Stepping Into the World Of Black Imagination
LONDON — In a suburb of London, in the 1970s, Ekow Eshun and his brother spent their free time poring over Marvel Comics. Among their favorites were the X-Men, relaunched in 1975 as a racially diverse team of mutants.
Elsewhere in visual culture, not to mention on the streets of London, “our presence as Black people in Britain was treated with skepticism
and hostility,” said Mr. Eshun, now 54 and a curator and writer.
In the fantastical universe of these superheroes, Mr. Eshun — whose parents are Ghanaian — found not escape, but a way to rationalize his experiences.
“I never got over the strangeness of a racialized society that defines people of color as inferior — that is a science-fictional state,” he said.
Exploring alternative worlds as a way of understanding one’s own is at the heart of “In the Black Fantastic,” an exhibition curated by Mr. Eshun at London’s Hayward Gallery until September 18. The show brings together a taut selection of work from established artists from the African diaspora, all born between 1959 and 1989, presented as episodic solo presentations that unfold like a labyrinth of varied environments.
The first of these is a series of dazzling works by Nick Cave responding to acts of violence in the United States. It includes a collection of Mr. Cave’s “Soundsuits,” the full-body costumes he began making in 1992 after seeing televised footage of the police beating of Rodney King. The exhibit’s “Soundsuit 9:29” is a new ensemble dedicated to George Floyd (the title is a reference to the length of time the former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Mr. Floyd’s neck).
Cutting through Mr. Cave’s space is a dramatic new commission titled “Chain Reaction.” Chains of black resin casts of Mr. Cave’s forearm grasp on to one another, fragments connecting to create a feeling of wholeness, which reverberates throughout the rest of the exhibition.
From Mr. Cave’s works, the exhibition extends across 10 more artists’ imaginations. Ralph Rugoff, the Hayward’s director, called “In the Black Fantastic” a “landmark” exhibition, one that brings together artists under this umbrella for the first time in Britain. Mr. Eshun shied away from calling the “Black Fantastic” a movement, defining it as “a way of seeing shared by artists conjuring new visions of Black possibility.” But the exhibition still heralds a new chapter
in the ways contemporary art approaches race and culture.
It is poignant that such a statement is being made in London, a city that was once the engine of Britain’s slave trade and its colonial rule of African countries, and one that is still reckoning with that legacy. Hew Locke, another artist featured in the exhibition, said, “You couldn’t have done a show like this, here, 20 years ago.”
Work by Lina Iris Viktor explores the world made possible by Liberia, a nation founded in 1847 by formerly enslaved Africans from the United States. Her commanding mixed media works often focus on female figures pertaining to Liberian mythologies and histories, and question the dangerous allure of utopian representations of dominance and power.
The exhibition’s artists share a concern with reinventing, refashioning and remixing, favoring techniques such as assemblage and collage. This innovative spirit is evident in the 24-karat gold Ms. Viktor applies to her work, and in the CGI video collages Rashaad Newsome splices together from his photographs of Black queer bodies and consumer goods.
“The Black Fantastic” grapples with a paradox a marginalized community faces: how to acknowledge the “other” as a construct while also celebrating the unique power of difference, and the imagination that pours forth from it.
“I think of this as a feel-good show about death,” Mr. Eshun said in an interview at the gallery. “It’s about the fragility of life and the proximity to death, and how physical presence, how aliveness, can be denied through acts of violence, and pervasively through the denial of our humanity.”