Black Aesthetics

Just another black phd student looking for answers in the visual she/they - 30

[blackqueerdo]

Meet the Black Art Incubator – a collaborative in residence at Recess (41 Grand Street, NYC) through August 19. Visit Recess’s website for full details: http://www.recessart.org/blackartincubator/ 

All photo courtesy: @kingtexas​

About Black Art Incubator

From July 14 – August 19, Taylor Renee Aldridge, Jessica Bell Brown, Kimberly Drew, and Jessica Lynne will host the Black Art Incubator—a project that will use Recess’s storefront space as a hub for public programming and the dissemination of resources for artists and arts professionals.

The Black Art Incubator is a social sculpture designed to create an intervention in the “art world” through a series of public events that bring together artists, curators, community members, critics, and scholars. Using collaboration and public engagement as guiding methodologies, the Black Art Incubator will seek to provoke new understandings of the myriad sectors that comprise the contemporary art world. The Black Art Incubator, although open and accessible to people from all backgrounds, is rooted in the nexus of the African Diaspora. The Black Art Incubator specifically aims to prioritize Black subjectivity through the use of social sculpture. The space serves as an evolving think tank, that is available for use by people of the community.

Modeling itself after an incubator, the project will offer a range of artist-led conversations, critical dialogues, panels, and teach-ins devoted to fostering discourse about community, history, and collaborative cultural production. Visitors will be invited to participate in and contribute to weekly programs including workshops on archives, conversations about art & money, office hours with leaders in the field, and open critique sessions for selected artists; more details are available in the “Events” column to the left. Notes, images, and other traces of these programs will accrue in the space, transforming Recess into a spatialized working document.

By developing a vibrant and accessible site and an accompanying set of programs, the Black Art Incubator will give specific form to an art world community—one that is united by a collective, process-based practice of self-care, knowledge-sharing, and discursive exchange.

[processedlives]

There’s a Tear in the World: Touch After Finitude Curated by Rizvana Bradley A body touched, touching, fragile, vulnerable, always changing, fleeing, ungraspable, evanescent under a caress or a blow, a body without a husk, a poor skin stretched over the cave where our shadow floats … (Jean-Luc Nancy)

This conference day will focus on the haptic through the resonance of touch. Extending our critical sense of the haptic through attendant, experimental grammars of touch, we confront a set of sometimes unruly and even wild philosophical and artistic imperatives.  For the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, touch marks the limits of how we come to know ourselves both in and beyond our finitude.  Touch has enabled us to enrich our techniques of knowing, making possible a rediscovery of the modalities of movement, matter, and sense that comprise our subject and object worlds.  Thematically, touch will recur in our discussions of artworks, and in our explorations of the irreducibly textured expressions of performance and social practice.  Weaving between image, sound, and the poetic line, the conversations in this conference day will navigate the overlaps and cuts between them. The included readings, performances, and talks will explore diasporic forms of world-making, dynamic philosophies of movement, the violence of cartographic and architectural imaginaries, the material trace of touch in economies of performance, and the haptic violence manifested in history’s archival inscriptions.

[processedlives]

Lecture by Hortense Spillers (Vanderbilt U.) - March 18, 2016

Hortense Spillers is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor in English (Vanderbilt U). “Shades of Intimacy: What the Eighteenth Century Teaches Us,” served as the keynote lecture for “The _Flesh_ of the Matter: A Hortense Spillers Symposium,” at Cornell University, March 18, 2016.

[processedlives]

