Press Paul Maheke - Galerie Sultana
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
Press
Paul Maheke
Galerie Sultana, 10 rue ramponeau, 75020 Paris, + 33 1 44 54 08 90, contact@galeriesultana.com, www.galeriesultana.com
Roxana Azimi, « Paul Maheke, corps délié.», M Le Magazine du Monde — 7 sept. 2019 Sur l’exposition Ooloi, de Paul Maheke, jusqu’au 29 sept. 2019, Friche la Belle-de-Mai, Marseille.
Patrice Joly, « L’été contemporain, 5 expositions à la Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille, 29.06 - 29.09.2019 », 02, Ete/Summer 2019
Pedro Morais, « Blackness ou comment disparaître en pleine lumière », 02, Ete/Summer 2019, p. 54-58.
Cédric Fauq, « Curating for the age of blackness », Mousse Magazine, n°66, Hiver 2018-2019, p. 226-235
CURATING 226
FOR THE AGE
OF BLACKNESS
BY CÉDRIC FAUQ
Through this text, I am aiming to set out an
unforeseeable agenda, and I should start with
a disclaimer: there is no such thing that can
be identified as the age of blackness, whether
it would be located—according to a linear
and unilateral perspective on time and his-
tory—in the past (precolonial times and the
development of the slave trade), the present
(generalized precariousness and fatigue, fas-
cination for nonthreatening embodiments
of blackness), or the future (in the advents
of liberation). The age of blackness is an
ungraspable time and space, always fleeing
while there—for some—, forever escaped
and too much here—for others. In the para-
doxical occupation of this territory—the un-
graspable—I see the necessity and potential
to study and revise the way we exhibit, put
forward, and make visible—thus vulnera-
ble—to move from exhibitions that are about
blackness to devise exhibitions that are in and
through blackness.1 1. I am here deeply indebted to the
work of the journal Baedan, exempli-
fied in the editorial statement and
This first requires us to come back to the in- first chapter (“A Holey Curiosity”)
terlaced history that makes up the relationship of Baedan 3: Journal of Queer Time
Travel (Seattle, Portland: Contagion
between blackness and exhibition making. Press, 2015) whose queer nihilist
I would go so far as to suggest that the for- methodology challenged and
mats and conventions of exhibitions and ex- inspired my approach to blackness.
hibiting as we know them have been devised
and maintained in order to surround black-
ness, to domesticate it so as to make it legible
Cabinet with Amazon Indian objects (and nonmenacing). Until recently, I used to locate the historical moment when that had
in the 1886 American Exhibition,
Museum für Völkerkunde, Berlin.
happened with the emergence of international exhibitions and the development of human
Ethnologisches Museum-Staatliche zoos (from the mid-eighteenth century). I was also seeing, in the different ages of the cab-
Museen zu Berlin. © 2019.
Photo: Scala, Florence/bpk,
inets of wonders/curiosity—not to be conflated—the extension of a colonial process and
Bildagentur für Kunst, Kultur the confinement of wildness, symptom of a desire to collect and preserve the unknowable,
und Geschichte, Berlin once it was no longer alive, and, more often than not, killed, murdered (a desire which
appeared in the Renaissance, in parallel to the inception of colonialism).
If some scholars have underlined the political and ideological project behind the invention
and development of human zoos and cabinets of wonders/curiosity,2 few have operated a 2. About cabinets of wonder/
comparative analysis of these two complex exhibition devices. However, despite chrono- curiosity, refer to the work of
Patricia Falguières, Genese Grill and
logical incompatibilities, I believe there are major conclusions to be dragged out of their Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll.
collision: my hypothesis is that the two perform liveness while exhibiting death. About human zoos, refer to Human
Zoos: Science and Spectacle in the Age
of Empire, edited by Pascal
In human zoos, the subjects were forced to perform what was believed to be “their lives” to Blanchard et al. (Liverpool:
please the audience and validate the views and assumptions of that audience in what they Liverpool University Press, 2008).
thought the “primitive” was like and acted like. Not only that but in parallel to the human
zoos, which were devised as spaces of authenticity, enslaved people were also coerced to
perform in theaters and cabarets to restage the invasion of their lands and replay the sce-
nario of their “defeat.” Sylvie Chalaye delineates this history very well—focusing on the
French context in the 1880s—in her essay “Theatre and Cabarets: The ‘Negro’ Spectacle”:
They are bodies to see, authentic bodies, in the flesh, objects of dis-
3. Sylvie Chalaye, “Theatre and
play offered to the curiosity of the audience. The black body is Cabarets: The ‘Negro’ Spectacle,”
spectacle, and is thus inevitably confined within an exhibition com- in Zoos humains et expositions
plex. Whether it is the theatre’s stage or the garden, one would al- coloniales: 150 ans d’invention de
l’Autre, edited by Pascal Blanchard
ways find a “zoographic” space exhibiting the “Negro” and offer its et al. (Paris: La Découverte, 2011),
spectacularity to the white gaze.3 400 (author’s translation).
CURATING FOR THE AGE OF BLACKNESS
227
C. FAUQ
Kobby Adi, Exit Strategies, 2018,
Bloomberg New Contemporaries
2018 installation view at Liverpool
Biennial, Liverpool, 2018. Photo:
Rob Battersby
Below - Kobby Adi, DYING TO LIVE
(still), 2018MOUSSE 66
228
TALKING ABOUT
Steffani Jemison, Same Time,
2017, L’économie du vivant
installation view at Maison d’Art
Bernard Anthonioz, Nogent, 2017.
Courtesy: Jeu de Paume,
Paris. © Jeu de Paume, Paris.
Photo: Raphaël Chipault
Emil Nolde, Masks, 1911.
The Nelson-Atkins Museum
of Art, Kansas City, Missouri.
Photo: Nelson-Atkins Media
Services / Jamison MillerCURATING FOR THE AGE OF BLACKNESS
229
C. FAUQ
These lines further emphasize the degree of performance inherent to the exhibition of
blackness when reduced to Races on Display, to borrow the title of Dana S. Hale ’s 2008
book. The liveness of the black subject, already dead (in cabinets) or dying (in zoos), was
always faked, performed.
