This article responds to Fons Americanus by Kara Walker to critically demonstrate the importance of studying visual representations using Michael Foucault’s concepts of discourse. The essay will critically highlight using discourse analysis to examine the powers of knowledge by following a visual sociological framework. The central focus seeks to demonstrate how Walker’s work contests the ‘racialized regime of representation’ and Eurocentric hegemony within her practice. Drawing upon semiotics (Bal, and Bryson, 1991), ideology (Freeden, 2003, Gramsci’s hegemony (Connell, 2005) and simulacrum (Baudrillard, 1994) to examine what is meant by ‘racialized regime of representation’ (Hall, et al, 2013: 237) so has to understand how the West’s first encounter of black people has resulted in disparaging, violent visual representation.
This understanding will contextualise how Walker's work contests and opposes historical and contemporary regimes positioned within the socio-political landscape. Thereby, the artwork will further demonstrate the importance of seminal marginalised discourse that seeks to decolonise the dominant narrative.
Racialized regime of Representation
To introduce tools to question and analyse text, Stuart Hall et al, introduce the term ‘racialized regime of representation’ (2013, p.237) to describe traces of racial stereotyping of black people found in popular visual representation. For example, cartoons, illustrations and caricatures with reductive essentialised depictions of ‘black types’ (2013, p.249). From a period of slavery through to abolition, the black body was negatively reduced to the signifier of their physical difference. Such as (fig.1) - fuzzy hair, thick red lips, broad nose (Hall, et al, 2013. The term signifier here points to the sign. Sign relates to semiotic, which is the study of signs (Chandler, 2007). The sign, in this context, being African American or enslaved Africans. The sign is defined by its part, the signifier and the signified. The distinction between the two, as defined by Barthes (fig.2), is the content of the signifier is always material such as sound, object and material (negative stereotypes), whereas the signified is not material but a mental representation. Thus the caractured negro is reduced to a negative myth. (Hall, et al, 2013).
Within this stereotyping there is a connection between representation, difference and power. In this, we can draw on a Foucauldian argument that discourse is tied up with power and knowledge and that knowledge is employed by discursive practices to regulate people’s conduct (McHoul, et al, 2015). The term ‘racialized regime of representation’ offers us an insight to how these stereotypes play into, what Foucault called, power of knowledge (Hall, et al, 2013), as a way to control black people through enslavement, White supremacy for economic and political gains. Child-like effigies impregnated into European’s psyche as grinning innocence, namely: Little Sambo, Black Mammy, Piccaninnies and many more, circulated into print and fixed into the European mind as a symbol of the good, kind natured negro.
Abolition during the 1830s put into circulation an alternative image that posed to elicit truth, commonality, kinship and equality moulded in the form of the (fig. 3) kneeling slave; pleading to the paternalistic goodwill of the Whites; eternally grateful for the emancipation, lacking appropriate agency and reduced, still, to a state of servitude.
In contrast to this reductive obedient, good-natured negro an alternative substitute was the abasement savage, rapist (fig.4), aggressive or hyper-sexualised and deviant negro (Rogin, M, 1985).
Foucault tells us that discourse is about the production of knowledge through language. Discourse never contains just one statement, one action or one source. Different texts lead to different forms of behaviours within institutions that operate within society. When they come together on the same topic that contains the same style, the same strategy, this discursive information informs a particular way of thinking about issues, which informs political ideologies. (McHoul, et al 2015). Using this analysis we can see how these ‘racialised regimes of representation’ reflective of history, the social context that preserve the dominant power of knowledge through denigration. That power of knowledge is regulated through certain social practices. In this case through visual representation that informs ideologies.
