Towering over the Senegalese capital of Dakar, the recently completed African Renaissance Monument casts a long shadow that stretches out across the surrounding suburb of Ouakom. Ahead of these three colossal bronze figures – a man, a woman and a child – is the Atlantic Ocean. Behind, an otherwise barren landscape is scattered with tell tale signs of development: here a cluster of cranes, there the foundations of a hotel rising up from the beach scrub. The skyline of Dakar is changing.

The brainchild of former Senegalese president Abodulaye Wade, the 49-metre high African Renaissance Monument (Le Monument de laRenaissance Africaine) was billed as an effort to challenge “centuries of ignorance, intolerance and racism” about Africa (Ba, 2009). To this end the monument represents a confluence of two distinct agendas. On the one hand, it embodies a moment of enormous optimism. As the name suggests, the statue signifies a rebirth of sorts; the right to a future just over the horizon signalled by the bronze child’s outstretched hand. In aiming to “match the Statue of Liberty or Paris’ Eiffel tower” (Ibid), however, the ARM also stakes out a claim in a global arena of national monumentalisation. This statue does not merely celebrate; it competes. The latter goal is complicated by a number of factors: a lack of transparency around the cost of the project, labour secured from a North Korean investment cartel, and an “un-Islamic”, even Stalinist aesthetic belie its scope and ambition. Collectively these concerns have engendered extensive debate in the global press. While Wade’s supporters argue that the statue brings life to Africa’s “common destiny” (Walker, 2010), celebrated Cameroonian curator Simon Njami has called the monument (in O’Toole, 2012) the “‘most outrageously stupid thing in the world”.

African Renaissance Monument – Photo by Author

In terms of sheer schizophrenic impact, the ARM is perhaps an apt metaphor for another giant looming large in the Dakarois cultural imaginary. The Dakar Biennale or Dak’art, the oldest mega show of its kind on the African continent, is likewise the meeting place of two ideological commitments that can make for uneasy bedfellows. As the descendent of poet, politician and philosopher Léopold Sédar Senghor’s “First World Festival of Negro Arts”, the biennale is closely bound up in the rhetoric of a contemporized pan-Africanism[1]. In its most recent incarnations the event has also strategically aspired to internationalism. To extend my metaphor, Dak’art turns its gaze to the West with its feet still anchored in African soil and as the African Renaissance Monument suggests, this can at times be an awkward, even inherently unstable, cultural and political location. In the text that follows I briefly chart some moments of friction that emerge as a consequence of these two ideological metanarratives overlapping in Dak’Art 2014, and evaluate to what extent the biennale has succeeded in reconciling a pan-African regionalism with its alignment to a global art world.

Rather than polarise these discourses and risk rendering them mutually exclusive, I hope to examine their points of intersection (and cross-pollination) in order to ask after Rasheed Araeen, “Can Africa assert its independence or develop its own direction and vision…without critically confronting the dominant structures of art around the world today?” (Araeen 2003: 100).

The theme of this year’s Dak’art, “Producing the Common”, makes for an interesting point of departure. In the show’s comprehensive accompanying catalogue, curators Elise Atangana, Abdelkader Damani and Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi establish their approach as “a conscious act of engaging what is collectively shared” that “take[s] into account what effects everyone, the Whole-World” (2014: 21). The phrase whole-world (Tout-Monde) is drawn from the writings of Martiniquan poet Edouard Glissant to describe a field of social relations: a world configured as an archipelago of “islands, isthmuses, peninsulas, lands thrusting out, mixing and connecting…” (cited in Dash, 2011). It is a radically egalitarian sentiment that also leaves room for cultural specificity, sharing some significant ground with the work of another theorist invoked at length in Dak’art press materials, Michael Hardt. Hardt’s conception of the common, from which “Producing the Common” takes its cue, operates as a politically and socially charged territory:

[The common] is not the realm of sameness or indifference. It is the scene of encounter of social and political differences, at times characterized by agreement and at others antagonism, at times composing political bodies and at others decomposing them (2009).

