Subverting history to reclaim ide
Artist Ayana V Jackson explores the vulnerability and strength of black women captured in iconic images
In a painting-like image titled Tignon, New Jersey-born artist Ayana V Jackson sits almost at a right angle to the camera. She is dressed in 18th-century garb, a shawl almost completely covering her torso, revealing only the button line of her garment. Her gloved hands are folded atop her thighs, right above left, drawing attention to her bonestraight posture.
The title of the life-size print refers to her headdress, a turban wrapped around her head and crowned with a flamboyant hat, its train tracing her back as it reaches for her waistline.
The tignon, the result of Louisiana’s late 18th-century laws, was the centrepiece of edicts prescribing the dress code for women of African descent, be they considered distinctly African or mixed enough to pass for white.
Considered a marker of inferiority to limit their competitiveness with white women, the women on whom the tignon was foisted soon subverted this device, elaborately styling their tignons and turning them into symbols of allure.
“Often, women would just throw on a hat and keep it moving,” says Jackson, contextualising the image.
Part of a solo exhibition, titled Intimate Justice in the Stolen Moment, of mostly digitally retouched images at Gallery Momo in Johannesburg, the editioned 2015 Tignon print has been repurposed to form part of Jackson’s layered look at the idea of weightlessness.
“I am certain that strength and endurance are part of our legacy, but I am just as convinced that it is not the entirety of our experience,” she writes in the press statement about her show, which opened on July 27 and runs for a month.
The inspiration for the exhibition comes from friend Shatema Threadcraft’s book, Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic, which became Jackson’s reading material as she settled into a residency at the Nirox Sculpture Park in Kromdraai, outside Johannesburg, earlier this year.
“In there [the book] she talks quite a bit about the absence of the ability of the black woman’s body to nurture their loved ones and themselves because of the precariousness of the slave trade … So even things like infanticide would find their way into being an act of mercy and an act of nurturing.
“I thought to myself: while that is very true, I imagined that there must have been these stolen moments in which you could find ways within your bondage to be free … kind of like the jumping of the broom, which was a marriage ritual that comes from the [American] South.”
In this sense, the cover of Threadcraft’s book, which features an image created by Jackson titled As Wild as the Wind, speaks almost literally to this idea and segues neatly into the artist’s assertion that the Intimate Justice exhibition is “a rounding out” of her approach to what she terms memory work.
For one, Intimate Justice is replete with images Jackson has created herself, as opposed to her predominant approach of interrupting the racist history of photography by inserting herself in iconic yet problematic photographs. In a 2011 image titled Dis Ease, from the exhibition Poverty Pornography, a naked Jackson Photoshops herself into Kevin Carter’s Pulitzer prize-winning picture, embodying both the vulture and the unnamed Sudanese girl.
A statement about society’s hunger for images of the poor and unclothed, Jackson’s rendering of this image becomes all the more important when one considers the range of emotion the original has produced. For instance, Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar invested more than a decade figuring out a shrine to the same photo, a structure he eventually titled The Sound of Silence.
This time, Jackson turns her gaze homeward, stepping back a little from “fighting photography with photography” and instead turning to her experience as an African-American woman to soften the stereotype of the “all-enduring” black woman. This time, classical paintings occupy the focus.
Lucy, a print referencing MarieGuillemine Benoist’s Portrait d’Une Negresse, forms part of a still-in-progress triptych, in honour of the scores of women butchered by 19th-century gynaecologist and torturer J Marion Sims. An image of Jackson, retouched to a painterly texture, retains the ambivalent seduc-