Ideology
To further examine ideology we turn to (1965), they argued that Germany philosophers, in their attempt to contest ideas, merely failed to come to terms with the real world. In response to this sublimation and morality that concealed reality, Marx and Engels asserted that the ideas of the ruling class were ruling ideas. Thus creating an ideological Illusion as a tool used by the ruling class, through the state, employed to reign, hegemonise and reproduce “history” according to
their investments. This sifting through of interests produced an ideology - allowing them with this ideology to present them as truths. Claims that dominated universal rationality (Freeden, 2003). This ideological illusion is an important component to be able to recognise the Eurocentric Weltanschauung - their view of the world. Authorised under this ideological canopy, society is presented with visual tenets to legitimise the violent disregard towards black people. Sealy argues that Western photography has been employed as a mechanism to generate Eurocentric and violent visual beliefs. Beliefs that have become the dominant discourse that he demands we must challenge (2019). It is, therefore, imperative that art is made by marginalised groups if we are to challenge what Gramsci identified as “cultural hegemony” (Lears, 1985). Expanding on Marx's and Engel’s, Gramsci's used the concept of cultural hegemony to explain the control or domination of a culturally diverse society. This culture is manipulated by the ruling class. Gramsci argued that the ruling class do not hold on to their dominance through a moral impressive performance, rather they must seek to secure an agreement with the subordinate groups to sustain the structure of society, thereby creating its cultural hegemony.
This notion that the relationship between knowledge and power is confined to a class interests, as defined by Marx and Engels, Foucault rejected. He argued there were other social factors in operation such as race, gender and sexuality ((McHoul, et al 2015).). As discussed, in the semiotic approach, these 'racialised regimes of representation', are recognised because language functions and visual representation function has a sign. Africa produced a rapid and growing increase of popular negative representation using these essentialised stereotypes (Hall, et al, 2013 citing Mackensie, 1986). Discourse analysis asks us to consider the historical location given any particular time to look at how people communicate (Hook, 2007). The essay employs Hall’s term ‘racialized regime of representation’ as a historical and geographical point of reference to contextualise its history and demonstrate the importance of the marginalised discourse. In Fons Americanus, a monumental art installation by Kara Walker, we can examine how she seeks to question this dominant visual representation.
Walker tells us:
‘My work has always been a time machine looking backwards across decades and centuries to arrive at some understanding of my “place” in the contemporary moment.’
Kara Walker Walker, (2019)
The Tate describes Kara Walker as an artist whose work examines notions of race, identity, sexuality and violence. (Walker, 2019) In Fons, Americanus (fig. 5) Walker has created a monumental, public sculpture in the form of a four-tiered fountain. The fountain questions how we remember history, inviting the viewer to question the hidden relations of power within its historical epoch. Following discourse analysis, the work pushes beyond the dominant narrative, asking us to question how we remember the past through our public statues and memorials. (Walker, 2019).
Utilising a Foucauldian analysis we must consider concepts, as separate, but related. These add up to independent questions about not just discourse, power and the subject, but their location to one another, and the historical fragility of them all. (McHoul, et al 2015, p. 10). Focusing on this it is important therefore to briefly understand Walker's historical background to contextualise who she is and how that relates to her work. Walker was born in 1969 in Stockton, California. At the age of thirteen, her father, also an artist, moved the family to the small town of Stone Mountain, Georgia, just outside Atlanta. It is important to note that Stone Mountain is the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan and the location for the yearly Klan rallies in the early ’80s. It was here that the children in her new community ostracised her for being too “white” due to her accent or too “black” for the European American children. With no racially neutral ground on which she could stand, she withdrew into the realms of surveillance. Walker likens her role as “uncertain”, always discovering exactly what part she might play in the uninvited drama (Shaw, 2004). Walker, therefore, is an outsider. This positions her discourse on the edge of what Foucault called the dominant narrative. We can not look at her work alone and need to examine the political discourse that co-exists."Separate, but related".
The political - Data analysis
While the importance of Walker's exhibition is to be celebrated, we must also acknowledge Kara Walker is the first black woman to headline in the Tate Britain’s Turbine Hall. A study published in the journal PLoS One suggests insignificant progress has been made with regards to black representation in the arts. More than 40,000 works of art in 18 leading U.S. museums’ showed that 85% of artists exhibited are White. Overall, white men dominated by 75.7%. White women (10.8 %), Asian men (7.5%), Hispanic men (2.6%). All groups represented in terms of gender and ethnicity were less than 1% (Solly, 2019), despite the fact that WOC accounts for 20% of the US society (Chalabi, 2019). In the UK a report carried out with Arts Council England shows BME workforce representation within National Portfolio Organisation (NPOs) 12% and Major Partner Museums (MPMs) 5% over 21 organisations. The proportions continue to be significantly lower than the 16% BME representation within the total working-age population of England. Artists in receipt of grants, show there has been a small change in the percentage of total Grants for the Arts awards from 2015/16 to 2017/18 of 9% to 11% BME (Equality, Diversity and the Creative Case, 2019). If discourse is about the production of knowledge and art institutions, such as the Tate in their 2016-2017 report declare that they “continued to excel during a period of great change”, given its declaration and the data, who does this exceptional “change” refer to?