As a guiding principal of the biennale, “Producing the Common” thus locates Dak’art 2014 not only at the tense intersection of politics and aesthetics, but also at a meeting point between the global black consciousness movement brought to bear by Glissant[2], and the Western political philosophy of thinkers like Hardt. In the space of Dak’art’s catalogue, such bodies of thought seemingly sit comfortably side by side.

Read in conjunction, however, the references to Hardt and Glissant that punctuate Dak’art’s press resources also couch the show in a resoundingly academic rhetoric. I cannot resist recalling the experience of sitting at a conference at the primary Dak’art venue of the Village de la Biennale, translation headset in hand, and listening to the women behind me parody the academic language of a catalogue essay. They threw words back and forth teasingly, taking turns to find a pleasing turn of phrase: “interdependence”, “arbitrating”, and “communitarian solidarity”.

In framing the exhibition in a particular lexicon – the language of the academic, the university, the elite – it is worth asking for whom the triumvirate of curators aim to produce this “common” The 62 odd artists on the main exhibition? The Senegalese public? An international art market? Glissant’s whole world? In an earlier essay, ‘Curating Africa, Curating the Contemporary’, Nzewi offers the model of the counter-public by way of explanation. His is a public called into being by a curatorial approach that establishes Dak’art unambiguously as a “counter-exhibition”. He advances that it is the “discourse [of Dak’art] which imagines and produces a pan-African ‘exhibitionary’ world” at odds with a dominant biennale typology (2012: 6-7).

Dak’art curators (left to right): Abdelkader Damani, Elise Atangana, Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi

“Counter-publics”, as the notion is expanded in the work of American social theorist Michael Warner, are a kind of bounded audience at odds with a prevailing social paradigm. It is worth noting Warner’s first criterion by which the parameters of a public are defined. “Publics,” he writes, “are a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself” (2002: 49). They exist only as the end for which information is manufactured, or in the case of Dak’art, for whom exhibitions are organized. Such publics come into beingby virtue of being addressed (2002: 49-51). There is a degree, then, to which Dak’art forges its own countercultural arena of reception, generating a unique brand of pan-African internationalism that it simultaneously defines and delimits. Bearing that in mind, I am inclined to argue that there is, still, room to expend critical energy inventing (or perhaps reinventing) a register that reflects the needs of a contemporary African public. Following Nzewi, if Dak’art’s objective is to “imagine and produce” a pan-African exhibitionary model, particularly one that falls under the rubric of egalitarianism, surely inclusivity would be a worthy cause célèbre?

In a way I am doing an injustice to Dak’art 2014 by reading the exhibition through its theoretical framework. The active “producing” contained within “producing the common” was more evident in the main exhibition space of the Village de la Biennale. There, diaspora artists and African residents shared a level playing field unbounded by either theoretical partitions or artificial national borders. The tone was set by Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia Henda’s installation “As god wants and devil likes it” (O.R.G.A.S.M. Congress) (2011-2014) in the central courtyard, which modifies the European Union logo to include the African continent at its centre. Henda’s accompanying series of photographs, equal parts staged and manipulated documentary footage, featured prominent European leaders in Afros and cornrows. The resulting scenes were playful, but also represented a critique of Africa’s place in a global political arena. In re-signifying his subjects, Henda figures the possibility of re-scribing not just a bitter colonial past but also a political present and, indeed, a future. His codified politicians are both caricatures of Africanness and placeholders of a sort. And indeed, the vision of an Africa at the heart of a European emblem – an Africa that acts as a centrifugal force around which Europe must operate – is a potent symbol for the agenda that undercuts Dak’Art.

