The Cut, The Tear, and The Remix: Re-imagining Spaces for Art in a Covid Struck World
Week 2 | July 14th, 2021
In an exhibition entitled the cut, the tear, and the remix: contemporary collage and black futures presented by the McMaster Museum of Art and the Nia Center for the Arts's virtual exhibition the white cube is dematerialized to create a space for Black artists of the diaspora envisioning an Afrofuture.
The exhibition, curated by Stylo Starr during her curatorial internship with the McMaster Museum of Art, features eight Canadian artists of the African and Caribbean diaspora. Their works, each grounded in a different form of a collage, centers around their experience as immigrants. In this sense, collage is quite a fitting medium as it works with themes of construction and deconstruction, contextualization and decontextualization. The platform itself was created by the artist SPATIAL-ESK and is set in outer space with colourful planes carving out colour-coded rooms for each artist. The exhibition is removed from any familiarity and is without any floors or ceilings, instead exposed to the galaxy surrounding it. Once entered you can click and drag your mouse through the exhibition. Different icons lead you to a secondary webpages to get more information on the artist and their work or in certain cases to watch the artwork.
For example, after entering Sonya Mwamba's room in pastel blue, you can click on an icon to be redirected to the McMaster Museum's website where you can watch her short films. They reference the Kodak test photos and Hollywood movies where the white cultural canon reigned supreme. Mwamba thereby challenges the white default by superimposing the black bodies to recalibrate these films, thus taking back Black narratives and ways of being. Another artist whose work we are redirected to see is Kofi Oduro's hypertext code as an alternative to the performance of poetry. His works speak volumes about the creative potential of basic technology and hints at how the black and immigrant experience is often moved beyond physical space. Digital art can be understood to embody this state of being as it is at once a physical and imaginary space.
Yung Yemi, “Nothing Real Can Be Threatened”, 2020
In another room, Yung Yemi's (also known as Adeyemi Adegbesan) black and white collages refer to what he calls "the duality of blackness"; that is to be both infinitely diverse and singularly monolithic. Thinking about a future where blackness is freed of oppressive colonial rule, each collage is stripped of context and hung in white space. They are also simultaneously draped in detailed and decadent armour, expressing the need for protection even in an Afrofuture. In a yellow room, FEZA focuses on what she calls the 'middle space;' where reconciliation between the past and the present becomes possible. Her collages deconstruct and reconstruct her memories by tiling segments of photographic images together like pieces of a broken mirror that create an alternate reality.
Next, originally presented as an immersive exhibition, Anna Binta Diallo's work resembles portals using images of landscapes, space, or maps within the silhouettes of bodies that merge with the background of the exhibition. Themes of displacement emerge through the juxtaposition of different landscapes within the singular vessel. In a red-coloured room, Emkay's Adjei-Manu similarly collages into silhouettes focusing on hands and eyes signifying the search for one's own identity and history, and how they might speak to one's own future. Finally, in a brown room, Ghislan Timm's plays with GIFs and Marcel Camus' 1959 film Black Orpheus to bridge the past and the future by juxtaposing and assembling the fate of the two lovers with imagery of the joyful festivities of the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, thus inserting black and brown bodies into Greek mythologies. Her space is more furnished than most, with brown columns blending into the rooms' background.
Overall, the cut, the tear, and the remix: contemporary collage and black futures is successful in its two goals. Its first, presenting a diverse selection of collage artists that engage in the discussion about the Afrofuture. For example, although all the artists addressed feelings of non-belonging through their common language of collage, some like Sonya Mwamba or Anna Binta Diallo addressed their displacement and search for identity by creating a sort of an alternate reality where they would belong, while others like Kofi Oduro or FEZA offered more contemplative experiments of what it means to be a migrant.
As for its second goal; offering an alternative to the white cube, both Stylo Starr the curator, and SPATIAL-ESK the designer of the platform, were able to capture the experience of going to an art gallery within the comfort of our own home away from the 'snobby' art world. They were able to do this by taking what was important; scale, accessibility, and order, and discarding the rest leaving us in this space between the physical, and the immaterial. This makes the space itself its own kind of artwork which blend in really well with the theme of the exhibition. For example, one aspect that often gets lost in virtual spaces is the sense of scale, as we can be left to zoom in and out infinitely. However, because the viewer can't actually walk around the platform and is constrained to a clicking on a single marker, the collages never lose their sense of scale as seen in Anna Binta Diallo's series of collages where we can stilll grasp how big the works would have been in their original installation setting.
Having said this, there were two things that could have been improved. First, is the creation of a space where you could do everything, like see Sonya Mwamba's short films or Kofi Oduro poetry without being redirected to another webpage. Second, the work of interpreting the pieces somewhat on our own has been done for us. In every artist's individual page is a statement giving us a reading of the work on top of the artist's statement which isn't necessary as it almost robs the viewer of their imagination when looking at the art. In the end, the cut, the tear, and the remix bridges the gap that the pandemic has left us with this past year and a half by bringing together an interesting departure from the white cube to possibly offer a more inclusive space that isn't limited by the audience's distance or time.
Link to the exhibit: https://museum.mcmaster.ca/the-remix-virtual-exhibition/