Exhibition Essay: Figure as Index by Luther Konadu

Georgia Phillips-Amos ·

Luther Konadu’s Figure as Index at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, March 18-April 30, 2022.

Portraits and Repetition 

“There can be no repetition,” wrote Gertrude Stein, “because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis.”[1] Here, in Figure as Index, images repeat. A photograph of four people sitting around a table is framed next to another photograph of hands holding another photograph of the same four sitting around the same table. In both, one person sits on the table and they alone look straight at the camera. Nearly identical, the two images inspire a game of Spot the Difference; the angles have slightly changed, one face has turned, a tan line remains where a bracelet is now missing. The color of the second print is softened, washed out. Its surface is shiny and crinkled by the hands that cradle it. The composition, which at first appears to simply repeat, has been altered in reproduction by chance and by design. The corner of the print in the second frame has been dog-eared. Stein’s emphasis slides from the figures represented to the tactile nature of photography itself.

Stein was writing about language: “No matter how often you tell the same story if there is anything alive in the telling the emphasis is different,”[2] she insists. Luther Konadu photographs people casually and repeatedly. His portraits are of young black friends and loved ones. Some appear again and again, in frames taken seconds apart or over the six years he has been working on this ongoing project. Rather than the pursuit of an ideal portrait, this study in redundancy results in a heightened awareness that no photograph can pin down its subject, ever. Photographer Elle Pérez has said of their own portraits that a photograph is “a perfect container because it is not actually, ever, definitive.”[3] As in Konadu’s repeating frames and scattered collages, subjects are recorded as they transform, sometimes perform, and evade our grasp. Konadu describes his use of multiples as key to his practice that is both “continuous and without a specific destination.”[4] His repetitions emphasize both the inadequacy of photography to capture its subjects and the materiality of the photographs. He wants us to remember we are looking at framed pieces of paper, made documents, not through windows onto people’s lives.

Full essay available on The Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art website: https://www.alternatorcentre.com/about

Review: Diedrick Brackens for Border Crossings

Georgia Phillips-Amos ·

Diedrick Brackens, “hape of a fever believer, installation view, Oakville Galleries, 2020, woven cotton and acrylic yarn.

“I‘ve inherited so many g h o s t s , ” Diedrick Brackens (b. Texas, 1989) explains in a recent interview with curator Legacy Russell. “There are all these people that I will never meet because of the virus, but I‘m always communing with them, trying to allow their voices to be made material.” The 32-yearold textile artist’s tapestries call openly on the words of queer poets, biblical allegory, Black American folklore, patterns from strip-woven Kente cloth, European narrative tapestries and the quilts of Gee’s Bend. With “shape of a fever believer,” seven tapestries woven in 2020 and displayed at Oakville Galleries this spring, Brackens specifically addresses not the COVID-19 virus but the 2016 CDC statistic, which states, “If current H.I.V. diagnoses rates persist, about 1 in 2 Black men who have sex with men (M.S.M.) and 1 in 4 Latino M.S.M. in the United States will be diagnosed with H.I.V. during their lifetime.” Brackens’s ghosts turn up as lifesized silhouettes, often in pairs, reaching out for, carrying and working to heal one another across highly saturated hand-dyed threads.

To read article in full, click here: https://bordercrossingsmag.com/article/diedrick-brackens

Review: Couzyn van Heuvelen for Border Crossings

Georgia Phillips-Amos ·

“ᐃᕐᑭᐊᒻᒥᒐᕐᒃ | BAIT | APPÂT at SBC Gallery in Montreal

“ᐃᕐᑭᐊᒻᒥᒐᕐᒃ | BAIT | APPÂT at SBC Gallery in Montreal

Couzyn van Heuvelen’s Avataq, 2016, breathe, he tells me. Made like party balloons from silvery oval Mylar sheets filled with helium, 12 sway in sync like bodies on a dance floor. Close inspection reveals flipper limbs and a sealskin texture screen-printed across their backs. An avataq is an Inuit hunting tool but a much less fragile balloon made from a whole sealskin inflated by a hunter’s breath. Attached to a harpoon line, the hunter’s avataq is used to track a marine animal once struck. Visiting SBC Gallery in Montreal on a desolate afternoon during the second wave of COVID-19 outbreaks—my own breath warming the air between my face and mask—I meet van Heuvelen’s hovering pod, part of his playful travelling exhibition, “ᐃᕐᑭᐊᒻᒥᒐᕐᒃ | BAIT | APPÂT.” Walking in on these 12 felt like stumbling into the best dancers at a house party. Van Heuvelen’s avataqs are celebrations of Inuit hunting practices and food sovereignty. As the artist explains it, they are also bait for more meaningful conversations about the seal hunt, international sealskin bans and the decimating effects of such bans on Inuit livelihoods.

