Arts and Design

Union jack swastikas and space-age braids: Thirteen Ways of Looking – review


Keith Piper’s THIRTEEN DEAD remains relatively unknown. Yet the 1982 work was one of the earliest artistic responses to the previous year’s fire at a house party in New Cross, south London, that took the lives of 13 young black people.

Handwritten words appear with pictures of the victim’s face on a series of postcards placed across a width of charred patterned wallpaper and skirting board: “Sister Yvonne survived with us 15 years in Babylon. On the dawn of her 16th year, Babylon sniffed her out.” The explicitness of the work is deeply affecting. Anger isn’t an emotion you expect to feel in an exhibition inspired by a poem (Wallace Stevens’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird), and yet, the more you absorb the details of this work – the victims’ baby faces, the burn holes – the more you appear to be at the mercy of your own rage.

This group exhibition brings together works by 13 artists of varying stature, from established artists of the 1980’s Wolverhampton-founded BLK Art Group to emerging Midlands-based artists. Racial and cultural identity is the blood of this show and many works interact with critical race theory, the bogeyman recently banished from schools by Conservative MP Kemi Badenoch. Eddie Chambers’s Destruction of the National Front (1979–80) is perhaps the most unambiguous attack on white supremacy the show has to offer. Chambers’s reconfiguration of the union jack into a swastika that is then torn apart in a sequence of four screenprints engages with the sociopolitical conditions of the 1970s, in which fascist calls to end the influx of “coloured immigrants” reigned supreme.

Hyphen-Labs’s NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism (2020) offers an alternative take on structural racism and the desire to transcend it via speculative storytelling. Their VR film shows an alternative reality that presents black women as neuroscientists and pioneers of brain optimisation operating out of a beauty salon. Here, braids are not actually braids, but trans-cranial electrodes that grant access to a surreal digital landscape. These works leave you thinking – if schools cannot teach us about the historical and ongoing effects of white privilege, should museums step up and stand in as centres of education?

Part of Shiyi Li’s Dreamerfly and Other Stories
Struggle, loss and rebirth … part of Shiyi Li’s Dreamerfly and Other Stories. Photograph: @garryjonesphotography

Group shows can sometimes be dissonant, and while this exhibition feels mostly in tandem, some of the newly made works can seem isolated. They struggle to create the same kind of visceral responses inspired by older works like Donald Rodney’s 1982 painting How the West Was Won. The bluntness of this piece, which depicts a pink figure smirking and holding a gun to the head of a brown man wearing a Native American headdress, was made when Rodney was just 21 and studying at Nottingham Trent University. Rodney’s use of cartoonish yellows and blues to illustrate this violent scene looks like it could have been painted today; a testament to the eternality of work from that corner of British art history.

Some of the newer works, despite feeling standalone, provide a memorable experience. Shiyi Li’s Dreamerfly and Other Stories (2020) is an ethereal multi-screen installation. The short animation, projected on to four screens and viewed by standing in the centre of the cube, is inspired by the ancient philosophical narrative A Butterfly Dream by Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu. It explores struggle, loss and rebirth experienced by a Chinese woman migrating to the UK and features a tender score of originally composed jazz. It’s one of the show’s soft spots, along with Navi Kaur’s film 5:22pm (2020), which shows her Punjabi grandmother lovingly making a sandwich.

You might at first mistake Autoicon (2000) for a staff-only computer area, but this unassuming desktop is an extraordinary piece of work. Rodney died from sickle-cell anaemia in 1998 and this work was initiated by him and later developed by his partner Diane Symons, Chambers, Piper, Richard Hylton and Virginia Nimarkoh. It’s a CD-rom digital work that simulates the artist’s personality. Visitors are instructed to start a conversation in a chat box and await a response in the form of a text, image or an audio clip of Rodney’s prerecorded voice. After greeting each other with some small talk, Rodney interjects: “Changing the subject slightly, what do you think about education?” It’s as though he’s alert to the current debate in the House of Commons chamber. We briefly discuss love, pain and flowers and when I ask him about the internet, he amusingly replies, “Excuse me?” Even with its Y2K interface, Autoicon is a technological wonder. It doesn’t just imagine black people in the future, it preserves them so that they arrive there safely and in their own image.



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