Although opening a day late (and who gets to say, really, that exhibitions should function according to a preordained schedule) Dak’art’s main venue was polished and sharply curated. Standing amongst the cosmopolitan crowd of collectors, curators and artists, I was reminded of the biennale’s many siblings the world over: perhaps Documenta, Manifesta or the Venice Biennale. Filipovic et al observe that the nomination ‘biennale’ frequently refers less to a specific periodicity – simply a bi-annual art event – and more to a model of exhibition practice that is “often grandiose in scale, sometimes dispersed across several locations in a city, [and] at times locally embedded through site-specific commissions while being global in ambition” (2010: 14). A biennale conceived as such is not a name only, but rather a series of aesthetic and critical standards capable of legitimating certain curatorial models, certain artists, and certain spaces.

O.R.G.A.S.M., by Kiluanji Kia Henda. Photo by author.

Let me be clear. Conforming to the standards of an international biennale typology is not a fault, nor am I levelling a critique of that aspiration here. Calling for something as reductive as “local flavour” would be too much like demanding that selected work exhibit an “African essence”. Ironically, the biennale selection committee upheld that same principle of “essence” as a necessary precondition for entry until Dak’art’s 2004 iteration (Fillitz, 2011). It is through such ill-defined criteria, taken on board unequivocally, that the mechanisms of colonialism are institutionalized and sustained. And make no mistake, such mechanisms are still at work. As Araeen asks of the present generation of African artists, “If the social, economic and political conditions of Africa are still struggling against the global hegemony of the West, how can its art be free from this hegemony?” (2010: 100).

That said I would like to point out that Dak’art 2014’s detailed (if madcap) press page links to an article from Italy’s Domus magazine that opens with the line “For the first time in its history, Dak’art has begun to resemble a real biennale” (Pensa, 2014, my emphasis). Written by the director of Wikipedia’s collaborative WikiAfrica initiative, the review is exhaustive and full of flair and critical dexterity. The authoritative judgement implied in that first statement, however, is compounded by the addition of the line “From what they say [the curators] seem well aware that a biennial – even in Africa – can certainly not represent a continent” (Ibid, my emphasis). Needless to say the author is not alone in this sentiment (over the years, such conversations have plagued Dak’art) but she does explicitly foreground something important. Adhering to the standards of international biennales reifies those same standards and ascribes universality to them, allowing for a category like “real biennale” to operate with relative impunity. And who polices the boundaries of that definition, after all? Who decides what constitutes a sufficiently ‘real’ exhibition?

It is in Dak’Art’s fringe programme, known colloquially as the ‘Off’, that the “realness” of a biennale is further complicated. The ‘Off’ is not confined within an orderly exhibition model. Over the course of Dak’art’s month long run, more than 250 artists exhibit work in the city and surrounds. Artwork materialises in disused warehouses and car dealerships, along bridges and in courtyards. I would suggest that the ‘Off’ allows for Nzewi’s imagined counter-public to be more truly activated. The mode of address in the streets of Dakar is less clearly defined, the art-public relation more protean and nebulous. Thus, “the common” is untethered from the curatorial dialogues engineered between works and expanded to encompass a more complex social sphere of engagement. An artwork that appears in the street – that most public of public spaces, and ideally available to all – necessitates, even demands, a different tone and register of engagement.

This is not always without complication. In the case of “Precarious Imaging: Visibility and Media Surrounding African Queerness”, such engagements were far from polite. Curated by Koyo Kouoh and Ato Malinda at the Raw Material Company venue in suburban Dakar, the show sought to profile explorations of queer African experience. Among others, the show featured South African artist Zanele Muholi’s Faces and Phases portrait series of black lesbian women, and Kenyan artist Jim Chuchu’s Pagan, exploring contemporary African homophobia as a colonial hangover. Within a day of opening, religious fundamentalists had attacked the gallery space, broken windows and destroyed light fittings on its front facade. According to Senegalese newspaper Le Monde, Mamè Mactar Guèye, vice-president of Senegalese Islamic organization Jamra, spearheaded the attack. In a subsequent television interview, Guèye explained, “This event is supposed to promote our culture, but proves to be propaganda for unions which are against nature. Undeniably, this edition of Dak’Art has been detrimental to our morality and to our laws” (Forbes, 2014). The show closed early due to pressure from the Senegalese state.

