bamako Biennale Africaine de la Photographie.

Kelvin Haizel

things and nothings, 2017

In things and notings, Kelvin Haizel explores the question of the image as object. His installation consists of  recycled car and motorbike parts (doors, headlamps,indicator lights ...), a video displayed on an upward-facing screen, and a video projection. The doors and headlamps are covered in adhesive sheet printed with images of car accidents. The various lamps are illuminated, wired together like a garland traversing the exhibition space, while the blink and tick fill the space in which the two videos are shown without sound. The first presents a grid of multiple images of gloved hands moving now quickly, now slowly, over a board game. The second is a film in slow motion. The installation as a whole plays on the oscillation between object and image, seeking, in underlining the objective nature of the image, to undermine its authority: slowed -down, the film is decomposed into independent images, while backlit images are headlamps...Photographs and videos are freed of their subjection to the subject or of their utility as pictorial supports, to take on an immanent function.  

Cedric Aurelle, the author of the artists' notes.

Afrotopia,

11th edition Rencontres de Bamako 

Biennale Africaine de la Photographie.

Kelvin Haizel "things and nothings"  at Afrotopia,  11th edition Rencontres de Bamako   Biennale Africaine de la Photographie. 2017. Photo Courtesy Dawit Petros and Kelvin Haizel

Kelvin Haizel "things and nothings"  at Afrotopia,  11th edition Rencontres de Bamako   Biennale Africaine de la Photographie. 2017. Photo: Dawit Petros and Kelvin Haizel

Kelvin Haizel "things and nothings"  at Afrotopia,  11th edition Rencontres de Bamako   Biennale Africaine de la Photographie. 2017. Photo: Dawit Petros and Kelvin Haizel

Kelvin Haizel "things and nothings"  at Afrotopia,  11th edition Rencontres de Bamako   Biennale Africaine de la Photographie. 2017. Photo: Dawit Petros and Kelvin Haizel

Kelvin Haizel "things and nothings"  at Afrotopia,  11th edition Rencontres de Bamako   Biennale Africaine de la Photographie. 2017. Photo: Dawit Petros and Kelvin Haizel

Kelvin Haizel "things and nothings"  at Afrotopia,  11th edition Rencontres de Bamako   Biennale Africaine de la Photographie. 2017. Photo Courtesy Dawit Petros and Kelvin Haizel

Kelvin Haizel "things and nothings"  at Afrotopia,  11th edition Rencontres de Bamako   Biennale Africaine de la Photographie. 2017. Photo: Dawit Petros and Kelvin Haizel

Kelvin Haizel "things and nothings"  at Afrotopia,  11th edition Rencontres de Bamako   Biennale Africaine de la Photographie. 2017. Photo: Dawit Petros and Kelvin Haizel

Kelvin Haizel "things and nothings"  at Afrotopia,  11th edition Rencontres de Bamako   Biennale Africaine de la Photographie. 2017. Photo: Dawit Petros and Kelvin Haizel