It is, because that’s where the subject lives as theorist, consumer, grocery shopper, got-to-pick-up-the-mail-now, let’s get to the bank. That subject is really living in the everyday. The question for me is how do you talk about or think about those different beats or rhythms through which you live your life. In other words, there is a doing and then there is a contemplating the doing. Those are two kinds of emphasis in the life of the same subject. There is the standing in relationship to an event, anticipating an event, and then there’s a getting a perspective on the event. One lives in the everyday and that’s one of the reasons why I’m a little concerned that our discussions about internationalism have made it harder for us to focus on the everyday. There might in fact be a global village, I can email or call someone right now, I can certainly go to Canada and instantly exchange money and vice-versa. All the trade agreements have made us a little closer to each other in the world across barriers of languages and cultures. But, I live my life everyday with a postal system, a system of currency, a certain set of neighbors, a certain kind of foodstuff and food culture.. There are certain people that I think about and call up. I live in a national culture, in the everyday world. So how do you think about that in relationship to Homi Bhabha’s “escalator” that he introduces in The Location of Culture. (see: Homi Bhahbha. The Location of Culture New York: Routledge, 1994) The notion of hybridity and ambiguity is a very powerful notion, it has a certain glamour and sex appeal, but I don’t live on an escalator. I mean at some point, I land. Theoretically that might not be interesting but that’s what happens and so that reality has to be worked into the theoretical configuration, or we are misleading or perverting what actually happens. I live in one culture at a time, I might speak several languages or idiolects in it. The post-colonial and the post-modern have a way of always moving the discussion somewhere else. But you take the “local” with you, whatever your “local” is, into these various cultural and theoretical zones. A lot of this comes back to what you actually do on the ground, in the everyday. What I’m suggesting is that it is one thing to make pronouncements in public spaces about fraternity, brotherhood, liberty, and justice. But it’s another thing to come back where you live and to make that a part of your practice. The disparity between those two things is what we call hypocrisy, and observing it makes me realize that I don’t like my own lapses, I don’t like other people’s lapses, even though we know we have to live with them. It’s a way of making people responsible beyond the pressures of their own rhetorical commitments, and the realization that commitments have to be something other than rhetorical; they have to be practical or praxial, in the sense of a practice. That’s what I see missing in our discussions today about race, gender, class, sexual preference. We talk a lot of stuff about openness and plurality and diversity and so on, but what’s the practice? What is the actual practice between one subject and another, between one leftist and another? There are troubling conclusions you have to draw about the generation of the ‘60s and its actual practices, what we actually do when we get home or when the television cameras are not there. You can’t believe that Clinton ought to come out more strongly for children’s rights, one asserts out of his mouth if you don’t take care of your own children. Women should have access or rights, but you don’t treat your women colleagues very well, the women around you, and the same relating to men. What’s the practice? The question is: Is there a place in theory today for us to to be critical of various gaps or lapses or aporias in the theoretical?

[processedlives]

—       Hortense Spillers

[projectqueer]

meet 3 queer brazilian artists reclaiming their african roots

Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Davi de Jesus, and Vitória Cribb tell us how they are reclaiming their blackness through art.

[glitchphotography]

Stills from Vitória Cribb’s “Internal Conflicts”

[wanderingandactingout]

from Sub Not Slave by Shawné Michaelain Holloway

SUB NOT SLAVE is a multimedia installation that forces a viewer to look down. Through a creative re-staging of a sex club bathroom, the work heavy handedly presents an examination of power. Serving as a kind of interrogation booth, the work turns into a structure that simultaneously asks, “What turns you on?” and “What do you think is dirty?” The definition of this uncleanliness can fluctuate between its literal meaning to “forbidden,” “uncouth,” and even “lesser than.”

Upon entering the space, a viewer is invited to stand over a toilet with both feet inside a guideline. Looking down, a video plays; placed where one would typically urinate and defecate, it is meant to remind the viewer of their role as dominant and judgement-maker on bodies or voices inside of the screen. In the footage, self-shot pornography plays in a loop. Intertwined with a list of yes or no questions. Viewers are asked to respond to aloud.

The exhibition title SUB NOT SLAVE reinforces submission as an active gesture that is offered in exchange for something rather than something that is owed. By following the artist’s carefully arranged choreography of viewership, she engages audiences in an embodied act of play. From across the room, another work presents the artist sitting in her own bathroom stall, overseeing a circuitous objectification.

Shawné Michaelain Holloway

[ekrem-serdar]

Opening at Squeaky Wheel on Wednesday, October 6, 2021, on view through February 14, 2022: SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY: i would’ve said goodbye if i thought you loved me back . See the project at Squeaky Wheel or online. More info here. 