We are now able to consider the act of exhibiting blackness as a gesture aimed at performing
blackness’s liveness while dead. This liveness/death interplay also helps us to understand
that certain modes of exhibiting are first addressed to a gaze that can be fed only by the ex-
otic, the spectacular, and the knowable (in the sense of what can be known), which is full of
contradictions: the gaze wants blackness to be alive, to introduce itself, but it can only do so
if in a state of near-death, weakened, amputated. This prompts me to claim that exhibitions
have never been devised to welcome the surplus that blackness is, contains, and exceeds.
More than that: they have been devised for that surplus to be suppressed.
The Chambers of Art and Wonders of the Late Renaissance
offer themselves as the phantasmagoria of the modern
4. Patricia Falguières, preface museum, its dark side, its nightmare.4
to Les Cabinets d’art et de merveilles
de la Renaissance tardive (Paris:
Editions Macula, 2012), 57 (author’s Patricia Falguières helps us to understand that the establishment of
translation). museums took place in opposition to cabinets of wonders/curiosi-
ty. These were messy, impure, and polluted, while their children,
the museums (from the nineteenth century), tried to set up order
and precision, as encyclopedism and mysticism were abandoned.
Museums wanted to be spaces of expertise: it prepared the ground
for the white cube to surface as this environment for clean knowl-
edge and appreciation, perpetuating class divide through the el-
evation and maintenance of purity. What happens, then, when
blackness enters this pure space? Or, to be more precise: what
happens when blackness is enclosed by purity?
A very particular, not to say bewildering, series of paintings em-
bodies and complicates the performance/exhibition conundrum
previously touched upon. These are paintings by an obscure char-
acter: Emil Nolde (1867-1956), who was the subject of a retrospec-
tive in the summer of 2018 at the National Gallery of Ireland. I use the word obscure as I am Atiéna Lansade, Untitled (Baby
I swear it’s deja vu, New Orleans,
not entirely sure how to position myself toward the person—and thus the artist. Indeed, 1997), 2018. Courtesy: Cell Project
Nolde was a Nazi. Contradictory fact: his works had also been deemed “degenerate” by the Space, London. Photo: Rob Harris
Nazi government. The series of works I would like to focus on is from 1911, and has been
mostly (but not only) inspired by collection displays of Berlin’s Museum für Völkerkunde
(Museum of Ethnography)—specifically, masks of different origins but also preserved
heads (from South America, Mexico, Nigeria, the Solomon Islands, and more).
I consider the four paintings of the series an attempt at rehanging the collections they origi-
nated from. According to Nolde ’s autobiography, it seems he had a lot to say about the way
Western museums were dealing with so-called “tribal art,” which we know was a precious
material for the avant-gardes and thus, to them, deserved particular care. However, at the
turn of the century, directors of museums of ethnology were conflicted about the method to
5. Jill Lloyd, “Emil Nolde ’s adopt, as explained in Jill Lloyd’s analysis of the Masks Still Life series:5 to classify accord-
Drawings from the Museum für ing to aesthetic and sensible qualities or to organize according to more rational parameters
Völkerkunde, Berlin, and the
‘Maskenstilleben 1–4,’ 1911,” (date, geographical area).
Burlington Magazine 127, no. 987
(London: Burlington Magazine
Publications, June 1985): 380–85.
What is made evident in these paintings is the life (re)injected into the masks and heads,
which then become more than objects in the space of the painting, which stands for another
type of cabinet, another kind of vitrine, one that—maybe—doesn’t reify and crystallize.
Here, the masks and heads perform by themselves, instead of being reduced to mere ar-
tifacts and objects of collections. The other important point is the new proximity created
between masks and heads from different geographical contexts (as they were separated in
the museums they were found in, categorized according to their geographic provenance).
Two other things to underline have to do with language and naming: the lack of indications
of the origin of each mask/head, as well as the titles of the works (Masks Still Life), which
emphasize the ambiguousness of the masks as bearing an agency of their own as well as the
blurriness between the masks and the heads.
There is a lot to unpack here. But I am really attracted by the idea of these paintings em-
bodying a complex curatorial gesture, manifested through several paintings, subverting the
legacy of both the cabinets of wonder/curiosity and the human zoo.
I now need to backtrack a little. I would like to speculate on the idea of exhibiting black-
ness, as an act. Not an act that could be located in history, nor an act that manifests as
an exhibition or proto-exhibition. I am here thinking of “exhibiting” in the sense of mon-
trer (French, “to show”), which differs from exposer (French, “to display”). Thinking
about the problems posed by exhibitions about blackness, I come to wonder: what if theMOUSSE 66
232
TALKING ABOUT
gesture that precedes the display is the unveiling, the indication, trig-
gered by a speech act, the naming. What if we were to consider naming
as a primary curatorial gesture: that which exhibits? What if exhibiting
blackness started with the injunction “You’re black” / “They’re black” /
“This is black”?
Let’s speculate even further. Before blackness and whiteness meet and clash,
blackness and whiteness weren’t. It took the encounter, a second big bang, for
the words to be shouted out. In our collective imaginary, in the Western world,
whiteness would have been the first to unveil and exhibit the other. Arriving
from somewhere else, it was “in motion” and thus on the watch: ready to
shoot and shout. Blackness wasn’t prepared. But this doesn’t mean that black-
ness wasn’t. Following Fred Moten’s thoughts, I believe in blackness before
blackness. Meaning something that cannot be grasped despite the fact that it
seems so much here, as it is now named, but before the naming.6 A blackness 6. The chapter “Kidnapping
that antedated the naming act, the first “exhibition” of blackness. Maybe this is Language” in Stephen Greenblatt,
Marvelous Possessions: The Wonders
where the age of blackness could be located. Or rather, unlocated. of the New World (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1991),
offers a great analysis of the “first
This primary act of naming the Blacks, enclosing blackness, enacted by the encounters” and the role language
colonizers, while perpetuating violence, had a great impact on what was next to played in them.