To me, this incident represents a clash between the immediate conditions of locality and globality; between the enactment of a local political logic and an aspirational internationalist agenda. In a predominantly Islamic country where perceived acts of homosexuality remain illegal, an exhibition of queer visual culture imagines and produces publics outside the bounds of the immediate political present. That is not to say those publics do not already exist- the opening event was duly attended by a diverse group of local and international artists and activists, some of them very outspoken figures in the Dakar community. The press release by Secretary General of Dak’art Babacar Mbaye Diop’s, however, suggests that these counter-publics exist beyond the purview of Dak’art. He formally disassociated the biennale from the troubled (and troubling) ‘Off’ show, bluntly stating that Dak’art was “not responsible for collateral exhibitions” (Forbes, 2014). As a crucial insight into the biennale’s objectives, this event manifests the frictions that exist when local particularities encounter internationalism and both commitments are equally compromised.

Critic Clementine Deliss, describing the first iteration of Dak’Art in 1992, acknowledges what she deems a “misguided faith in the so-called international art circuit” that has “deterred the organizers from developing a pan-African approach” (1993: 136). Notably, her review is titled “When internationalism falls apart”. Deliss finds fault with both the biennale’s pan-Africanist and internationalist ambitions. For her, writing in the early 90’s, the event had a long way to go. As Fillitz (2011) has suggested, though, it is all too easy to force upon Dak’art the goal of dismantling the dominant aesthetic discourses of a Euro-American art world without taking into account its ambivalent cultural location or, indeed, the needs of exhibiting artists.

Much like the African Renaissance Monument, Dak’art is caught between looking outward and inland. Situated at the meeting point of distinct national and international cultural agendas, the event is necessarily conflicted at times. It is important to keep in mind, however, that the intersection of pan-Africanism and internationalism – that metaphorical crossroads – is also a vantage point. From that unique point of view, new worlds are visible.

The post Dak’art 2014: At a crossroads appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

At present, the exhibitions The Unicorn Incorporated (Curtis R. Barnes) and Your Feast Has Ended (Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, Nicholas Galanin, and Nep Sidhu) have been on display at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, WA for nearly three months. The Unicorn Incorporated is the first solo exhibition and retrospective of the work of Curtis R. Barnes. As described by the Frye, “For over five decades, Barnes has worked as an artist, illustrator, muralist, and community advocate. In his sculpture, painting, and drawing, he employs imagery derived from his vast experience, mystical erudition, and heritage.”[1] Your Feast Has Ended is a joint exhibition featuring the work of the artists Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, Nicholas Galanin and Nep Sidhu, who explore themes of death, ancestor veneration, environmental exploitation, legacies of colonialism, and fetishization through multimedia works including but not limited to sculpture, video installation, pelts, and adornment.

These exhibitions have been the subject of much discussion and bewilderment, the force behind figurative kicks in the ass and literal calls to action in Seattle’s artistic community this summer. The works contained within these exhibitions bring to bear a number of “–isms,” “–archies,” and other troubling aspects of our society that the politically correct would prefer to remain in the background: non-mainstream spirituality, racism, patriarchy, homicide, body fetishism, and social control to name a few. Further, the makers of these works are representative of nationalities and ethnicities that typically are not visible in the art world.

Two years of intense conversation and collaboration between Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Director of the Frye Art Museum, and Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes resulted in The Unicorn Incorporated and Your Feast Has Ended, as well as a bevy of multidisciplinary, accessible, community oriented programs constructed specifically to support and expand their reach. It must be acknowledged that these installations couldn’t have happened anywhere but the Frye. Its historical policy of “always free” looms large in an artistic and cultural landscape where museums and other cultural institutions are increasing admission prices to compensate for shrinking funding sources, rising operational costs and the general effects of global economic malaise. Undeniable too is Birnie Danzker’s leadership. Her beliefs that curation never really achieves denouement, and that exhibitions are not singular events where artists simply turn over their work and agency to the museum, has allowed a significant degree of multidisciplinary thinking and practice to be incorporated into traditional modes of art curation and art education.[2]

Why do these exhibitions matter?

