Decolonizing the camera
Curator of FotoFest 2020’s main show stirs up ideas
Mark Sealy, who curated FotoFest 2020’s main show, offers his spin on global ideas.
Mark Sealy is jazzing on the idea of the FotoFest 2020 biennial’s big show as an African version of “A Love Supreme,” saxophonist John Coltrane’s riff-rich, avantgarde album of 1965.
“That would be lovely,” says Sealy, the exhibition’s curator. “That would be a big ask!” He gives it a hearty laugh, but he’s serious about the resonances he wants to create with “African Cosmologies: Photography, Time and the Other.”
Sealy, who is from London, is tired but giddy, pleased by all he sees around him. We’re with FotoFest director Steven Evans at Silver Street and Winter Street Studios, where the show hangs in broad hallways and a few gallery spaces. I lose count of the times Sealy says, with sincere good nature, “Brilliant!” or, “I love this!”
As the director of Autograph ABP, a renowned photographic institution in London, Sealy has been a key figure in discussions about “de-colonizing the camera” for 30 years. “At the age of 60, it’s nice to have the opportunity to unpack some of the things I thought were important,” he says.
Early in his career, he recognized that the invention of photography in 1839 had given Westerners yet another tool for oppression. The new medium created perfect conditions for racializing an exotic and inferior “Other,” he says. “When we say ‘Africa,’ it’s still completely loaded. Why? It’s what images have done — film, Hollywood. Africa in the Western imagination has not been made by the African subject. That’s what we’re trying to undo.”
Top: Aida Muluneh’s “Access,” from the otherworldly series “Water Life,” was photographed in Ethiopia. It appears at Winter Street Studios, one of two biennial venues.
Some of the show’s 32 diverse artists live in Africa. Some were born there but live elsewhere. Some were born elsewhere, of African descent. A few are quite young. A few are senior citizens. A few are dead. Many are women. Sealy has known most of them a long time.
“If we look through the arthistory books, when European artists have been brought together, we don’t necessarily think of them as European. They’re just Modernists or whatever,” Sealy says. “This just happens to be a conversation with people from all over the world who share a geneology, possibly.”
A show about ideas
Some concentrate on universal issues around identity and human rights. Others quietly evoke memory and the passage of time. Some are reflective, some are audacious, some are radically imaginary. This is not a show about African geography, in the way a number of previous FotoFest biennials have presented images that represent trends and issues focused on a particular part of the world. It’s more openly a show about ideas.
Evans says he has been nudging FotoFest in that direction for several years, but he also noticed when he arrived in 2014 that the organization had worked more deeply in some areas of the world than others during its several decades. “Ideas around Africa or blackness were one area I thought where we could expand the conversation,” he says.
Several of the artists have appeared in previous FotoFest biennials or museum shows here but not in the same way. Among the familiar names are Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Carrie Mae Weems, Lyle Ashton Harris and Zina Saro-Wiwa, as well as Houstonian Jamal Cyrus.
Evans sees conversations moving forward, not only between the artists and the audience but also between the artists themselves. “It’s looking at things from multiple vantage points and perspectives, giving a faceted idea,” he says.
Sealy’s concept based on the origin of a universe makes perfect sense. With a few exceptions, he is presenting bodies of work — not scattershot images here and there — that encourage defined yet related galaxies of thought.
‘Difficult to decode’
Sealy couldn’t care less about photography’s technical aspects and history. “I’m only interested in the work images do in culture,” he says.
He gets goosebumps standing next to Fani-Kayode’s dramatic, symbolic nude self-portraits and gazing down a long hallway toward an equally confrontational, large vinyl self-portrait by the young Zanele Muholi. Fani-Koyode, who died in 1989, was gay and politically exiled in
London. The still-young Muholi, a binary, South African queer rights activist, is a direct descendant.
“When I was working with Rotimi back in the day, his work was simply dismissed as derivative of Robert Mapplethorpe’s,” Sealy says. He doesn’t think Euro-centric art historians got the connection between FaniKayode’s art practice and his Yoruba ancestry. “Unless you understand the cultural space, it’s very difficult to decode,” he says.
Muholi poses topless as a South African miner, connecting queer identity with the most brutalized populace of the apartheid regime. “It’s an incredibly complex, layered image which invites us to do a huge amount of work around the rainbow nation, around identity politics in South Africa, around the history of South Africa,” Sealy says.
