In the 1980s, when Lubaina Himid organised 3 exhibitions in London filled with the art of black women artists, there was a sense of urgency. One of the exhibitions, The Thin Black Line, took place in the corridors of the ICA, as an embodiment of their marginalisation. She says, “Almost all of the time the exhibitions came about because I responded to other peoples urgent desire for a physical and tangible proof of our creative activity.”1 There was a need for space, for visibility, for expression, for support.
These things are of course still necessary and urgent. But there is the additional aspect of the era in which artists are producing work. It feels simplistic to attribute the change to social media alone, but it is also impossible to overstate just what its prevalence has done for artists, and the way in which we consume art. The internet has brought with it a sense of constant over-stimulation, over-information. To exist on the internet is to see multiple things at once – from multiple angles and through multiple mediums. Chris Hayes describes the sensation as hearing “everything at once…all of it too much and too loud.”2 And that might be the case.
Perhaps it means that in 2022 we have shifted towards a consumption that is steeped in the numerous. Even in seeing alone, things become relative and linked in a way that they weren’t before. The idea of Tiktoks and reels, often forced collages of separate events, pulled together by music and sound, to create a mosaic of a moment. Social media has moved from a platform of the instant, to one of the copious. More more more, they seem to be demanding of creators, but how has that changed the way in which we consume?
This idea of existing in multitudes has also long been an important facet of diaspora culture. Stuart Hall said, “In the diaspora situation, identities become multiple.” Kobena Mercer writes about the “figural” work of Aubrey Williams, the Guyanese painter, that it is both figurative and abstract. He says that within Caribbean art, “any clear-cut binary between coloniser and colonised, between victims and perpetrators, between the doers and the done to, has now been ambiguated—if not liquidated altogether—in favour of an ambivalent scene of entanglement in which all identities are implicated in the historical trauma and its aftermath.”3
Caribbean culture, according to David A Bailey, “dissolves and transcends the familiar Western binaries that informed both the Enlightenment and the expansion of empire.”4 Yet these binaries have constantly been employed when approaching Black art. Political vs apolitical, figurative vs abstract, representational vs non-representational. But is it appropriate to approach work so simply now in this age of a lot?
Every work in this exhibition is multi-layered, whether conceptually or physically. Manifold questions the limitations of approaching artists and their work through a singular lens. The artists in the show operate through layers; they create work that denounces easy accessibility by leaning on their complexities and contradictions. It might be their relationship to time, it might be their process, it might be their very beings. Working across painting, photography, video and print-making, the works and artists on show force us to question preconceived ideas about the hierarchy of planes. What is primary and what is secondary? Can multiple things be true of one artwork? Do form and function have to match? Can a work be abstract and representational? What does radical co-existence look like?
In Fadekemi Ogunsanya’s It is You That I Love, she combines various aspects of her practice, namely her dedication to the multi-functionality of her paintings. This work, an object that one must confront in the exhibition space, is also decorative and sculptural. It forces the audience to encounter it in multiple ways, using the familiarity of the heart-shape to draw you in. Ogunsanya embodies what it means to exist as an artist with multitudes, a trained architect whose works blur the line between object and painting. She is quite concerned with bringing what might be said to be ‘cheesy’ into exhibition spaces, giving audience members space to breathe, it’s okay to let your guard down and just enjoy.
Ayoade Bamgboye’s video and accompanying performance takes into account the vulnerability of creativity. Fucking Hell is a stream of consciousness that explores her innermost thoughts. It also straddles writing, comedy and performance; multi-disciplinarity and malleability of form are essential. She is also thinking about words and comedy in the exhibition space, not as a byproduct of the, but as the work itself. Why shouldn’t art be funny and serious and sad and playful?
Dana Cavigny actively pushes back at stereotypical representations of black women, using her works as an example of heterogeneity. She paints from photographs she and her friends have taken on nights out. There is a recurring character in the selected works, moving through different party scenes in her purple bucket hat, sitting down with her friends in one painting, delivering a whine in another. We never see her eyes, and in two of the paintings her head is turned away, as if this moment is not for us but solely for her enjoyment. She has range.