Discourse, of the generative kind, is salient and necessary. Given their bellicose, in your face nature, these exhibitions have certainly revived seemingly forgotten conversations around issues such as gentrification and police violence.  Yet the factor that has implicitly, and for some, subversively, caused the most discomfort is that we are witnessing versions of manhood, represented by men descending from African, Native American, and Indian lineages whose presence has historically been, and continues to be, contested. That these are four men who do not fit the stereotypical tropes created and systematically distributed worldwide about African, Native American, and Indian men means that their art can’t be made to fit such a narrowly defined narrative either[3]. In order to think about their art, we must accept that the existing, dominant paradigms based in large part on European aesthetic standards (or minimally a European filter on the aesthetics of African, Asian and Native American cultures) fail miserably. We have no control over creating or manipulating the value of these works. We must consider that the themes and ideas proffered by these exhibitions may not be for us, even if they are about us. These ideas may very well signal the resurgence of a way of being that, though hidden for reasons of protection and self-preservation, has always existed and has always been about creation, connectivity, being self-determined, and sustaining a community of beings who are free and self-sufficient.

The Unicorn Incorporated: Curtis R. Barnes

Look Them, by Curtis Barnes. Photo courtesy of the Frye Art Museum.

The Unicorn Incorporated is the first solo exhibition of Curtis R. Barnes, a life long artist and Seattle resident. Barnes’ formal and informal education included cherished time with his grandmother in his home in the Central District, Seattle’s historically African-American neighborhood, where he states, “she taught me how to read, count, and write in cursive, and she introduced me to Aesop’s fables, a variety of folk tales, mythology, and other make-believe worlds.”[4] During his elementary school years, at the recommendation of one of his teachers, his mother enrolled him in art classes at the Frye, which were like “a new world of magic.”[5] Subsequent art education included art courses at the University of Washington, eventual degrees in painting and sculpture from Cornish School of Allied Arts as well as a degree in wood technology.

Curtis R. Barnes’ portfolio traverses significant spans of time, mediums and experiences.  The works selected for The Unicorn Incorporated are but a snap shot. His work for the Afro-American Journal gives a clear view of the violence and oppression visited upon African-American people in Seattle, and is representative of Barnes’ ongoing work to raise consciousness for those willing to be present and receive the message. Barnes’ editorial cartoons for the Afro-American Journal problematize the carefree, liberal, progressive view associated with the city of Seattle: the work titled “White Seattle Is Doomed” (1971) depicts the entrance to the city as barred by crisscross wood panels. His conté drawings explore and celebrate the female form, while his Mask series, in pen and ink, confronts the viewer with the reality that everyone has something to hide. His intrigue of the unseen is further explored with the African Unicorn in his “Television in the Sky” series bringing to bear the importance of mythology at the familial, community, and societal levels. These works are a profound commentary on connectivity to other planes and realms, where the ancestors and other spiritual entities reside, and states very plainly that although fragmented at times, the connectivity has always been and will always be there; we must know it and respect it.