come. Several artists and thinkers come back to the first time they were called
“black,” such as psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
or artist Victoria Santa Cruz in Me Gritaron Negra (They Called Me Black)
(1978), both told through the recounting of a fall.7 It would be interesting to re- 7. For more on the relationship
write the history of these “calls/falls” as “forced exhibition” (which would also between the “call” and the “fall”, see
André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance:
enable us to better understand the relationship between blackness and polic- Performance and the Politics of
ing). The reclaiming of these moments by black people themselves is also of in- Movement (New York: Routledge,
2006) and specifically the fifth chap-
terest, as it operates a reversal in the exhibiting nature of the naming: for a black ter: “Stumbling Dance: William
person to call themselves black is to take back the ownership of how they ap- Pope.L’s crawls”.
pear within a white field of vision. It also means the possibility of disappearing.
At this stage, we can start drawing some conclusions. This fast-paced chronology of the
relationship between blackness and exhibiting—not only exhibition—is helpful in order to
better consider where we are today. The craze for black artists and artists of color in the name
of representational fairness and decolonizing strategies should be deeply interrogated. As a
gay/queer mixed-race curator, I find myself bothered by the recuperation and reducing of
questions of race to mere issues of representation and historical revisions. I believe that there
is much more to do, something that could be labelled “queering blackness,” which would ex-
periment with forms and display strategies, ways of producing and exhibiting art that would
invent new poethics—following Denise Ferreira da Silva’s thinking. Make space for the
unbelievable and the unknowable. Artists have been doing this work, and a new generation is
clearly taking this direction and pushing it further. But the practices clearly clash with the
“exhibitionary complex” 8 8. Cf. Tony Bennett, “The Exhibi-
sustained by curating. tionary Complex” New Formations,
Issue 4: Cultural Technologies
(London: Lawrence & Wishart,
The need to revise and Spring 1988): 73–102.
question the place of cu-
rating in this whole mess
is thus not only important
but also crucial. This is
where the strategies put
in place by Emil Nolde
in his Masks Still Life
paintings can help us: (1)
reconfiguring the exhi-
bition—performance/
death-liveness interplay;
(2) embracing inaccuracy
inferred by a sacrilegious
relationship to knowl-
edge; and (3) questioning
the act of naming as an ex-
hibitionary gesture.
Victoria Santa Cruz, Me gritaron
negra (stills), 1978. Courtesy:
Odin Teatret Film & Odin Teatret
I would thus advocate for exhibitions that unperform blackness, in the vein of the practices of
Archives, Holstebro, Denmark Ligia Lewis and Paul Maheke, who, in their treatment of space and dance, work toward the
surfacing of what it takes for a body—and a voice—to appear and disappear (thus already
9. Fred Moten, Blackness and
blurring the lines between the living and the dead, as demarcated in the West). Unperformance Nonperformance, 2015 (pronounced
is probably more nuanced than nonperformance, a term notably employed, theorized, and po- at the Museum of Modern Art,
eticized by Fred Moten in his important lecture “Blackness and Nonperformance” (2015).9 New York on September 25, 2015).
Available at https://www.youtube.
It also puts refusal (of representation and spectacle) in motion, instead of immobilizing it. com/watch?v=G2leiFByIIg
The question is then: is there scope for exhibitions to unperform themselves? (Last accessed on 28/12/2018)CURATING FOR THE AGE OF BLACKNESS
233
C. FAUQ
free.yard, PRAISE N PAY
IT / PULL UP, COME INTO
THE RISE installation view
at the South London
Gallery, London, 2018.
Photo: Andy StaggMOUSSE 66
234
TALKING ABOUT
Paul Maheke, Dans l’éther, la, ou
l’eau, 2018, À Cris Ouverts instal-
lation view at Galerie Art & Essai,
Rennes, 6 th edition of Les Ateliers
de Rennes – Contemporary Art
Biennale, 2018. © Paul Maheke.
Courtesy: Galerie Sultana, Paris.
Photo: Aurélien Mole
Rammellzee, Maestro (detail),
1979, RAMMΣLLZΣΣ: Racing
for Thunder at Red Bull Arts New
York, 2018. © The Rammellzee
Estate 2018. Courtesy: Yaki
Kornblit and Red Bull Arts,
New York. Photo: Lance BrewerCURATING FOR THE AGE OF BLACKNESS
235
C. FAUQ
Another important aspect of the work that needs to be done has to do with unnaming.
There need to be more lexicons formed in order to deal with blackness, to think and exhibit
through and in blackness, and to inhabit its ungraspability. The works of artists such as
Rammellzee (with his alphabet and equations)
and Steffani Jemison (working on secret lan-
guages, musical notations, and gospel mimes)
or scholar Denise Ferreira da Silva (with the
help of equations) are truly decisive in the way
they invent or revisit languages to seize the
legacy of blackness and prepare the ground for
something new to happen (beyond the end of
the world as we know it).
There are many more ghosts to give up: uni-
versalism in the first instance. It is now nec-
essary—in group exhibitions, as Bassam
El Baroni advocates in his 2014 essay
“Universalism without a Universal Subject, on
the Possibilities of Time in the Contemporary
10. Bassam El Baroni, “Universalism Group Exhibition”10 —to abandon the holis-
without a Universal Subject, on the tic treatment of artists’ practices within one
Possibilities of Time in the Contem-
porary Group Exhibition,” in given project. Clashes have to happen and
Cultures of the Curatorial 2, Timing: should be emphasized. Harmony is the child
On the Temporal Dimension of
Exhibiting, edited by Beatrice von
of purity and should thus be banned. It may
Bismarck et al. (Berlin: Sternberg be time to consider the provision that negation
Press, 2014): 83–91. and voids can bring into curating and exhi-
bition making (in opposition to complemen-
tarity). This is also valid for blackness itself.