Painting is a necessarily layered medium, the way in which it is applied is one that is directly related to time. And in the diaspora context it is perhaps a more dynamic concept. Histories are fluid. Temporalities merge. Past becomes present becomes future. And the application of paint is a process that recognises the complexity of this notion.
The creation of a painting is a collection of moments, over short or long periods of time. Turiya Adkins might make a mark today, and not add another mark to the painting for 6 months. She also uses methods such as printmaking to add layers to her work, incorporating found footage onto her canvases and going over them with her marks. She combines the representational with the abstract, attempting to build a visual language that can reflect the dual notions of hypervisibility and invisibility that feels intrinsic to black life. For Chinaza Agbor, her process of creating skin is one that involves layers of underpainting, mixing colours underneath the surface for certain highlights to be visible in the finished product.
Helena Foster’s paintings tend to depict intimate moments, subjects caught between decisions, attempting to balance the good with the bad. Foster doesn’t often paint clearly defined faces, the details of her subjects often feel fuzzy. But somehow the paintings feel charged, the slightest of touches bonding two people together. Her brushstrokes are visible, layered and layered until the paintings are on the verge of abstraction. With Agnes Waruguru’s works, time is suspended in a way. Her process experiments with negative space, trying to capture fleeting moments through her brushstroke. The work feels like a record of being in between moments, trying to capture the ephemeral.
On the other hand, photography and video are time-based mediums, and we see quite clearly in the work in this show, the way in which the artists interrogate the malleability of time. Katherine McKittrick says that “Black creative work regularly undermines the linear temporalities of capitalism.”5 Montage and collage take centre stage in the exhibition, the artists bending time to their own preferences, infusing the past into their presents. With Oluwatobiloba Ajayi’s On the margin the temperature drops a few degrees (2021), a digital print that is made up of images from her family archive and her own prints, there is an image of her grandmother in Scotland, one of her mother in Amsterdam and another of her in Lagos. She collapses time and space into one image, in a way that made the artist herself question whether it was accurate to date the work as 2021, when there are so many years and layers within the print.
Ayo Akingbade’s Sukiyaki is a meditation on influences and references, but also on the flexibility of time. She brings references from across borders and eras and creates montages in which Sade Adu can exist alongside Aretha Franklin and Kate Bush.
For Olukemi Lijadu, whose works in the show are based on found images of a Nigerian family that she bought in Portobello market in 2021 for £2, she reflects on how time can be so clearly marked by certain objects, and how an image can invoke a sense of familiarity and nostalgia for one person, and perhaps something entirely different for another person with no context. She appropriates the images and zooms in on what feels familiar to her. Her choices, the moments of childhood that stuck out to her, like soft drink bottles at birthday parties, or delicate mary-janes maybe worn to church on Sundays, take away from the original function of the images and bring them to an entirely different context, one in which the artist is imposing her own context and memories onto them.
In part five of Eva Diallo’s Bolol, time feels endless. From above, she photographs the Aïr Massif in Niger, a mountain range in the Sahara that spans over 32,000 square miles. Diallo’s relative was lost in the vast region for 7 days, and she decided to photograph it from an airplane, rendering the expansive landscape abstract and making us consider not only our insignificance, but the insignificance of time as well. The photographs force us to reflect on how easy it would be to lose track while traversing this desert, of time, of location, of oneself even.
Concern with time and memory is central to diaspora art practices. For many of the artists in Manifold, living in cities away from where they are from, or having a distance from the lands of their parents, nostalgia and a longing for home become important facets in their work. For Emmanuelle Loca-Gisquet, she thinks of her photographs of Martinique, her home, as physical embodiments of nostalgia. She thinks about what Caribbean culture means to her specifically, what are the parts of it she wants to capture, and how possible it can be to represent a moment, a feeling, an identity.