[russellmoreton]

Spatial Diffractions/Blueprint. by Russell Moreton Via Flickr: russellmoreton.blogspot.com/ Outpost 280922 Peripheral Vision : Relationality. Categories and things may make it easier for us to grasp reality, but they also hide its underlying complexities. Robert Cooper, 2005. Developing a constitutive nature within practices. Qualitative Reseachers. Entangled practices are productive, and who and what are excluded through these entangled practices matter, different intra-actions produce different phenomena. It is in and through an understanding of these entangled practices presented by Barad that we can begin to understand how diffractive readings can help us in our work as qualitative reseachers to produce knowledge differently. Interactions Matter. Spatial Agency. Walking Wayfinding in the City. Thinking intra-actively. Thinking with Barad’s intra-action helps us fashion an approach that re-inserts the material into the process of analysis. It is a reclaiming of the material absent in its modernist limitations. It is the work of Karen Barad and other named as ‘new materialists, or material feminists’ to ask how our intra-action with other bodies (both human and nonhuman) produce subjectivities and performative enactments. Such questioning shifts our thinking away from how performative speech acts or repetitive bodily actions produce subjectivity, but also how subjectivity can be understood as a set of linkages and connections with other things and other bodies, both human and nonhuman. The Discursive Text/Material. Phenomenology is interested in the now, what we see, how we perceive, and how those perceptions shape or come the world that is constitutive both of our environment and us. The Keatsian concept of negative capability, that of being with uncertainty, of seeking to transcend and revise contexts, to reject constraints and open up dialogue as a throughfare for all thoughts, to ask questions and develop empathy. John Keats 1795-1821. Local artists and writers respond to the University of Winchester’s Magdalen Hill Archaeological Research Project. On-site, co-directors Dr Simon Roffey and Dr Phil Marter talk about process. A negative, destructive archaeology of taking away, of context sheets for a cut (negative) or a deposit (positive): how the processes are physical and sensory as well as interpretative, how their work is forensic, piecing together, visceral, more instinct than intellect, tactile and haptic, sculptural, revealing, never final, and as much an art as a science. The Parallel Visions of Artists and Archaeologists. The artist’s role here is to bring their own kind of knowledge setting aside logic and reason, to use the imagination and senses, to express through body and mind, the self, the messiness and uncertainty evoked by these material traces, mystery and wonder. Colin Renfrew, Figuring It Out, 2003. Spatial Diffractions in Interior Design. A final diffraction is to think about how the office space itself creates a diffraction. The office door, the opening, the threshold, can be viewed as the place through which waves pass, creating a diffraction. This diffraction passes both ways: in inviting those who enter and those who fail to enter. This opening further serves to reconstitute the office door as a threshold to be crossed, or as a threshold that welcomes. One invites, the other excludes. We presented examples of how Sera and Cassandra were produced differently through intra-actions with office space, other bodies, clothing, and furniture, and similarly how their entanglement with these material fixtures resulted in a mutual constitution of the material and discursive. It is through an enactment of a diffractive analysis and a re-thinking of our relationship to/with data, and to/with the material in our research sites, that we see much productive potential for research methodologists. Project Spaces/Presentations. Diagrams, maps and charts are all a symbolic depiction that emphasises mapping relationships. Keywords: Agency, Spatial Agency, Practice, Making, Architectural Body,Relational Movements,Outreach, Urban Walking, Interactions, Cultivation Field, Foraging, Finding, Gathering, Harvesting, Organism, Person, Environment, Anthropology, Archaeology, Art,

[yingangphoto]