In the exhibition Le Colt Est Jeune & Haine,
which I curated in 2018 at DOC, Paris, a sen-
tence was inscribed right above the floor plan.
It said, “BLACKNESSES RATHER THAN
BLACKNESS IS.” One of the desires of the
exhibition was to shatter blackness to better
manifest its multiplicities, make them palpable.
(On top of refusing representation, the exhibi-
tion was refusing blackness as something that inherently belongs to black people. There Olu Ogunnaike, Stock _107792391,
was the profound desire to create a rupture between black culture and blackness and move 2018, The Way Things Run (Der
Lauf der Dinge) Part I : Loose Ends
away from the idea of belonging, to think of blackness beyond the concept of “ownership”. Don’t Tie installation view at PS120,
Where that could lead is still unanswered). Berlin, 2018. © Olu Ogunnaike
2018. Photo: Steffen Kørner
The idea of palpability (as a counterpoint to visibility) eventually leads to my last obser-
vation, which may be the most perilous one: could blackness be considered a medium?
Not only as substance and matter—a permanently fleeting one—but also catalyst and
channel? This is something I am currently asking myself, as I notice several of the artists
I am collaborating with treat materials for the share of blackness they hold, and/or devise
and use their works as a catalyst to infuse blackness beyond the representational. To name
but a few, this is the case for Olu Ogunnaike and his wood dust and coal, Kobby Adi and
his precarious display arrangements, Atiéna Lansade and her poor images, Adam Farah /
The Share of Opulence; Doubled;
free.yard and their treatment of surfaces (floors, windows, screens)… Many more could Fractional installation view at
be mentioned: Dominique White, Samboleap Tol, Minia Biabiany, Lewis Hammond, curated by_2018, Viennaline,
2018. Courtesy: the artists and
Rachel Jones, Tarek Lakhrissi, Mathias Pfund, Ima-Abasi Okon, Tamu Nkiwane, Julien Sophie Tappeiner, Wien. Photo:
Creuzet, Abbas Zahedi, Eve Chabanon, Cameron Rowland. kunst-dokumentation
If blackness is a medium, what are
the implications when it comes to
curating? What needs to be done so
as to avoid the enclosure of the me-
dium and foreground its ungrasp-
ability? The strategies previously
outlined can be useful; they now
need to be tested, in and through.
Cédric Fauq is curator at Nottingham Contemporary where he recently co-
curated Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance. As an independent cura-
tor, he recently curated Le Colt Est Jeune & Haine at DOC, Paris, and The Share
of Opulence; Doubled; Fractional at Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna. Upcoming proj-
ects include an exhibition at Cordova, Barcelona. His practice focuses on de-
veloping exhibitions, gatherings, and programs that aim at complexifying the
relationship between display, blackness, and representation.MOUSSE 66 CURATING FOR THE AGE OF BLACKNESS
230 231
TALKING ABOUT C. FAUQ
Ligia Lewis, Water Will, 2018
performance at HAU Hebbel
am Ufer Theater, Berlin, 2018.
Photo: Doro TuchPedro Morais, «Le Frac Aquitaine acquiert une vidéo de Paul Maheke », L’Hebdo du Quotidien de l’Art, n°1607, novembre 2018, p.20-21.
Elena Setzer « Echoes, Oracles and False Friends: À Cris Ouverts. 6th Rennes Biennial,2018 », KubaParis, 2018. Echoes, Oracles and False Friends: À Cris Ouverts. 6th Rennes Biennial, 2018 “Some People want to run things, other things want to run. If they ask you, tell them we were flying” Bewildering things seem to have taken place within Paul Maheke’s installation Dans l’éther, là, ou l’eau (2018), the activation of which served as a prelude to the 6th Rennes Biennial, running from September 29th through December 2nd. Cocooned by an spherical drone sound, you could find yourself in a bizarre interior, composed of deflated aquariums equipped with soaked strands of hair, marbles and moist clumps of soil on the ground; curtains that have nothing to veil but bear traces of mold and several light bulbs arranged within flat orbital metal objects in front of a campy airbrush mural depicting an extraterrestrial world. Are we witnessing a cos- mic constellation or rather entering the sloppy household of a New Age veteran? “I took everything and made it my own”, states one performer, a member of an occult triad which seems to em- body both the essential elements of life and performativity, while installing herself within this slippery compo- sition. Here (dans l’éther) the dramatic, ringing speech of a static performer, themselves entangled with one of the curtains to such extent it becomes a toga, prophecies her own return in a circular argument: “I am because I was and because I was before and because I will be and will be again.” Echo is an oracle is an echo is an oracle.
There (l’à), in front of the backdrop of the violet Jupiter landscape, a body measures a square through taping and exaggerated walking, until the hips start to swing out in a well-known manner, evoking iconic movement patterns of Michael Jackson’s Dangerous World Tour (1992). A ghostly amalgamation of old masters of perfor- mance and pop culture. Between (l’eau) dance and theater, body and voice, the third performer floats with her wavy gestures, accompanying the proud interpretation of Michelle Gurevich’s ballade Party Girl. Intonation and body language become indivisible. Maheke, who often performs on stage himself, remains in the unlit spots, makes space for the female perfor- mers, whose individual languages become visible with and through their multi-layered appropriations. Paying homage to activist poet Audre Lorde, the interplay creates a renewal of her timid Echo, which is marked by a “timbre of voice / that comes from not being heard” (Audre Lorde, Echos, 1978). This ‘three dimensional’ Echo is different: she grabs back, uses her unique adaptability and makes everything her own through spectral laye- ring. Maheke’s domestic microcosm, which restrains itself from making every symbol legible, operates within the glitch of the untranslatable title: À Cris Ouverts opens up a semantic and emotive range through phonetic proximity along the chain of trauma, crisis, survival and ephemeral renewal. The 54 artists brought together in Rennes, explore and stimulate grey zones of dissonance, confrontation and clash, which withstand being captured by current logics of rule. Following Jack Halberstam’s rethinking of “wildness as a critical space, term [and practice]”, curators Céline Knopp and Etienne Bernard resigned from thematic chapters or sections. Moreover, the ten venues across the city seem to be loosely grouped like an archipelago, lapped by a shared, fluid, ecosystem. A similar rhizomatic microstructure might be found in Julien Creuzet’s fragile, skeletal sonic installation at Halle de la Courrouze, a former arsenal. It recalls the formation and survival techniques of mangroves trees, which populate harsh environments like unstable, salty coastal areas and estuaries while functioning as habitats for various animal species at the same time. Here, it is the rhythmical creole chanting of Creuzet which seems to fill the gaps between the metaphysical twigs and provide the breeding ground for a conglomeration of found material, engraved flip charts and multiple screens, pictu- ring a dissociating couple.