By exhibiting a significant monumental installation by an artist of colour whose work explicitly reminds the viewer of its colonial ‘racialised regimes of representation’ on such a huge scale, 13 metre high to be precise, it suggests a small commitment to their report, but hardly exceptional. What role are institutions prepared to play? These are all rhetorical questions of course. Bidisha, writer for the Guardian asks, "is it fair that “artist of colour [are] expected to continually “tackle” racism and misogyny, diversity and inclusion, slavery, colonialism, oppression and the suffering self” (2019) if institutions continue to maintain the same power structure? The figures here do show a slight improvement, yet the pace, as demonstrated, is slow. Mona Chalabi describes the ratio of the painting in major gallery collections as 5.5 to 1. To elaborate, the Tate still has 5.5 men for every 1 woman in their collection (2019). This figure does not account for artworks by women of colour. Juxtaposed against the data, Fons Americanus functions as a memorial that questions knowledge and power, that sits on the same structures of power.
Walker’s Fons Americanus is based on the Victoria Memorial outside Buckingham Palace. The installation sits in the Tate's prominent Turbine hall. A wretched colonial display of transatlantic histories depicted in a painful confrontation. Drawing the viewer to the explicit violent past imposed on enslaved African subjects of the British Empire. The use of water deals with issues around the transatlantic slave trade, but it also deals with migration and black people trying to cross borders (Brinkhurst-Cuff, 2019). It forces us to question our current monuments (Walker, K. 2019), their historic white supremacy boastings, that brand themselves irrefutably into our brains. Reminding us to recall that Rhodes Must Fall (Chaudhuri, 2016). and the importance of confronting Britain’s imperial legacies. The fountain presents hidden meanings, metaphors of the Black Atlantic. Pointing towards Paul Gilroy’s writings on how culture between Africa, America, Caribbean, Britain is not specific to one location, but tied together all at once via the Atlantic that has shaped the development of Black identity and culture in America and Europe (Gilroy, 1993). Walker's use of caricatures is, to some extent, reflective of those negatively used in the past history, as discussed earlier. However, Walker subverts those similar ‘racialised regimes of representation’ as a grimacing mockery, as if to reclaim from the immorality of Empire, Walker’s own visual discourse.
Walking around the fountain each sculptural figure contains a visual, cultural, historical and literary source. Including J.M.W. Turner’s Slave Ship1840 (fig.6), originally titled Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying Typhoon Coming On (Boime, 1990). Drawing parallels between past atrocities to the current political discourse surrounding migrant bodies lost at sea (Tondo, 2019).
Reaffirming Foucault’s argument that discourse never consists of just one statement or one action and that they recur across a range of texts within different institutions within society (McHoul, 2015).
Kneeling down on one knee as if pleading, Governor Sir William Young, a slave merchant in the Carribean, is presented posturing in shame. Walker has sculpted this man's colonial “power”, and reduced it to a fragile position. Governor Sir William Young postures to The Captain (fig.7), who is a compound of important Black leaders that rebelled against European colonial violence. By doing so, one might denotate a semiotic signifier of the distinctive kneeling negro (fig.3) with shackled legs and arms, hands raised earnestly; a visual sign of a colonial emblem used to campaign against the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Designed and widely distributed by Josiah Wedgwood’s pottery firm. An extremely popular image circulated in Britain and the USA. Decorative objects that featured the beseeched black figure appeared on many objects from Chinaware to cufflinks (Trodd, 2013). Walker here, therefore, disrupts that discursive discourse by flipping the script, so to speak, whereupon imbuing a Black discourse with Black agency. Historically, Walker reminds us that riots and revolutions led by the maroons continuously threatened the economic strength of men like Young. Nonetheless, agency is often appointed to White abolitionists, most notably, William Wilberforce (James, 2001).