So proud to announce that my artist book, The Quickening, designed by @teunvdh, was given second prize for the Australian Photo Book Award last month at the closing of @photofestivalau!! The Quickening is now completely sold out, so copies are now only available through the resale market. Excerpt from the book can be viewed here. Please email or DM to see the full video, otherwise the book can also be viewed at the following libraries: V&A Museum, London International Center of Photography, New York National Library, Canberra Photography Studies College, Melbourne

~~~

“The Quickening is ambitious, subtle, inventive and deeply moving. I can hardly remember the last time I encountered a work that made such wise use of tactility in achieving a photographic vision. So many good decisions.” - Teju Cole The Quickening details the claustrophobia, myopia, paradoxical loneliness and luminance of new motherhood and the postpartum period. Riso and offset printed, this uniquely handmade book was published in a limited first edition of 250 copies, redolent of the number of days of gestation before the premature birth of the author’s son. Additionally, 30 copies from a special edition each come with a choice of one of two prints. This number is indicative of the number of days left until the child’s due date. Created as an editioned art book, each copy is signed and numbered. A variety of papers were used to reflect a haptic complexity in addition to a soft french fold that feels full and fleshy in the hands. A chaotic and varying bind with red string is a nod to the stitches used during the emergency caesarean birth of the child and no book is precisely the same. Finalist for the Vevey Images Grand Prix for 2019 Julia Margaret Cameron Award Honorable Mention for 2019 Solo exhibition at Rencontres d'Arles 2019 Winner of the BIFA Documentary Photo Book Prize 2020 Finalist for the Lucie Foundation Photo Book Prize 2020 Tokyo International Foto Award Honorable Mention for 2020 Official Selection for the London International Creative Competition 2020 Finalist for the Perimeter x PHOTO 2021 International Photobook Prize Winner of Belfast Photo Festival 2021 Bronze medal for the Documentary Book Prize at the Moscow International Foto Awards 2021 Px3 Paris Photo Award Honorable Mention for 2021 Australian Photobook Award Honorable Mention for 2022 Finalist for the 2022 SIPF Photobook Award SEE THE PROJECT ~~~ 90 pages with 116 images French fold Combination of offset and riso print Various uncoated papers Softcover with linen sleeve 8.6 x 11 inches First Edition of 280 + 20 AP   Self Published Photos & text © 2021 Ying Ang Design Heijdens Karwei, Amsterdam ISBN: 978-0-646-83323-1 Printed in the Netherlands ~~~ Critical Reviews: “The Quickening wears its handmade-ness on its sleeve. A ream of loose papers held together with a complex patterned variation on a Japanese stitch tells the reader that this is a personal and intimate document… The cacophony of imagery we are presented with oscillates between the manic, the incredibly dark, the gentle, the dreamlike and the intimate… Ang’s book is an exploration of photobook making, and how narrative works in the visual book form—it pushes and stretches concepts of storytelling, of showing and revealing. And finally, it’s a moment of total honesty and openness told in the only way it could have possibly been told.” - Daniel Boetker-Smith for Lensculture “Work like Ang’s has such profound value for articulating hard-to-reach experiences that language often fails to capture. She entangles the viewer in the web of social and political issues surrounding the transition into motherhood that are too often ignored and overlooked… The psychoanalyst Carl Jung wrote, “only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life” – a sentiment that manifests in Ang’s book over and over again” - Gem Fletcher for Creative Review “Ang’s images are carefully composed and meticulously photographed, showing a mastery and deft use of photographic technique. She uses a wide range of tonality, lighting, contrast, and printing methods to produce different textures and moods, as well as many unexpected transitions from page to page. Many images burst at the seams with symbolism and layers of meaning, resulting in work that rewards repeat viewing and contemplation.” - Andy Pham for Paper Journal “The pictures in The Quickening are a gorgeous cacophony of tender and tension-filled scenes interwoven with moments of luminosity which show how easily the lightest moments of motherhood can slip into the difficult ones (and back again). There’s a softness to the pictures, too – a dreaminess that feels like the first moments of waking up, where everything is a little blurry and sleep images linger.” - Joanna Cresswell for Refinery29 “Ang’s depiction of matrescence is layered and complex. Her images blend the gentle and soft, with a strain and rawness that becomes all-consuming. Velvety skin is enveloped in warm, delicate light. But, motifs of that tenderness behind misted glass at once suggest fullness and a claustrophobic repetition. The narrative is textured and sensual; it mirrors the intensity of Ang’s lived experience.” - Izabela Radwanska Zhang for the British Journal of Photography