Spoken language as adaptable and transformative weapon, and the sea as mythological and political imagery seem to be one of the connective phenomena of this biennial. Most distinctly, this interconnection is explored by Madison Bycroft’s scenographic video installation, with its overflowing stage designs and aquamorphic sculptures, spread out over two venues – one of it located outside of Rennes, at the coast of the English Channel. In her video work Jolly Roger & Friends(2018), the open sea as a stateless transit zone and basin for fugitives serves as the political backdrop for a fictionalized love story between the female pirates Anne Bony and Mary Read. Underwater and under cover of the legend pirate flag Jolly Roger – “the banner that bans the ban” – the masked female outlaws secretly converge through an erratic language game. Ann and Mary, these tricksters with their flexible tongues, hijack one signifiant after the other and unify through consonances of faux amis, be- coming Ann Mary or Mary Ann. The self-referential system becomes a sanctuary for the secret lovers within a phallocentric environment. Meanwhile, their comic counterpart, two illiterate art dealers with stiff golden neck braces, are stuck in the loop of their hedged contracts around Jeff, Robert, Richard, Jasper. Bycroft stretches, twists and sprinkles language until it becomes an elastic mollusk, or something resembling Senga Nengudi’s flexible sculptures filled with sand and water. Sensual piracy is also key to Julie Béna’s newly developed video installation Who wants to be my Horse? (2018). Presented within a cage-like metal cabin with dark curtains (yes, curtains again), the work evokes a peepshow and turns it into a theatrical stand up stage. Again, it is the carnivalesque performance of storytelling itself (not the narration through representative ima- gery) that shapes and chains different portraits of a sex-positive movement: A sleek lady in a sink tells salacious jokes, a mistress teaches carefully about good and bad lashes, and the actual pornstar Madison Young confesses ‘why she never made it as a comedian’. Cheap pastries and tea in plastic cups are what lure the visitor into Oreet Ashreys video installation Revisiting Genesis (2016–ongoing), located in a clinical setting between therapy facility and quarantine site. Intermin- gling popular TV hospital series with Black Mirror dystopia, the twelve-part video work unfolds a dark story of necropolitics, interwoven with (female) failure caused by a system of globalized privatization. At the center are the mysterious symptoms and the aspired healing of the resigned artist Genesis, who is in a state of progressive dissolution. While Genesis nimbly escapes into a semiotic black hole, her friends try to reanimate her through the newest technological therapy – a slideshow, recapping ‘highlights’ of the individual life. “Death is optional” says the slogan of another company, selling programmed gadgets, which send happy selfies to bereaved loved ones. The experience of death as total contingency, as the “wild spirit of the unknown and the disorderly” is abolished through the infinity of relegating imagery. In her recap of this year’s major biennials, such as Manifesta in Palermo or the 10th Berlin Biennial, Susanne von Falkenhausen bemoans the ubiquitous post-autonomy of current large-scale exhibitions. Art, she states, is merely treated as service provider for political concerns, therefore an almost universal legibility the condition. However, the 6th Rennes Biennial keeps the promise of being somehow unresolvable, of promising nothing but an anthology of wild tales interweaving the flotsam of current floods. Just as Ashrey’s futuristic genesis leads back to Maheke’s primordial cosmology, or Bycroft’s mollusc fauna could be resident within Creuzet’s Carib- bean ecosystem, the works spin their yarn around each other through a similar poetical vocabulary and twisted grammar, which is often informed by performative, theatrical and ritualistic strategies. In a time of ubiquitous populism, such self-supporting networks seem to form a slippery statement. Elena Setzer is a writer based in Zurich, Switzerland.
Dominique Guillot « Biennale d’art contemporain », L’édition du soir - Edition du soir Ouest France, 10 octobre 2018.
Paul Maheke est l’un des jeunes artistes invités dans le cadre de A Cris ouverts, la
6e biennale d’art contemporain des Ateliers de Rennes. À découvrir à la Galerie Art &
Essai de l’université Rennes 2, jusqu’au 2 décembre 2018.
Paul Maheke ouvre son exposition personnelle intitulée Dans l’éther, là, ou l’eau, par une
performance de 45 minutes. Son souhait était de répondre à l’invitation de la biennale d’art
contemporain, de Rennes, en combinant différents projets au sein d’une même installa-
tion. Elle mêle une performance (Fire circle for public hearing, déjà donnée au printemps à
Londres), ainsi qu’une fresque murale représentant Jupiter, des rideaux drapés le long des
murs et des sculptures/installations au sol.
L’identité, la mémoire
« Elle s’intéresse au lien entre le cosmique et le domestique, détaille Paul Maheke à l’issue
de la performance. Il s’agit d’une cosmologie, de la création d’un monde personnel qui inter-
roge l’identité et la mémoire, les études post-coloniales et féministes, avec le corps comme
langage. Ces dernières années, j’ai essayé de travailler à un vocabulaire en tentant de
m’abstraire des concepts liés au genre, race, classe… »
Installation poétique et politique
Un travail qui l’a aussi mené à s’intéresser à la figure du fantôme, « être sans apparence
visible, qui navigue dans différentes dimensions, géographique et temporelle, et permet de
parler depuis des positions périphériques et selon des voix qui ne sont pas forcément ins-
crites dans le langage dominant ». Michael Jackson est l’un des fantômes qui habitent cette
installation poétique et politique, au même titre que Grace Jones… entre autres.