Click through to read article in full: https://bordercrossingsmag.com/article/couzyn-van-heuvelen

Interview: Abdellah Taïa in BOMB

Georgia Phillips-Amos ·

Interview with author and filmmaker Abdellah Taïa, published in BOMB magazine, May 3, 2016. Forward below, interview in full available here.

Photo by Abderrahim Annag.

Photo by Abderrahim Annag.

At twelve years old in Salé, Morocco, Abdellah Taïa touched a high-voltage generator and lay dead for an hour before surprising everyone and breathing again. He defied death and would have to keep doing it: as a lone effeminate youth in his neighborhood, he was a target of sexual violence every day. On one occasion Taïa cites as a turning point, grown men on the street yelled in the night to wake him, threatening rape, and though he lay sandwiched between his mother and seven siblings in a shared bed, no one sheltered him. He is an artist intimate with vulnerability and he is unafraid. He is also a political activist who, in 2006, became the first renowned Arab artist to come out publicly in Morocco, a country where homosexuality continues to be illegal.

Born in 1973, Taïa has lived in Paris since 1998 and writes books and films in French. Following his first two novels, Salvation Army and An Arab Melancholia, the forthcoming Infidels is his third to be translated into English. Echoing Taïa’s own exile, these books take place between Morocco and Europe, where on the streets and in bedrooms his stories collide in tenderness and violent urgency.

Built in a series of rhythmic soliloquies, Infidels is a timely novel about Islamic fundamentalism, intimacy, betrayal, and panic. “I change realities,” the protagonist Jallal says, “really and truly enter fiction, cross the border, take on other colors.” Taïa’s characters are fugitives constantly in motion: they get close, they love; they manipulate, they spit at each other’s feet. Their days and their transgressions are beautiful, but in a merciless world they can also be terrifying.

Click here to read interview.

Review: Guillermo Kuitca at Sperone Westwater Gallery

Georgia Phillips-Amos ·

Review of Guillermo Kuitca: This way, published in June 2014 issue of The Brooklyn Rail.

Guillermo Kuitca, “Untitled,” 2014. Oil on wood, four-panel installation 1023/8 × 176 × 124 ̋. Courtesy sperone Westwater, New York.

Guillermo Kuitca, “Untitled,” 2014. Oil on wood, four-panel installation 1023/8 × 176 × 124 ̋. Courtesy sperone Westwater, New York.

GUILLERMO KUITCA This Way

by Georgia Phillips-Amos

SPERONE WESTWATER | APRIL 24 – JUNE 21, 2014

In the narrow selection of Guillermo Kuitca’s new paintings on display at Sperone Westwater, the artist seems to have lost all desire for grounding points of reference. The gallery space has been converted into a labyrinthine garden of Kuitca’s design, a nameless land with neither signposts nor inhabitants. Guillermo Kuitca’s oeuvre arises from a confluence of disparate inspiration—traces of obsolete cartography and the choreography of Pina Bausch. But this series of new work breathes loneliness above all else.

“Guillermo Kuitca, despair and isolation (desesperacion y aislamiento)” reads the only scribble painted on one small white rectangle in the artist’s otherwise fully composed canvas. Most of the paintings and collages included in This Way are without figures and the one muted grey silhouette in the entire show is a hauntingly solitary woman standing in the doorway of a milky-pink room. Chiefly devoid of titles or geographical orientation, the little bit of language that does interrupt the flow of paint is bleak.  

Though Kuitca rejects any reading of his art through the lens of his biography, this outcry of solitude is apt messaging for the child of a Russian-Argentine psychoanalyst. Kuitca had his first solo show in Buenos Aires at the ripe age of 13 in the midst of the country’s “dirty war,” which generated a mass exodus and left deep puncture wounds in the lives of those who stayed. At 16, the precocious Kuitca began exploring theater, and there remains a directive force in how his works generate movement through the gallery space.

Read review in full on the Brooklyn Rail website.