Maintaining similar subversive textures, at the top of the fountain Venus (fig.9) soars triumphantly – except her clothes are ripped off, her breasts bare and her throat slit, spurting water like blood to fill up the fountain. (Walker, 2019) Referencing ‘The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies’ by British artist Thomas Stothard (1755–1834). Published in History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, 1801. The book portrays Venus as an African woman (fig.10) who stands on an opened shell, encircled by white cherubs. Triton, the Greek god and messenger of the sea, accompanies her carrying the British flag triumphantly guiding the procession across the sea. The illustration acted as a form of propaganda to promote and romanticise the transatlantic slave trade (Walker, 2019). What Baudrillard would identify as a ‘simulacrum’ (Baudrillard, 1994). In other words an altered sense of reality. The idea that the slave trade was a good and pleasant industry. A play on illusions and fantasy. Baudrillard's analysis focussed on contemporary media and technology. Used here to demonstrate or to argue that the process simulacra in its visual genesis, be it fantastica, such as Stothards Venus; pleading and docile as in Wedgwood’s kneeling negro; or DW Griffith’s deviant pathological rapist, found in The Birth of a Nation, they are all ‘racialised regimes of representation’ presented as fact to make us believe that white supremacy is real when in fact it is all a sequence of hyper-real simulation to conceal reality.
Walker’s use of the ‘carnivalesque’ to flip the script to satirically address an otherwise depressing wicked history does not pose to independently resolve, teach or tackle such serious issues, unaided. This analysis shows that the responsibility is arguably collective. Such important questions require further discursive accounts if we are to accept that the dominant discourse and such negative racialised regimes of representation maintained knowledge and power, not barring the same regimes, as they are necessary for comparison. But clearly more discourse from the very people who are marginalised - due to the very script that maintains power that excludes - is essential.
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References
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Birth of a nation image, (2018). Available at: https://archive.4plebs.org/tv/thread/95061631/ [Accessed 10 Dec. 2019].
Brinkhurst-Cuff, C. (2019). Turbine Hall artist Kara Walker: 'Apparently, the only thing I am is black'. the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/sep/23/kara-walker-turbine-hall-tate-modern-racially-charged [Accessed 4 Dec. 2019].
Chalabi, M. (2019). Museum art collections are very male and very white. the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2019/may/21/museum-art-collections-study-very-male-very-white [Accessed 3 Dec. 2019].
Chaudhuri, A., 2016. The real meaning of Rhodes must fall. The Guardian, 16.
Chandler, D., 2007. Semiotics: the basics. Routledge.
Connell, R.W. and Messerschmidt, J.W., 2005. Hegemonic masculinity: Rethinking the concept. Gender & society, 19(6), pp.829-859.
Equality, Diversity and the Creative Case. (2019). A Data Report, 2017-2018. London: Art Council England. Available at: https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/publication/equality-diversity-and-creative-case-data-report-2017-2018 [Accessed 3 Dec. 2019].
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Freeden, M., 2003. Ideology: A very short introduction (Vol. 95). Oxford University Press.
Gilroy, P., 1993. The black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. Verso.
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Hook, D., 2007. Discourse, knowledge, materiality, history: Foucault and discourse analysis. In Foucault, Psychology and the Analytics of Power (pp. 100-137). Palgrave Macmillan, London.
James, C.L.R., 2001. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. Penguin UK.
Lears, T.J., 1985. The concept of cultural hegemony: Problems and possibilities. The American Historical Review, pp.567-593.
Lane, R.J., 2008. Jean Baudrillard. Routledge.
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McHoul, A., McHoul, A. and Grace, W., 2015. A Foucault primer: Discourse, power and the subject. Routledge.
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Rogin, M., 1985. " The Sword Became a Flashing Vision": DW Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. Representations, (9), pp.150-195.
Shaw, G.D., 2004. Seeing the unspeakable: the art of Kara Walker. Duke University Press.
Sealy, M. (2019). Decolonising the camera: photography in Racial Times. 1st ed. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
SCHOFIELD, J. (2018). On Friedrich Engels' birthday: in search of the man who changed the world. Confidentials. Available at: https://confidentials.com/manchester/on-friedrich-engels-birthday-in-search-of-the-man-who-changed-the-world [Accessed 12 Dec. 2019].