Vidéo et performance
Deux aquariums recèlent des citations de textes écrits par des activistes féministes qui l’ont
marqué et inspiré son travail. L’eau, le corps… des concepts importants pour l’artiste qui
évoque le corps, composé avant tout d’eau, comme une archive à décrypter. D’autres objets
installés dans la galerie, tels des globes lumineux composés en partie de matière organique,
sont censés parler du corps sans le représenter. Toujours la volonté de s’échapper des
représentations universelles.Pedro Morais, « Le centre ne peut tenir », Le Quotidien de l’art, n°1536, 11 juillet 2018, p.8.
Hannah Tindle, «The Artist Referencing Voguing, Bruce Nauman and Michael Jackson »,
AnOther mag, June 7 2018.
We speak to Paul Maheke about his current exhibition at London’s Chisenhale Gallery and
the disparate influences that inform his work
JUNE 07, 2018
TEXT : Hannah Tindle
“My understanding of identity is very much informed by third wave feminism and the
idea of the personal being political,” explains Paul Maheke. “But then, the other central
focus of my work is also trying to break free from the representational realm – especially in
connection with identity politics – and how we move forward from this notion. How can we
look at the representation of identity in other ways?”
The 33-year-old, France-born artist, who is now based in London, utilises movement,
installation, sound and video to re-articulate the representation of queer, black bodies.
Maheke is best known for his performance work in which he appears as a central figure in
the throes of dance, often invoking the atmosphere of a nightclub – a cultural and histo-
rical space synonymous with the nurturing of LGBTQ+ communities. “My experience of
dance in clubs has also really informed my way of looking at the body as a political entity
and how we can channel the body to engage in different modes of communication, other
than just the voice,” he says.The artist’s latest work – titled A fire circle for public hearing – is currently on display at London’s Chisenhale Gallery. The result of a three-month residency in the Dominican Republic, the exhibition is comprised of three daily performances choreographed by Maheke, set against the backdrop of an immersive installation. Here, he discusses how he combined the disparate influences of Bruce Nauman and Michael Jackson to form an enti- rely new narrative and his plans for the future. On establishing his practice... “I grew up near Paris, and I studied in France too. When I was 18, I got accepted to art school and received a degree in etching. I wanted to become a medical illustrator, actual- ly. Although it seems far away from what I am doing now with my work, I suppose there are similarities in that both involve the body. One of my tutors was a French contemporary ar- tist, and she suggested that I apply to National School of Arts of Paris-Cergy to undertake a five-year fine art degree. The course has a reputation for being very experimental and conceptual. So I was quite interested in that, because it was transdisciplinary. Even when I was solely making drawings, I was already conceptually concerned with three-dimensional space. I graduated from this course in 2011, and then moved to Montreal before getting accepted onto London’s Open School East in 2015 – I’ve been in London ever since.”
On dance... “Dance has been really important throughout my life. I never trained as a dancer or any- thing, but have been doing it since I was a kid. At one point I even dreamt of becoming a choreographer. It’s only in the last three to four years that I started to implement dance in my work, because I thought that it would be an interesting way in which to bring a visceral bodily action to my work – since my practice is very much concerned with the body and identity. It was at this point that everything began to make sense for me. It also coincided with the moment where I started to appear in performances myself. Before then, I was producing work that took the form of objects that I would leave in public spaces. I was really interested in the existence of the art object without an audience, which is very dif- ferent to what I’m doing now, where the work very much involves an audience.” On a collision of influences... “My influences and research have shifted over the years. I tend to investigate forms of dance that contribute to the emancipation of marginalised bodies and narratives. It was mainly focused in the US; so krump and voguing and those types of movements. But then I started to research a little bit more and tried to find a way of speaking from a European perspective too, using a mixture of the influences that I grew up with. These range from Michael Jackson to Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker to contemporary figures such as Ligia Lewis and Dana Michel. Mostly, I am interested in movement that resonates with some sort of social understanding of the world and a collision of things that are not necessarily obvious, from which emerges a new dialogue. For example, that’s how I worked when producing A fire circle for public hearing at Chisenhale; bringing together elements that would refer both to Michael Jackson and Bruce Nauman, but these two references then meeting in a body of someone identifying as a woman, subsequently altering the dis- course around masculinity.” On sound... “I started to work with sound back when I had my show at the South London Gallery in
2016, titled I Lost Track of the Swarm. I invited DJ NKISI from Non Worldwide to colla- borate with me on a soundtrack that would be featured in the show. Similarly, the piece I performed at Tate Modern for Ten Days, Six Nights in 2017 – called Mbu – included sound formed from clips I found on the internet, that I then compiled, remastered and remixed. For the Chisenhale show it was a very different process. I invited Sophie Mallett – an artist and friend of mine who I’ve worked with in the past and met at Open School East – to compose a one-hour long soundtrack that would accompany the performances, but also occupy the space while the performers were not there. I wanted something quite epic, with a strong sense of narrative. So she worked with repetition and the classic musical pattern of the sonata. My musical influences themselves are as random as the choreogra- phers I mentioned before. Mykki Blanco has been someone who interests me; not only because of his mixture of punk and club and hip-hop, but Mykki’s social position as a voice for queer people of colour and HIV positive individuals. But then there’s also someone like the late Pauline Oliveros, who I listen to a lot. She was also queer, but her level of queer- ness maybe less visible than in Mykki’s. The sound in my work never refers to these people directly, but they are always there in spirit.” On future projects... “The Chisenhale show is coming to an end, and I am working towards several other exhi- bitions and performances at the moment, mainly in Europe and the US. The most recent project is a collaboration with my two siblings, who are not artists. For this, I invited my little sister, who is a psychoanalyst, and my little brother who is a digital archivist – and also a musician – to collaborate with me. The piece investigates Kindoki, a form of witchcraft from where our father is from in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Here, we combined my sister’s research around the figure of the child witch, with sound by my brother and dancing by me. We first performed it last week in Brussels, and it is next going to be pres- ented at Centre Pompidou in Paris on the 10th of June.” A fire circle for a public hearing is open at Chisenhale Gallery, London until June 10, 2018. Daily performances start at 3pm throughout the duration of the exhibition and last for 45 minutes.