Irene Antonia Diane Reece made I Look Out For Mine, this series of photographs of her hometown Houston, Texas, while studying in Paris. She couldn’t relate to the buildings in Paris that her classmates were drawn to photographing, she was thinking about the notion of home and archive. She wanted to capture the diversity of the community that she grew up in, especially in response to increasing change, gentrification and stereotyping. For Daëna Ladéesse, she is concerned with embodying history, through performance and her sweeping brushstrokes, she is thinking about what it means to engage with diaspora and her ancestors through movement and paint. For Isabel Okoro, there is a different kind of nostalgia in her work, wistful almost. Her photographs operate on multiple registers within the show, firstly as a hopeful, melancholic glance back at a summer romance, thinking about its emotions and its lessons. On another level the large-format images are hard to miss, giving room to black sapphic romance in an exhibition context.
Oftentimes, when exhibitions of artists of colour are arranged in countries in the global North, their practices are placed in problematics that directly relate them to whiteness. And yes, that is an unavoidable reality, but it is not always pertinent. One of the most important aspects of Manifold is to look at blackness in relation to blackness, and to think about the variety that exists across diaspora cultures. The exhibition asks questions about seeing and consuming. How can artists demand complex readings of their work? Here, they encourage audiences that might want to impose simplistic and flat interpretations to come a little closer, and to see through a lens of abundance.
Perhaps it means that in 2022 we have shifted towards a consumption that is steeped in the numerous. Even in seeing alone, things become relative and linked in a way that they weren’t before. The idea of Tiktoks and reels, often forced collages of separate events, pulled together by music and sound, to create a mosaic of a moment. Social media has moved from a platform of the instant, to one of the copious. More more more, they seem to be demanding of creators, but how has that changed the way in which we consume?
This idea of existing in multitudes has also long been an important facet of diaspora culture. Stuart Hall said, “In the diaspora situation, identities become multiple.” Kobena Mercer writes about the “figural” work of Aubrey Williams, the Guyanese painter, that it is both figurative and abstract. He says that within Caribbean art, “any clear-cut binary between coloniser and colonised, between victims and perpetrators, between the doers and the done to, has now been ambiguated—if not liquidated altogether—in favour of an ambivalent scene of entanglement in which all identities are implicated in the historical trauma and its aftermath.”3
Caribbean culture, according to David A Bailey, “dissolves and transcends the familiar Western binaries that informed both the Enlightenment and the expansion of empire.”4 Yet these binaries have constantly been employed when approaching Black art. Political vs apolitical, figurative vs abstract, representational vs non-representational. But is it appropriate to approach work so simply now in this age of a lot?
Every work in this exhibition is multi-layered, whether conceptually or physically. Manifold questions the limitations of approaching artists and their work through a singular lens. The artists in the show operate through layers; they create work that denounces easy accessibility by leaning on their complexities and contradictions. It might be their relationship to time, it might be their process, it might be their very beings. Working across painting, photography, video and print-making, the works and artists on show force us to question preconceived ideas about the hierarchy of planes. What is primary and what is secondary? Can multiple things be true of one artwork? Do form and function have to match? Can a work be abstract and representational? What does radical co-existence look like?
In Fadekemi Ogunsanya’s It is You That I Love, she combines various aspects of her practice, namely her dedication to the multi-functionality of her paintings. This work, an object that one must confront in the exhibition space, is also decorative and sculptural. It forces the audience to encounter it in multiple ways, using the familiarity of the heart-shape to draw you in. Ogunsanya embodies what it means to exist as an artist with multitudes, a trained architect whose works blur the line between object and painting. She is quite concerned with bringing what might be said to be ‘cheesy’ into exhibition spaces, giving audience members space to breathe, it’s okay to let your guard down and just enjoy.