Solly, M. (2019). Survey Finds White Men Dominate Collections of Major Art Museums. Smithsonian. Available at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/survey-finds-majority-artists-represented-major-museums-are-white-men-180971771/ [Accessed 3 Dec. 2019].
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Workshop date: 29 November - 1 December >
Radical Self-Compassion: Sharing Personal Archives Through Performance and Assemblage Art
In this recalibrating 3 session workshop, you will learn to listen to your body and engage with your personal archives to birth radical acceptance and joy, even in moments of rupture.
"Yoυ doɴ'т ɴeed α woмв тo ɢιve вιrтн"
Over three sessions, you’ll participate in exercises that guide you in listening to your body and connecting with personal archives. You’ll learn to reassemble fragments of your story and collaborate with others to create from shared experiences. This process will help you compassionately embrace your troubles, using archives, sculptural assemblage art and body mapping to give voice to the stories our bodies carry - empowering you to (re)connect with your unique inner strength, and deepen connection with others.
In rehearsal for Poiesis of Weathering with director/practitioner Peta Lily
This new programme draws on my research project ~ Poiesis of Weathering, a sculptural performance installation funded by the Arts Council England. Engaging with themes of race and rupture, as pathways to radical acceptance and healing, the work integrates lived experience and theoretical perspectives with hands-on artistic practices making visible power structures embedded within the landscape. Through this lens and our group’s unearthing, participants are invited to radicalise their own stories through assemblage art to explore the rich and complex layers of their lived experiences with compassion.
"Poiesis of Weathering is a deeply resonant work exploring the psychological impact of everyday experiences of racist violence through the use of surrealism, performance and narrative. With a careful regard to the use of materiality and objects, Treasure creates an opening or portal into her own psyche, an internal world that reflects the ongoing and collective horror that is the experience of anti-blackness in the external."
Imani Mason Jordan, Languid Hands
Programme Outline:
Online Sessions:
Session 1: Speculative Writing & Introduction to Assemblage Art.
Session 2: Engaging with Personal Archives & Body Mapping
In-Person
Session 3: Assemblage Art Making, Performance and Body Mapping.
When
Friday 29 November 6.30pm - 9.00pm
Saturday 30 November 10am - 1pm
Sunday 1 December 10.30am - 4.30pm
This workshop has ended.
Join the waitlist to be emailed when this workshop becomes available.
Where
Address south east London, location: TBC
ABOUT JOYCE
"Joyce is a discipline-crossing artist - her work draws satisfyingly and transformationally on the personal and the social aspects of humanity"
Peta Lily
Joyce has over thirty years of experience working in the creative industry, working in a wide variety of mediums including jewellery, collage, sculpture, painting, drawings, performance, film, theatre, new technology, and writing. This includes 20 years of experience facilitating workshops in diverse settings. Her practice is an exploration of the intricate relationships between human narratives, the spiritual and the evolving world around us. She has taken on roles installing shows as a director, project manager, artist, filmmaker, and workshop facilitator, engaging with both groups and individuals.
COST: £199.00
OR pay by 15th November and save £44.00
Early Bird Price just £155.00
As seen through the transformational conjuration of Betye Saar's work, Liberation of Aunt Jemima, these workshops echo this radical act of reclamation, inviting participants to befriend their troubles and engage in collective sharing, where personal and communal archives are transformed into assemblage art, acting as pieces of radical acceptance. In this political assemblage piece, Saar reclaims a well-known racial stereotype as a symbol of Black power— where Saar arms Aunt Jemima with a shotgun in one hand and a broom in the other.
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Inspired by Cecilia Vicuña’s fragile 'precarios,' which merge discarded natural and manmade materials, these workshops explore the impermanence and interconnectedness of life. Vicuña’s ephemeral works, sometimes swept away by nature, act as offerings and reminders of ancestral knowledge. We will reflect on her call to 'hear the ancient voices in a new way,' and consider how or if such questions engage with our archives as we create our assemblage sculptural pieces, listen to our body and embrace the potential for change, even in times of uncertainty.
Who is it for?
Artists and Creatives reclaiming narratives through storytelling and personal archives, especially those amplifying marginalised voices.
Individuals and communities seeking ways to process experiences and identity.