In his seminal “African Spirits” series from 2008, Samuel Fasso impersonates historical figures associated with the PanAfricanism liberation movement of the 1960s and ’70s. There’s much more to the show than self-portraiture, but that mode of expression suggests a lot of questioning at a personal level.
Across much of the work, there’s a good sense of “circular breathing” — another musical reference Sealy uses to talk about sustained notes over time. Viewers might notice, for example, how Ernest Cole’s image of a line of naked South African miners with hands up against a wall in a bathroom, from his famous 1960s series “House of Bondage,” echoes in the layered prints of Sammy Baloji’s 2006 series “Memoire,” examining the colonial legacies of black Congolese peoples in Lubumbashi, Togo.
The “Other” refers to a lot of things, not just queer identities, encompassing many populations that have been forced to migrate or persecuted by political regimes.
Figures fade to haze in Aida Silvestri’s touching, recent series “Even This Will Pass.” Each image is punctured with colorcoded thread, marking the path of a journey to escape Eritrea’s repressive, totalitarian government in the early 1990s, and accompanied by a poetic written narrative. All those paths converge in a mixed-media map. Hélène A. Amouzou’s ghostly self-portraits of herself as baggage in a suitcase, about her struggles emigrating to Belgium, also strike poignant notes.
Sealy and Evans have displayed all 48 pages of a photographic diary by the young Lindokuhle Sobekwa in specially built cases, so viewers can absorb the full experience. The diary concerns Sobekwa’s heartbreaking search for his sister. “He’s a young, contemporary South African, born in the postMandela age, dealing with all the complexities of domestic and international violence,” Sealy says. “There’s so much pain and so much lament in that space, and so much healing that needs to be done.”
That kind of intimacy contrasts starkly with the performance activism of another young artist, Sethembile Msezane, who costumes herself as a bird reclaiming spiritual spaces against a backdrop of falling colonial monuments.
Taken as a whole, the show is mostly reflective and often celebratory. Dawit L. Petros’ beautiful series “The Stranger’s Notebook” places figures in landscapes, holding mirrors that obcure their heads and show the environment behind them, prompting questions about who is seeing whom as well as ruminations on memory and place. Sealy speaks of “a journey to a new identity” in these images as well as more buoyant ones.
He’s included a classic archive of free-spirited, nightclub-hopping poseurs by Jean Depara. A selection of James Barnor’s 1960s fashion photography for Drum Magazine includes “Drum cover girl Erlin Ibreck at Trafalgar Square, London” — which Sealy counts among his favorite images of all time. It captures a complex moment, pulling viewers not to the central subject, whose eyelashes catch the sunlight, but to the white man behind her who is licking his lips salaciously. (A sort of #MeToo nightmare with pigeons, as Alfred Hitchcock might have portrayed it.)
Not an African fantasy
I lean toward the ambitious, fantastical bodies of work and installations in the Winter Street spaces, where the chords intensify. Afro-futurism stars here.
The surreal, staged images of Aida Muluneh’s graphically powerful, jump-off-the-wallcolorful series “Water Life” question how water use and access disproportionately affects women. They’re Magritte on steroids. Wilfred Ukpong creates a mesmerizing narrative about social issues in the Niger Delta, developed with young people in marginalized communities. His film and large prints framed in black plastic garbage bags feature terrifically costumed characters in an epic story that’s part of a much larger project, “Blazing Century.” I could see it becoming the next “Game of Thrones.”
More delight comes in the darkened gallery where Faisal Abdu’Allah’s golden barber’s chair gleams like a throne in a mysterious environment overseen by a trio of “Duppy Conquerer” self-portraits, conjuring Jamaican spirits who are forces of historical memory. Santu Mofokeng’s “The Black Photo Album: 1890-1950” also occupies a room, with projected slides that question images of Africans in European clothing. The short films of Samson Kambalu also have a room to themselves.
Quotations from many influential thinkers (including Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Frantz Fanon, a pioneering philosopher of post-colonial studies) appear on walls throughout both buildings. “They’re not meant to describe anything but to kind of locate you somewhere,” Sealy says. The quotations operate like whispers, adding more layers to Sealy’s stream-of-consciousness stew.
“I’d be very surprised if people liked all the work,” Sealy says. “But there are parts of the rhythm that we’ll dance with much easier … . We didn’t want to create an African fantasy. We wanted to create an African cosmology, influenced by the idea that the impact of Africa is global. We understand fundamentally, whether it’s through great artists like Picasso or great musicians like Coltrane, Africa has influenced every one of us, whether we like it or not.”