Hello hello!
Last week was a bit of a cray one on the work front hence the delay in getting this to your inbox. The bonus suggestions at the end are back but I’m still not sure if I’m ready to commit to them as a permanent feature. Enjoy :)
VISIT
Curated by Azu Nwagbogu (LagosPhoto Festival, Art Base Africa, African Artists Foundation) The Medium is the Message is a new group exhibition at Mayfair’s Unit London. It’s a celebration of the Black experience liberated from stigma, exoticism, socialisation and a cacophony of other burdens often borne of the Western gaze.
It subverts curatorial norms by framing painting and its ability to act as a vehicle of self-expression as the narrative as opposed to subscribing to a theme.
“At its core, The Medium is the Message is an exhibition concerned with pigment over pigmentation. It is primarily about the power artistic pigment holds when trying to express an identity free of cliches.”
The line up of artists probably sits somewhere between emerging and early career but having observed some of their trajectories over the last year or so I definitely get the sense that significant careers lay on the horizon. There are so many amazing people showing whose work I’ve yet to see in the flesh but I’m particularly excited about self-taught Tanzanian artist Sungi Mlengeya whose paintings give me serious Barkley L. Hendricks vibes but with a more quiet and contemplative edge. At the end of the evening, 2020 by Mlengeya is pictured above.
WATCH
I came across Blk Soap by Darryl Daley during one of my insomnia driven Instagram rabbit hole escapades. It’s that perfect storm of unsettling and compelling, a surreal collage of found footage anchored by a soundtrack that fuses the staccato visuals into some semblance of a story. I remember waking up the following morning and having to re-watch it to make sure that what I’d seen was real and not just a lucid dream.
Blk Soap is triggering, it was, after all, made following the most recent wave of BLM protests as “a creative response to the current exposure of the black body”. The fragmented visuals capture a 400-year history of suffering and resilience, tension and elation, a relentless push and pull that can make simply existing exhausting. It’s dense and takes a while to digest but there’s a brilliance about it that’s I’m still finding tricky to articulate.
DISCOVER
It feels like the world is waking up to Ming Smith. A solo show in May (albeit digital) preceded her Vogue Italia September issue cover and inclusion in the Artsy Vanguard 2020 list. If you managed to visit Soul of a Nation at the Tate Modern back in 2017 you may have spotted her work there. Despite these recent successes it’s been a slow grind, her career spans 50 years but she’s spent most of that time without gallery representation even though she was the first African American female photographer to have her work included in MoMA’s collection. She’s passionate about ‘capturing the spirituality and humanity of Black people’ which would have been at odds with the war on drugs propaganda machine sweeping the US in the 70s and 80s - perhaps that’s why her work didn’t quite take then.
Her life reads like a captivating Netflix documentary, the kind that’s rooted in so many familiar cultural moments yet still opens you up to a new slice of history. Her subjects have included Grace Jones (pictured below in Grace Jones at Studio 54, 1978), Tina Turner and James Baldwin and she was the first member of New York photography collective Kamoinge Workshop - they have a retrospective scheduled at the Whitney next year if you happen to find yourself in NYC.
If you want to learn more I recommend this Guardian interview: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/may/17/ming-smith-ive-always-had-to-break-boundaries. Or you can scroll through images of her work here: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/gallery/2020/may/17/ming-smith-painting-with-light-in-pictures
I’m so hoping another solo show is around the corner, I’ll let you know when it lands.
IN OTHER NEWS
SUPPORT
Surfboard and apparel brand Mami Wata launched a Kickstarter to fund Afro Surf, the first book to ‘comprehensively document and celebrate African surf culture’ back in August. The crowdfunder was successful and you can now pre-order the book via their website. It promises many more stunning photos like the one above amongst its 300 pages.
FOLLOW
With the US election around the corner, artist Hank Willis Thomas is once again trying to galvanise voters. The For Freedoms billboard campaign of 2016 has been replaced with the Wide Awakes - a global cross-disciplinary collective of activists and artists whose name is taken from an 1860 abolitionist group. Follow their progress on Instagram or read more via the New York Times article below.
DISCOVER
Manchester-born Maximillian Davis is the new designer everyone is talking about after debuting an exting and fresh collection at London Fashion Week earlier this month. Inspired by his Trinidadian heritage his aesthetic aims to reinvent tailoring and elegance. Learn more in the Vogue article below.
VISIT
Cultural polymath Ekow Eshun has just announced Face to Face, a new exhibition he’s curated in partnership with the Fund for Global Human Rights charity. The photography show challenges the often exploitative and dehumanising images we see of poorer communities in the global south by spotlighting the work of photographers who have captured their realities with the dignity they deserve. Located in the Kings Cross tunnel it opens on 7th October, more info via the button below.
Magda xxx