Activists and Decolonial Thinkers merging creative expression with social justice, focusing on racial equity and liberation.
Community Builders fostering collective storytelling as tools for justice and solidarity.
Anyone interested in decolonial practices and feminist perspectives, regardless of artistic experience, ready to challenge dominant narratives.
To contact Joyce with any questions, email
joy(at)joycetreasure.co.uk
Relevant Literature:
Barbieri, Donatella - Costume in Performance; Materiality, Culture, and the Body
Campt, Tina M. - A Black Gaze
Caretta, Martina Angela, and Zaragocin, Sofia - Cuerpo-Territorio: A Decolonial Feminist Geographical Method for the Study of Embodiment
Hall, Stuart - Constituting an Archive
Judy, R. A. - Sentient Flesh; Thinking in Disorder, Poiesis in Black
Noble, Denise - Remembering Bodies, Healing Histories: the Emotional Politics of Everyday Freedom
Palmer, Katrina - The Dark Object
Rarey, Matthew Francis - Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic
Russel, Legacy – Glitch Feminist
Smith, Theophus H. - Conjuring Culture
Sharpe, Christina - In The Wake
Stoute, Beverly J. - Black Rage: The Psychic Adaptation to the Trauma of Oppression
Thompson, Robert Farris - Flash of the Spirit
Yusoff, Kathryn - A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None.
Three visual artists Pauline Bailey, Joyce Treasure and Ola Brown have been involved in a collaborative artist residency to explore the Lapworth Museum's collection of fossils, rocks and minerals.
They responded to specific items or themes in Lapworth's vast collection, and this exhibition shares installations the three artists have made in response to their brief explorations. This pilot is produced and curated in partnership between the Black Arts Forum and the Lapworth Museum of Geology.
Exhibition dates
1 April - 31 August 2022
Lapworth Museum of Geology
University of Birmingham
B15 2TT
INTIMATE XENOLITH
Skeleton leaves, wool, synthetic hair, mycelium packaging, text, sugar starch and cowrie shells.
Soundscape
67cm height
34cm width
17cm depth
INTIMATE XENOLITH asks,
Can we study the success of natural science, like a planetary oracle, to grasp how social science can proceed? Intimate Xenolith is a soundscape installation piece combining mythology, ritual, and geology to form a speculative ancestral narrative around healing.
Intimate Xenolith written by Joyce Treasure orated by RED MEDUSA.
RED MEDUSA is an established spoken word artist and scholar who combines her learnings from her experiences as a Black, neurodiverse, educated, working-class woman and mother with her academic knowledge of health and social inequalities to deliver moving, visceral and disruptive poetry. Grounded in Black feminist theory, her exciting works have led to headlines at the famous Southbank Centre in London, the infamous She Grrrowls Festival, The Million Woman Rise March and published in Vogue and Forbes Magazines.
Following the launch of Stryx VR gallery space in 2020, Stryx ran SPOT VR Residency running between 4th December 2021 until 31 January 2022.
Untitled Performance / The Little Girl Who Said ‘Hi’
For my SPOT VR Residency, I explored the masquerade, characterised by masks, dances, and chants, I am interested in the Gelede performed by the Yoruba-Nago community, which pays homage to women - especially older women. The masquerade is used as satire to criticise antisocial behaviour. The Gelede is ironic and performed during special occasions, harvests and epidemics.
Using an existing piece, Untitled Performance, as an entry point to explore how the masquerade and performance can be employed to perform strength and vulnerability, irony and satire. The Spot programme with Stryx will act as an experimental space to examine how performance, VR tech and making may inform my practice.
"The install Treasure is undertaking over December 2021 and January 2022 is titled: The Little Girl Who Wrote ‘Hi’ and draws on a subchapter of the same name of Chapter four, The Weather, In The Wake; On Blackness and Being, Christina Sharpe.
"Sharpe shows how the history of anti-black violence haunts present-day life by using The Slave Ship as a marker to categorise how contemporary Black lives in the diaspora have fewer resources represented through layers of society. Sharpe's study argues that the past predominates, and an ongoing history is embodied and embedded within territories and social stratification.