Kate Brown, «The 6 Must-See Performances - and a Special Fragrance - at the Estonian Chapter of the
Baltic Triennial», Artnet News, July 2, 2018.
A revolution can take many forms, but peaceful acts of singing and hand-hol-
ding are rarely the first images associated with national revolt. For the Baltic
countries, however, these kinds of acts defined much of their revolution in
the years leading up to 1991 when the Soviet Union’s postwar occupation
ended. Citizens from the three countries comprising the Baltic—Estonia,
Latvia, and Lithuania—formed a human chain that extended some 600 kilo-
meters (373 miles). They belted out songs and poetry in peaceful demons-
trations, an expression of their desire for freedom and resistance to Soviet
rule.
It is just these kinds of overtures that live on in the rebellious spirit of the
Baltic Triennial, now in its 13th edition. For the first time, the exhibition
takes place across these three countries. Titled “Give Up the Ghost,” Vincent
Honoré’s exhibition explores themes of togetherness, individuality, identity,
and the performative gesture. A senior curator of London’s Hayward Gallery,
Honoré has organized the exhibition as three separate overlapping chap-
ters. The second opened last weekend in Tallinn, Estonia. Vilnius opened in
Lithuania in May, and the show will culminate in Riga, Latvia, in September.London-based artist Paul Maheke’s performances often look and feel familiar. They play with a wide range of reference points: shady side-eye, Michael Jackson dance moves, whispered incantation, flirtatious glances. But stitched together with his idiosyncratic choreography, the works become refreshingly unpredictable. A rising star on London’s art scene, Maheke’s entrancing performances and works are in high demand. Indeed, he presented a piece at Manifesta 12 in Palermo before heading up to the Baltic. And in June, he performed in Paris with his siblings, Simon and Alix Maheke. In Tallinn, however, the artist com- manded the room and its hundreds of viewers all alone. His eerie, green- light poetry installation in the ceiling washed over many of the triennial’s works in the room as well as other performers.
« A conversation with Paul Maheke on erasure, ghosts + channeling the space between, as part of fluent’s body ecologies series », AQNB, May 2018 A conversation with Paul Maheke on erasure, ghosts + channeling the space between, as part of fluent’s body ecologies series Paul Maheke, ‘A familiar familial place of confusion (Channel)’ (2018) Body Ecologies performance documentation. Courtesy the artist, Centro Botín and fluent, Santander Paul Maheke enters the large auditorium of Santander’s cultural institution Botín Center casually, feet shuf- fling lightly along the floor against the backdrop of a trance-like soundtrack. Dressed only in boxer briefs, a white tank top and socks, the London-based artist feels out the space, moving between bodies in the audience and the stage area. Presented on April 17 as part of the Body Ecologies programme put together by Santan- der’s independent art space fluent, Maheke’s performance ‘A familiar familial place of confusion (Channel)’ (2018) follows one by Mary Hurrell on January 30, closing with another by Louisa Martin on May 26. The three-part series is the research project of curator Alejandro Alonso Diaz whose “conclusions appear in the form of experiences, gestures, intuitions and emotions, rather than via words and concepts.” Diaz notes the research opts toward embodied experience and sensorial thinking to track the “changing ways our bodies work, breathe, dream and interact.” Looking at performance for its potential to “transcend the use of language,” movement, gesture and ambience become vehicles to explore limit, potential, and transforma- tion in relation to human identity and perception.
Maheke’s performance, which runs in conversation with current solo exhibition A fire circle for a public
hearing at London’s Chisenhale, mutates seamlessly between layers of fragmented choreography. From small
facial expressions and performative tropes to Michael Jackson references and bodybuilding poses, gestures
form and fall away like stray thoughts. In what feels like a prelude, the pace of movement remains a constant
throughout but the atmosphere gradually intensifies. Large curtains slowly come down, the space darkens.
A large projected video takes centre stage. Spinning footage of the artist dancing in their studio creates a
dizzying, centrifugal effect. Through image, sound and body, the viewer enters an atmosphere of physiologi-
cal experience that seeks to communicate without representation.
The attempt to move past language is the attempt to move into new paradigms — how do we free ourselves
from words, from the fabric that formed them? How do we purge ourselves from its inherent violence, or,
as Diaz notes, “reshift into a new planetary choreography to rearticulate these logics, which range from our
daily unconscious gestures to the migration of species”? In a conversation that attempts to unpick some of
these questions, Maheke expands on the multiple narratives that emerge and intersect within a body — where
archive, memory, marginalised identities and the colonial body reappear like ghosts.
