Imaginary exhibition
An online exhibition curated by Isabella Kuijers
28.05.2020
Each of us has our own story about how COVID-19 and the lockdown has affected our lives and routines. In the case of the artists featured here, all were scheduled to have exhibitions with the Association for Visual Arts (AVA) in Cape Town and have had their (our) shows postponed. In the art community working from home has practical implications for producing work and may have impacted the privacy, scale, and materials available to artists. With so much of our lives effectively on hold and so many constraints on the production of art, the idea for an imaginary exhibition was conceived - one without limitation. Artists were encouraged to submit maquettes, mock-ups, sketches or descriptions of a work that wouldn't normally come to fruition. The reason for the work’s non-existence could be as simple as cost or size or as exotic as societal taboos, uninvented technology, or the laws of physics.
This posed its own challenges, like a sport, the medium of choice for artists restricts and provides a structure for the form the work will take. Floating in the realm of endless possibility can be daunting. But perhaps, as is the case of Bradley Flynn’s non-work, the thought process itself is the artistic process. Flynn circles the concept of exhibiting non-existence which eventually short-circuits and cancels itself out in a paradox.
For Fernão Cruz and Horácio Frutuoso this was an opportunity to toy with the diaphanous quality of air in the form of skywriting and bubble blowing. They show an unimpeded form of levity and play in art. While in weighty opposition to these works is Elgin Rust’s Giant Wings, enormous versions of flotation devices for children that would inevitably end in drowning. Giant Wings follows on from Rust’s other works in which she casts ‘inflatables’ in concrete and other heavy materials. The sense of familiarity with objects such as ‘water wings’ is so sinisterly at odds with the physical properties of her works. These were proposed to a concrete 3D printing company in 2018 but were too complex to print at the time.
Phillip Steele’s work Billboard Maquette (Red) is also outsized, a billboard in the tradition of 90’s Cuban artist, Félix González-Torres, whose work propelled LGBT images and messaging into the public sphere. Steele aims to preempt protections for queer people, writing that “if my existence is acknowledged, and not silenced, my human rights are better protected. He who controls public space controls commemoration—and in doing so controls history and memory.” Steele’s concern is that when images of marginalised communities are absent from the present, they are more likely to disappear from historical stories of our time. However, he recognises that the primary reason his work would struggle to come to fruition is the taboos surrounding the naked male body. In many spaces, both online and offline, censorship of full-on male nudity is standard. The work asks us to think about what would be acceptable on a billboard - especially when female bodies are so often exposed as part of advertising and art.
King Debs’ untitled work is also billboard-like, depicting a glowing rectangle marked with an ‘X’. The scene, which is watched by three shadowy forms, shows “a unique event with profound consequences [-] a technological singularity. That seemingly impossible moment is manifested by the ‘X’ symbol at the focal point of the image. This is an imaginary state where machines surpass human intelligence and become so advanced that they gain consciousness.” The use of light, a glowing emergence in the darkness, indicates that we will watch as something terrifyingly brilliant bootstraps itself out of our technological quagmire. King Debs’ vision of a possible future frames it as not just an unseen ordinary moment but a revelation. Here the ‘X’ is a placeholder for something impossible to describe; a signature; a treasure trove.
Two photographic collages show iterations of Michelle Marcuse’s cardboard sculptures. In photoshop, Marcuse composed, distorted, and combined photographs of previous physical works, placing them in extraordinary or impossible positions. The sparkling light and the way the constructions hang delicately in space has an enchanted feeling, Marcuse writes: “I have given them a quality which I find arising in my early morning half wake/sleep states where anything seems possible.” They have the look of trojan horses or hard-edge spiders nests about them.
My (Isabella Kuijers) own works, Linger 1 and 2, are about touch and absence. In the first work I envision a room filled by a grid of pillars (made of soil, wire and plastic sheeting) with the plant Mimosa Pudica growing out of the pillars. Mimosa is a weed in South Africa and is often called the ‘shame plant’ because it recoils from touch as a way of avoiding predation. As participants enter the room and walk into the dense foliage, the plants will retreat, a parting will open behind them and gradually close up again. In Linger 2 I would require not-yet-available medical technology. I imagine a work where long grafts of scalp are kept alive (and producing hair) above a door frame. The hair would grow down creating a curtain that would have to be touched or pushed aside to enter. These ideas are a response to the way touch is being appreciated as such a precious commodity now that so many of us are experiencing physical separation as part of Lockdown.
In more direct response to the current pandemic is Tangeni Kambudu’s Fuck Jean-Paul Mira & Camille Locht. Jean-Paul Mira (the head of the intensive care unit at the Cochin Hospital in Paris) and Camille Locht (research director of France’s national health institute) proposed that Vaccines for COVID-19 be tested on Africans in an interview for French Television.
Mira asked: "If I could be provocative, should we not do this study in Africa where there are no masks, treatment or intensive care, a little bit like it's done, by the way, for certain AIDS studies or with prostitutes?"
"We try things because we know that they are highly exposed and they don't protect themselves," he said.
Camille Locht, responded: "You are right. And by the way, we are in the process of thinking in parallel about a study in Africa ... That doesn't prevent us, in parallel, from also thinking about a study in Europe and in Australia." (Reuters)
Thankfully, the response has been one of revulsion and denouncement. "Africa isn't a testing lab," tweeted Ivory Coast soccer star, Didier Drogba. "I would like to vividly denounce those demeaning, false and most of all deeply racist words." There is a long disturbing history of using disempowered demographics as lab rats. Probably the most famous recent example is that of the ‘Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male’ which only ended in 1972 (not even a generation ago). In this study rural African-American men with syphilis were observed (and left deliberately untreated) in the USA. Many more examples exist but another important instance of African instrumentalisation is the case of Henrietta Lacks in 1955. A poor African-American from Baltimore, Henrietta’s cells were the first to be successfully cultured for use in medical research. The cells came from tissue samples obtained without consent, and, now known by the shorthand HeLa cells, have been important for the production of the polio vaccine, cancer research, AIDS research, gene mapping, and other scientific advances. Neither she, nor her family, were compensated for her contribution.
In it’s over-the-top lavish conception the work rages against viewing Africans as disposable human test-subjects in the fight to protect the lives of Europeans. When asked why the work is imaginary Kambudu pens a list of almost impossible criteria for its production: The 260cm×300cm one-piece wood will be cut in Germany, The hand-engravings are done by artisans in Yemen, The frame is hand-made by artisans in Mongolia, The General Sherman Tree is only found in USA. Adding finally that: “An AFRICAN came up with the concept”.
The Imaginary Exhibition will continue to exist and grow in a virtual space until one day maybe we can make it a reality…