The install uses original text pages from "Stones Justice Manual" that she found in a skip outside a law office in central Birmingham. Like so many who have had to adapt and change over the past year, the company was either going into liquidation or moving. The pages are incredibly light and delicate, containing the same fragile, weighty materiality found on Bible pages.
"This opportunity was open for artists, performers, makers, crafters of Black heritage. This was a paid opportunity providing 8 week residency including access to space, curatorial and technical support for one early career and one mid-career artist. Within this residency, artists were invited to explore ideas, develop their research and create new work to experiment physically and digitally with the VR space. Previous experience working in digital / VR enviroment was not necessary.
StryxVR is a Virtual Reality gallery created for the Oculus Quest 2 VR headset created by Stryx gallery with VR developer Ben Neal (Psicon Lab)"
an untitled performance
in recognition of black feminist , bell hooks , this video performance explores the notion of care through experience, employing William S. Burroughs Cut Up technique to generate new experimental meaning.
vvvvvvvv
an untitled performance
your name points to a default condition of artistic practice marking an epoch where ancestral memory imbued itself , possibly , into a \ mycorrhizal network / , where manifestations saunter through our imaginations and tenderly escape us .
for this reason you remain , \ untitled /.
from this past , in response to the presence , you conjure hopes and dreams into the future . although , in saying this , there is nothing linear about you . you are unpolished and unfinished , made from materials upcycled , as a coping mechanism in response to losing your head , mind and marbles . pandemics have that effect on the nervous system . maybe that is why you chose lime > a hue between green and yellow to boost a feeling of liveliness , and self-confidence , while at the same time expressing the feelings of loss and sorrow .
you ’re my binge drinking , promiscuous nights out > a barrier between locations .
you are a catharsis to alleviate the pressure . your dance is your voice .
you have the power to recall childhood memories > the draped clothing over your head adorns the innocent yearning for : farrah fawcett blond flowing locks. the dragging sound of brush against woollen sleeves , drowns out political speeches othering your pride . in your performative seclusion , the back of your hands flick against the material hanging beside your small brown face
pushing it back over your shoulders , one sleeve at a time to emphasise the drama of flicking hair . this masquerade acts as a ritual layering . straightening out a framing of
{ shame }
embraced inside curly brackets to keep it free from harm , cocooned inside a sentence , remaining visible to - the elephant in the room - safeguarding Being . ur strength lies here , dormant in between seasons .
you are unpolished and unfinished
^^^^^^^^
The Dancer by Joyce Treasure responds to Kumo's album, inspired by dance rhythms, titled Slave Dances (Seven Portraits).
Full colour 52-page A5 zine companion to the album:
”An essential accompaniment to the album, indeed a brilliantly educational document in its own right, is a full colour 52-page A5 zine, featuring soberly beguiling artwork by Joyce Treasure and superb design by Dan Taylor. Here, Kumo explains in detail how he sourced, researched and put together these pieces, his recording methods and motivations in making the album. There is additional text also from Treasure, an essay based around her cover image The Dancer, in which she lays bare the insidious processes of cultural and mental colonisation which deprive both blacks and whites of true consciousness.” David Stubbs
Black Bottom (James Stinson) Video by @Francesca Bonci
In response to police brutality, Black Lives Matter, Covid 19 and extremist ideology, in December 2020, values forged a new Breakaway State. In this third space, technology moved race away from the biological and genetic historical systems towards questions of technological healing and agency...
February 2019 - Jan 2020
Two Birmingham artists, who won free studio space for a year in a specially created facility at Bruntwood’s Cornwall Buildings, have moved into their new residence.
Joyce Treasure and Suzi Osborn were among 25 applicants for Bruntwood-Grand Union’s artists-in-residence scheme designed to help kick start careers of young or emerging artists in Birmingham.
The new studio in the basement of the Grade II-listed building on Newhall Street is the latest step in Bruntwood’s drive to encourage greater support for the city’s arts and cultural scene from the wider business community.
During the next 12 months, Joyce and Suzi will use their residency to create art that reflects the Birmingham of today.
It is striking about Amsterdam-North that women are underrepresented in the streetscape. Mothers spend time at the playgrounds, but the design of public space itself is mostly aimed towards men and younger children. Joyce will be investigating the social routes that women follow in this neighbourhood and the role public areas play in it.