Paul Meheke, ‘A familiar familial place of confusion (Channel)’ (2018) Body Ecologies
performance documentation. Courtesy the artist, Centro Botín and fluent, Santander**There are so many elements going on in your work, not just through the layering of sound, video and per- formance, but also the references. Can we start by talking about your process? Paul Maheke: I often describe my practice as a magma, it’s kind of solid at times and liquid at other times — it’s always layers that are accumulating throughout time, and so I always have the feeling that I’m moving forward bit by bit, somehow. One thing helps me to do another thing, so I like to think of the exhibitions and performances as moments of research, as well. I’m interested in tropes, representations and cliches, and how to re-digest them. For example, I’m not in- terested in using cliches per say, but if I am to use them, they need to be filtered for them to become interes- ting. So it’s very much about digestion and the rendition of that – how does movement transform in the space (that is my body) and how can two ppl meet in my body and what does that create. ** Like you’re channelling something? PM: Exactly, everything happening really quickly. But there is a lot of research of course in the sense that my work is very much influenced by a lot of things such as feminisms and writing and poetry… **: Are there people in specific you keep coming back to? PM: I usually say Michael Jackson is the reason why I’m dancing, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres is the reason I keep making art. So those two are very important for me, that’s why in the Chisenhale show there are refe- rences to both of them. I’m very absorbent. I’m really interested in putting together things that are not necessarily obvious together. It’s a lot of things colliding and I’m interested in the tensions between them and even the conflicts or contra- dictions. For example, for this performance, there is this idea of jumping in and out of a person all the time, almost as if possessed by some spirits. **Yes! You look like you’re under a spell when you’re performing… PM: Especially for that one because there’s all those facial expressions, but it was interesting to see how various movements could come together in a single narrative, and this is often what I’m doing with text or in my videos – trying to put together things that were not and making them as seamless as possible. **It seems like all these movements travel around the periphery of something, like it’s about what’s being left out and what’s not there. Or this moment of the rehearsal or the before or after, rather than the performance itself. PM: Yeah totally – for example, with Michael Jackson, I’ve been looking at videos of him rehearsing because I was interested in that kind of underperformed quality. I’m always interested in what’s left untold and unseen, and there’s something quite poetic about the rehearsal — this kind of repetition of movement almost as if stuttering, of rendering them with an uncertainty, something that is not quite so clear. There’s a lot of move- ments that are starting but not really finishing and then transitioning to something else. **Yeah, those ‘not yet’ moments make you feel like your watching something very intimate happen, or you’re thinking about the space around you somehow. Or maybe a memory, what once was and is now just an after- thought… PM: When I speak about the work, often I’ve been using the word ‘ghost’ to describe it, even the references or the people that surround my practice, or have been influential for it to flourish – about channeling some others.
Paul Meheke, ‘A familiar familial place of confusion (Channel)’ (2018) Body Ecologies performance documentation. Courtesy the artist, Centro Botín and fluent, Santander **Yeah, I want to talk about these ghosts, but first, in relation to channeling, does your process feel somewhat outside of your control or that it’s open other forces somehow ‘making the decisions’? PM: It’s a mixture I think, for example the show at Chisenhale, I really have the feeling that the work prece- ded me, in the sense that I wasn’t able to see the full dimension of the work and how important that was for me, up until the moment it was done and performed by other people, somehow. I had the same thing with my first video, when everything seems to click without me really being part of that process, so I guess there is almost a magical element. It sounds really romantic and cheesy. **Not to me. Especially the way you explore a non-linear sense of time — this seems like an essential thing to tap into. PM: Yeah, totally, linearity for me always speaks from a place of violence. I cannot think of anything else but violence when I’m thinking of it. And of erasure, as well. **Could you talk about the relationship between nonlinear time and erasure and in your work, and how it relates to circularity which seems a strong component of your practice? PM: I’m really interested in the idea of circularity and this non-aggressive way of occupying a territory. For example, the way nomadic people use a circle of patterns to not wear out the soil, or not wear out the re- sources where they are living. But there is also this thing of the way linearity speaks of the western mind and how things are meant to make sense and they never made sense for me (even though I’m a western person). I think it has to do with queerness, as well, where my understanding of the world is very much a layering.
Things are happening simultaneously and they can speak to each other, or not, and they may or may not encounter even, but it’s way more messy than that and I’m interested in that kind of confusion of power. The work is about that somehow. For example, the video, sound and dancing are following three parallel lines and they are encountering at times, and branching off, and that’s where that in-between is and where the work resides. And in terms of time — again back to this project at Chisenhale — it was also one of those things, like what would be a queer, black understanding of time, for example. That’s when I started to think back to Michael Jackson and also the vogue ballroom scene, where everything is happening at the same time on the sides, in the centre, in the middle, above, underneath. For me, it’s almost a counter-example to the white cube and to this thing of having to isolate something in order to value it and to understand that it’s valued. The vogue bal- lroom scene is the opposite; the fact that everything is happening simultaneously makes the thing interesting. I think, for me, that was as close to an understanding of space and time according to queerness and blackness. **You can really feel that complex layering in your work — but also moments of push and pull that work against each other — I guess I’m referring to the way your work occupies both a space of freedom and move- ment, as well as stasis and limitation. PM: For this piece, I think there are clear references to that; to the impossibility of escaping masculinity because of the way my body looks. What was really hard for me in this work was not to fall into that trap of binaries — like masculine or feminine — but finding something that would be a bit more uncanny or unsett- ling. **Yeah, I was really feeling those socks; PM: If I were to remove the socks, then I would just be a typical contemporary dancer. There’s something a bit comical about them, about the work, as well, in the movement that I’m doing. I felt this vulnerability at the beginning because it’s very rare that I show my body in my performances and so this was somehow very revealing for me. So the first moment when I’m just walking around in full light was very, oof, I felt very self conscious somehow. **As well as the way the ‘beginning’ of it started, very casually, warming up and the audience was staring in anticipation or confusion. PM: I like to work around those moments, the transition of what’s considered a performance and what’s not. The photographer only started to photograph me once the light was down, when, for me, the prelude is totally part of the performance – those kind of liminal spaces, or in between spaces, I’m really interested in. The socks are not necessarily speaking to that but there is a little bit of how to bring the domestic into the space, which is an art venue, and how to bring in the mundane. **There is a nice relationship between your choreography and the other elements, which felt enormous in comparison — the space, the lighting and also the circulating video. Somewhere between the simple and the spectacle… PM: I’m often using very simple means. With the video I started to experiment with movement in the studio and I placed a camera on the fan that was just above me, and I started to dance. Very DIY, very simple. That’s often what I’m doing. I see it almost as a timer. It’s an ever-present thing that is there in the space circulating, gravitating. As well, there were a lot of ideas around cosmology and this kind of broader understanding of the world, and of existence and humanity. Somehow very pretentious and ambitious, these kind of connections between the domestic and the cosmic, but yeah the spinning video there were big ideas to take on board. **All these elements existing within one fractal almost. I remember when I first encount ered your work, you spoke about a lot of these ideas (the cosmic, the formless) in relation to water and hydrofeminism.
You can also read