Barnes’ wood sculptures constitute only three pieces in the exhibition but are among the most poignant. In particular there is “Look Them” (1975), a nearly 4 foot tall sculpture with four figures all intertwined, supporting each other. This work immediately calls to mind similar aesthetics found among Bantu peoples of West Central Africa who created sculpture for use in ceremonies to venerate their ancestors.  The concept of the blood’s memory[6] explains “the visible manifestations and ongoing praxis of displaced peoples in their respective Diasporas. In this case, it very adeptly explains the historical and ongoing praxis of African culture and tradition found in every place outside of the African continent where people of African descent reside.”[7] Barnes’ commentary that, “Wood is important to me because it is alive and has veins”[8] invites analysis of the artist’s insistence upon the physical manipulation of living things.  The impact that such manipulation has may only play out long after the manipulator has ceased to exist in human form, as well as the ability of the artist, or any maker for that matter, to tap into that blood’s memory and sit consciously with his/her ancestors and create in the way his ancestors did without loss of time, space, or relevance.[9] This kind of artistic practice is a continuation of Curtis R. Barnes’ early time spent with his grandmother and the manifestation of his respect for and ability to master other worldly modes of doing and being.

Your Feast Has Ended: Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, Nicholas Galanin, and Nep Sidhu

The official title of this joint exhibition is O Ye Parasites, Your Feast Has Ended and if you are bothered by the title, then this exhibition is for you. A synchronistic selection of work representing a diverse range of media, the pieces in this exhibition are like long time comrades whose relationships to each other, irrespective of the different narratives they tell, are timeless and unfaltering.  Where The Unicorn Incorporated is retrospective and introspective, and according to Curtis R. Barnes, self-explanatory, Your Feast Has Ended is a call to action beckoning both those who have been fed upon and issuing a warning to the “parasites” that their food supply has dried up. This exhibition is a collusion of acts that follows the realization of the need for change, to remove the blinders, to reconnect to the Host.[10]

Consistent throughout this exhibition is a tribute to ancient and contemporary spiritual traditions, or the Host. These artists, through an intentional and sustained connection with the Host, have created objects whose primary form is art but whose function is a spiritual vessel. These vessels have been consecrated in accordance with each artist’s pact and agreement with the Host; similarly perhaps, to what their ancestors did when they walked the earth. In doing this work, these men are no longer solely artists, but also shamans, and their artistic practice is now also ceremony.

Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes

Wait! Wait! Don’t Shoot!, by Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes. Photo courtesy of the Frye Art Museum.

Magic and spell, weaved betwixt and amongst sobering stories of death, dismemberment, resurgence, and salvation are tantamount in Alley-Barnes’ work in this exhibition. The pelts cum trophies are the most intriguing of the artist’s work in Your Feast Has Ended, as they merge the artist’s fascination with our society’s obsession with fetish and signal his ability, like that of a shaman, to repurpose materials for divine use. Though what you see before you is indeed a confluence of vintage materials and garments, each pelt represents a different narrative, infused with incantation, which transforms it into something ‘other.’

Alley-Barnes’ work, “Wait! Wait! Don’t Shoot! (An Incantation for Jazz and Trayvon)”, is simultaneously a death rite for Trayvon Martin, as well as a spell designed to speak directly to the living spirit of Jazz, to whom this piece is also dedicated. The notion of speaking to an individual’s spirit is ancient spiritual practice and is often a solution used when a child or adolescent is engaged in damaging behavior that could cause great harm if not death to the child. Through leveraging the right combination of words in the form of prayer at a predetermined time towards the spirit of the individual, the spirit is convinced to stay and re-orient itself towards healthy behaviors. Doing so, in effect, saves the person.

Calves of Saint Sa-Rah Lu-Pit-Ta, by Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes. Photo courtesy of the Frye Art Museum.

This work is especially poignant in light of the artist’s own experience with police brutality and the recent string of murders of young Black men committed by police officers. The message here is straight, no chaser: do not think for one moment that we do not still have ceremony to lay our dead to rest and that we won’t use the same to teach, protect and exalt our people who are still here.

Alley-Barnes describes his form of sculpture as refuse alchemy . He sources used materials, that he then recycles and formulates into sculpture. These sculptures are visual representations of the ancient and extinct Matuzdi people, and the vehicle through which Alley-Barnes’ shares with us his personal reflections on dismemberment. His work “Calves of Saint Sah-Rah Loo-Pee Tah” is a commentary on the literal and figurative destruction of the bodies of women of African descent, dating back to Sarah Baartman and also referencing present day occurrences, namely the media’s obsession with actress Lupita Nyong’o’s phenotypic traits, which reduce her to her parts divorced from their sum.

