Prospect.5
Various venues, New Orleans 23 October – 23 January
In late August, Hurricane Ida swept the Mississippi River over its banks and into the low parishes of New Orleans, where it flattened homes, downed powerlines and killed 82 people. Time also reversed direction: on the same day 16 years earlier, Hurricane Katrina had made landfall, destroying much of the city. That catastrophe prompted the founding of the Prospect Triennial as a catalyst for New Orleans’s revitalisation. Yesterday we said tomorrow, the title of the triennial’s fifth and current edition, was inspired by a 2010 album by jazz musician Christian Scott – but after Ida scuttled the exhibition’s opening for a second time, following a year’s delay due to the -19 pandemic, it became an eerily prescient reminder that trauma is recursive.
As curators Naima Keith and Diana Nawi note in the exhibition catalogue, ‘We know we are not in the after.’
Weeks after the opening, site-specific works by Hill, Simone Leigh, Wangechi Mutu, Tiona Nekkia Mcclodden and Cooking Sections were still unfinished, owing partly to power outages and supply-chain issues. Several of the completed satellite projects, meanwhile, feel mismatched with their context: Rodney Mcmillian’s films God is in The Whip and Preacher Man (both 2017–21), for instance, are dwarfed by Happyland Theater, the leaky hangar in which they are projected, while Dineo Seshee Bopape’s multichannel stop-motion video Master Harmoniser (2021) feels cramped in a tiny backroom at the New Orleans African American Museum.
Five artists from the first Prospect were invited to exhibit here again. Among them, Dave Mckenzie is the only one who has engaged conceptually with the notion of return. An elegant white cube presentation at Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans opens with photographs of his late father’s chain necklace and the niche in a New Orleans cemetery where he permanently interred it. By burying a part of himself in New Orleans, Mckenzie has given himself a reason to keep coming back. Nearby, Karon Davis o£ers a di£erent kind of memorial to her late husband, Noah Davis, with Pain Management (2021), a white plaster sculpture of a figure praying to a suspended moon, as full and bright as the one that appeared in the sky when he died
in 2015. Her work is beautifully paired with sculptures and cyanotypes by Kiki Smith that could have been made by the same hand. A series of collaged and stitched paintings on panel by Felipe Baeza, meanwhile, depict figures growing tree branches from the stumps of their severed limbs. Hung opposite the late Laura Aguilar’s self-portraits beneath gnarled oak trees, they are visions of bodies healing from violence and dislocation.
Downstairs, a lyrical new film by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz meditates on various temporal dislocations. El cuervo, la yegua y la fosa (The raven, the mare and the grave, 2021) combines footage that the San Juan-based artist shot in Puerto Rico in 2017, in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, with interviews she conducted with an astrophysicist and with a Haitian poet translating Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913–27) into Creole. “Próxima B, which is our closest star, has its own preferred now,” the scientist declares, as di£usions of milk and glitter spread slowly like nebulae. Proust’s sense of time was similarly subjective and untranslatable. The film suggests that time is only real in our minds, perceivable by its elasticity.
Time stretched on painfully for Welmon Sharlhorne, who completed the mesmerising pen-and-ink drawings on display across the street at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art while incarcerated at Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Ornate church facades in the Nordic Romantic style are embedded with clocks that seem to tick away towards his parole. A series of undated, untitled drawings, meanwhile, imagine the bus that carried Sharlhorne away from Hurricane Katrina’s wrath as a spaceship with bubble windows – a futuristic rendering of a di«cult past.
The haunting photographs from the third instalment of Dawoud Bey’s history series, In This Here Place (2019), also contend with historical trauma. In Bey’s pictures of slave cabins on Louisiana plantations, on view at the Historic
New Orleans Collection, shadows cut sharply across warped clapboards, evoking the Black bodies that were brutalised and imprisoned there. The shutter speed has captured the slight blur of leaves swaying in the Southern breeze, endowing these images with a quietly vibrating intensity.
‘Everything that exists is possible only on the basis of a whole series of absences, which precede and surround it,’ Mark Fisher wrote in The Ghosts of My Life (2014), referring to hauntology, the study of that which is both ‘no longer’ and ‘not yet’. New Orleans is often described as haunted: not just by the ghosts of the enslaved people who built it, but by its own future, foreclosed by racism and climate change. In its best moments, Prospect.5 is humbled by the inescapability of this condition; rather than o£er neat solutions, it proposes a sense of resolve. Diana Nawi writes, ‘The world is always ending, but it does not end.’ Like a river, art flows wherever it can. Evan Mott