[noosphe-re]

The role of peripheral and unfocused vision in our lived experience of the world, as well as in our experience of interiority in the spaces we inhabit, has also evoked my interest. A remarkable factor in the experience of enveloping spatiality, interiority and hapticity is the deliberate suppression of sharp focused vision. This issue has hardly entered the theoretical discourse of architecture as architectural theorising continues to be interested in focused vision, conscious intentionality and perspectival representation. The very essence of the lived experience is moulded by unconscious haptic imagery and unfocused peripheral vision. Focused vision confronts us with the world whereas peripheral vision envelops us in the flesh of the world. Alongside the critique of the hegemony of vision, we need to reconsider the very essence of sight itself and the collaboration of the various sensory realms.

Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses

[medic88itup]

Yall, was catching some video essays on ancient religions and this idea of The Evil Eye Belief Complex prominent in ancient Greek Mesopotamian cultures is some interesting stuff. So, this idea of warding off someone's evil gaze...contemporary paganism...practitioners of the pagan and arcane. Making substances or images to prevent the evil eye. An enmeshing net, a closing bird snare. Fill it's mouth with ashes.

Baskania = evil eye bewitchement = fascination derives from the evil eye complex. "To look upon" mirror image. Reflecting the light. This is LAUDNA. She deflects the evil gaze. Phallic charms and incantations. Paul references evil eye in Galatians 3...Talmud and The Zohar...apotropaic symbolism...folk religions assimilated in to institutional religions...

I'm gonna write a fic. As soon as I sleep.

Intromission light :: light is touch...being gazed upon. Unwanted attention from others...envy...that's the most dangerous thing to happen to someone in small tribal societies, because they will come for you.

So yeah, just some stream of consciousness thoughts about a fic I wanna write maybe, anyway I got ideas about the girls being part of this evolving Exandrian Mythos and what the reflective symbolism that can be seen in Our Girls...

What is sight but physical touch? The apex of the cone of vision. Optical pneuma. IMAGE = IMOGEN. Haptic sight. Ths poisoned arrows of the eyes.

Dagger and Raven symbolism of mesopotamian imagery seen in imogen's dagger and Paté's Raven skull and then there is the Fey component

[jennpelly]

“At this stage of the game I still consider myself a writer who indulges in critical essays and theorizing, but for the purpose more of engaging in the major moral, political, and cultural dialogues of our time than of appraising the value of artists’ work in the consumer marketplace and in the destitute (and mythical) marketplace of ideas. I am also more interested in the people behind the work, what makes them sweat, vulnerable, anxious, and driven to do what they do, than in the work itself. I’ve got to be hyped about the work to be interested in their ideas, but in conversation I’m less concerned with their esthetics than with what life experiences provoked their artistic obsessions. I find myself most fascinated by folk who are umbilically connected to their work by some neurotic personal issue that in translation joins in with the debates around race, class, power, and identity going on in our time.”

— Greg Tate in Artforum 1992

[y2zee]

HandBlown Glassware 001. Designed by Multidisciplinary artist Solange Knowles and produced by glassblower Jason McDonald.

[flychicka]

Solange Knowles, Jason McDonald, Small Matter Art Objects: Glassware 001 (2023)

[notchainedtotrauma]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Solange (@solangeknowles)

In Service to Whom (2023) 84 minutes A four-act performance Sound, Video projection, Scenography, Archival Collection 24 screens, 4 channels

As I contemplate the evolution and maturation of my artistry, “In Service To Whom” was developed around constructing new narratives surrounding my body, the posture of rest, protection from the gaze, and speaks to a reemergence into the world of everyday life following periods of personal incubation and self-revitalization. The piece featured a sound piece featuring artist Autumn Knight and premiered “Not Necessarily In Arms Reach, Music for Two Tubas ” and “If the Promise is Large” for solo cello and double bass.

View a galley + full credits on www.saintheron.com

Special Thanks to: Jonathan Wilson, Clare Eardley, Melissa Burnet Rice

Photography: @ib.hasa.n

[militantbodies]

Manthia Diawara -  “Edouard Glissant: A Demand for the Right of Opacity”

August 2019, European Graduate School