Alley-Barnes returns to the feminine, specifically the divine feminine, in his short film “Sacred” where he asserts the necessary role of women in reestablishing physical and terrestrial balance. Water soothes, and like a woman, can give birth and nurture life. At the beginning of the film we witness scenes that are replete with abundance and beauty: the sound of water drops pierce our ears, a bulging, quivering drop of water sitting on a leaf, and a beautiful woman fully submersed in water. By the end of the film we are acutely aware of water as a scarce commodity in high demand that must be controlled at all costs, even to the point of exhaustion. We are also left to ponder the extent to which divine intervention, calling on women with their inherent connection to the Host, can assist in righting the ills we have carelessly visited on ourselves, and environment.

Nicholas Galanin

This Country Is A Lie And Well, by Nicholas Galanin. Photo courtesy of the Frye Art Museum.

Standing at the entrance to the exhibition, your eyes follow the light and suddenly you are under attack from Galanin’s porcelain arrows sitting quietly above. It’s a surprise attack but the choice is yours: turn and leave, or move forward. Your decision-making is interrupted by words broadcasted on a pirated radio station, created by Galanin and his brother Jerrod, in a traditional Tlingit wood storage box built to hold ceremonial items. Tlingit language springs forth from it and our ears ring loudly in our attempts to understand a tongue that was nearly obliterated. The lesson here: language exists because we are a communal people and we must continually engage in dialogue to build community. When language is taken from a people, as was done to Native Americans, communities are forever changed and entire cultures destroyed.

Inert, by Nicholas Galanin. Photo courtesy of the Frye Art Museum.

Galanin’s point of departure is the land itself. Whether it is the battles between Native peoples and colonialists, the materials he uses to construct his works (wood, silver, copper, etc.) the blood of Native men and women spilled on this soil or the animals that once roamed Tlingit territory in present day Alaska – land is preeminent and predominates; without it we would have nothing.  Galanin intends to shock and awe. The point is to feel something affectively. It may be empathy for the wolf in “Inert” whose hind legs and back are flattened and unable to move, a symbol of the cultural stasis of Native American cultures. Or it may be visceral disgust upon viewing the rape whistle transformed into earrings. Should a rape whistle be an earring? Perhaps not, but Native American women continue to grapple with the legacy of rape. It is a part of the American historical record. Native American art has been reduced to what the market place deems as valuable: trinkets and mementos stripped of historical weight. Don’t we all have a dream catcher?

Galanin broadens the commentary on destruction by issuing a specific indictment of reckless de-ritualized animal sacrifice through the mass killing of its native animal species in “This Country Is A Lie and Well” and “Inert”. Taking it a step further, he decries police violence as an extension of the systematic colonial oppression visited upon Native American people in the Northwestern United States, with “How about those Mariners?” a video installation of a Tlingit warrior carrying a carving knife much like the one John T. Williams (to whom the work is dedicated) was legally carrying when he was murdered by a Seattle Police Officer in 2010. Galanin’s work intentionally broaches uncomfortable historical events that were visited upon Native peoples and speaks loudly against continuing marginalization of Native American peoples and their art forms.

Nep Sidhu

Paradise Sportif, Nep Sidhu. Photo courtesy of the Frye Art Museum.

When language and architecture are merged the result is a third space, and Sidhu dedicates his grandest pieces of the exhibition to spatial exploration. Heavily theorized, particularly within the field of postcolonial studies, Edward Soja defines the third space as, “as an-Other way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life, a distinct mode of critical spatial awareness that is appropriate to the new scope and significance being brought about in the rebalanced trialectics of spatiality–historicality–sociality.”[11] Each of Sidhu’s panels in the Confirmation series is both the portal to the third space and the third space itself. Looking into the center of each work creates a dizzying optical effect such that you feel you can enter it and go beyond to another place.[12] And that is precisely the point. Sidhu combines his experience with the death of his mother written out in Kufic script (which he studied for nine months with an Imam to learn), with the experiences of his fellow Constellationeers[13] Ishmael Butler and Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes (Butler’s lyrics about his mother and Alley-Barnes’ observations on Seattle’s cursed history), mounts them on brass and sheet veneer marble to become the Confirmation series, and has shared them with us in a newly sanctified space: the Frye Art Museum.

Confirmation B, by Nep Sidhu. Photo courtesy of the Frye Art Museum.

With “Re (Confirmation) A” this work creates a portal through which Sidhu and Butler can continue to communicate with their deceased mothers – a hopefully soothing realization that though the body ceases to be the spirit is always there in this third space.[14] “Confirmation B” takes it a step further: the combination of language and architecture is not solely a portal, but a vehicle for the necessary incantation that is the precursor to ancestor veneration. The script in “Confirmation B” contains Sidhu’s mother’s last words to him as she made her transition. The message here is that we need simply to activate language and earth in the appropriate iteration, and conversations with our ancestors will recommence. The third spaces of “Re (Confirmation) A and “Confirmation B” represent the realm of the ancestors and more specifically that realm where our mothers are ever present. The third panel of the Confirmation series, “Curse Words”, is a visual representation of an excerpt of a written work of the same name written by Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes. This fragment tells the story of the blood-drenched contradictions of the beautiful territory now called Seattle, providing a commentary on the transgressions visited upon the land and its original inhabitants. The mind piercing red reminds us how much blood soaks this land, and forces us to reckon with our stake in it.

If the Confirmation series illuminates our path towards the third space, Sidhu’s Paradise Sportif clothing line exemplifies how we must comport ourselves once we get there: protect and exalt.   Intending to uplift our present day shamans so that they can work efficaciously, the garments are necessarily beautiful, but what they do and what they mean is more relevant. In Sidhu’s own words,

“When understanding the power of our past messengers and healers, the garments that they wore played significance in their function as much as their understanding of nature, rhythm, dance and medicine. When dealing with negative or destructive spirits during a ceremony, the healing of an illness could inspire revenge in the spirit that caused it. The spirit could not effectively attack a shaman wearing a powerful costume, nor could it recognize the shaman when he or she was out of costume. In both cases, the shaman was protected in the spiritual realm. The garments worn functioned in much the same way as playing the same music during meditation to induce a meditative state. By always wearing the same costume during trance states, the costume itself became an instrument for facilitating access to that state.”[15]

Sidhu has intentionally steered clear of turning Paradise Sportif into a commercial line. To date this collection has only been seen at the Frye, on Sidhu’s web site, and donned by the members of the Black Constellation collective, of which he is a part. It is apparent that Sidhu seeks out people and places that embody and radiate the light that he carefully infuses into every piece.

And now?

On September 14 and September 21, Your Feast Has Ended and The Unicorn Incorporated complete their respective runs at the Frye Museum. While it is significant that these exhibitions started in Seattle, which so desperately needed to be shocked out of its complacency, these exhibitions speak both to and far beyond this city, and thus they must travel. Sidhu’s work must be seen in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Dakar, Marrakech and his hometown of Toronto. Alley-Barnes’ work must visit Chicago, New Orleans, Detroit, Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and Baltimore. Galanin’s should reach as broadly as possible throughout the Americas to countries like Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia and Peru where the indigenous imprint remains indelible. The challenges of planning and executing such global exhibitions aside, there must be a concerted effort to make these exhibitions accessible to those who are open to the large-scale metamorphosis invoked by this body of work. Our responsibility as viewers of this work and culture patrons is to lend our minds and voices towards its actual and conceptual longevity. The artists have done their job. Now it is time to do ours.

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