Ayoade Bamgboye’s video and accompanying performance takes into account the vulnerability of creativity. Fucking Hell is a stream of consciousness that explores her innermost thoughts. It also straddles writing, comedy and performance; multi-disciplinarity and malleability of form are essential. She is also thinking about words and comedy in the exhibition space, not as a byproduct of the, but as the work itself. Why shouldn’t art be funny and serious and sad and playful?
Dana Cavigny actively pushes back at stereotypical representations of black women, using her works as an example of heterogeneity. She paints from photographs she and her friends have taken on nights out. There is a recurring character in the selected works, moving through different party scenes in her purple bucket hat, sitting down with her friends in one painting, delivering a whine in another. We never see her eyes, and in two of the paintings her head is turned away, as if this moment is not for us but solely for her enjoyment. She has range.
Painting is a necessarily layered medium, the way in which it is applied is one that is directly related to time. And in the diaspora context it is perhaps a more dynamic concept. Histories are fluid. Temporalities merge. Past becomes present becomes future. And the application of paint is a process that recognises the complexity of this notion.
The creation of a painting is a collection of moments, over short or long periods of time. Turiya Adkins might make a mark today, and not add another mark to the painting for 6 months. She also uses methods such as printmaking to add layers to her work, incorporating found footage onto her canvases and going over them with her marks. She combines the representational with the abstract, attempting to build a visual language that can reflect the dual notions of hypervisibility and invisibility that feels intrinsic to black life. For Chinaza Agbor, her process of creating skin is one that involves layers of underpainting, mixing colours underneath the surface for certain highlights to be visible in the finished product.
Helena Foster’s paintings tend to depict intimate moments, subjects caught between decisions, attempting to balance the good with the bad. Foster doesn’t often paint clearly defined faces, the details of her subjects often feel fuzzy. But somehow the paintings feel charged, the slightest of touches bonding two people together. Her brushstrokes are visible, layered and layered until the paintings are on the verge of abstraction. With Agnes Waruguru’s works, time is suspended in a way. Her process experiments with negative space, trying to capture fleeting moments through her brushstroke. The work feels like a record of being in between moments, trying to capture the ephemeral.
On the other hand, photography and video are time-based mediums, and we see quite clearly in the work in this show, the way in which the artists interrogate the malleability of time. Katherine McKittrick says that “Black creative work regularly undermines the linear temporalities of capitalism.”5 Montage and collage take centre stage in the exhibition, the artists bending time to their own preferences, infusing the past into their presents. With Oluwatobiloba Ajayi’s On the margin the temperature drops a few degrees (2021), a digital print that is made up of images from her family archive and her own prints, there is an image of her grandmother in Scotland, one of her mother in Amsterdam and another of her in Lagos. She collapses time and space into one image, in a way that made the artist herself question whether it was accurate to date the work as 2021, when there are so many years and layers within the print.
Ayo Akingbade’s Sukiyaki is a meditation on influences and references, but also on the flexibility of time. She brings references from across borders and eras and creates montages in which Sade Adu can exist alongside Aretha Franklin and Kate Bush.
For Olukemi Lijadu, whose works in the show are based on found images of a Nigerian family that she bought in Portobello market in 2021 for £2, she reflects on how time can be so clearly marked by certain objects, and how an image can invoke a sense of familiarity and nostalgia for one person, and perhaps something entirely different for another person with no context. She appropriates the images and zooms in on what feels familiar to her. Her choices, the moments of childhood that stuck out to her, like soft drink bottles at birthday parties, or delicate mary-janes maybe worn to church on Sundays, take away from the original function of the images and bring them to an entirely different context, one in which the artist is imposing her own context and memories onto them.
In part five of Eva Diallo’s Bolol, time feels endless. From above, she photographs the Aïr Massif in Niger, a mountain range in the Sahara that spans over 32,000 square miles. Diallo’s relative was lost in the vast region for 7 days, and she decided to photograph it from an airplane, rendering the expansive landscape abstract and making us consider not only our insignificance, but the insignificance of time as well. The photographs force us to reflect on how easy it would be to lose track while traversing this desert, of time, of location, of oneself even.
Concern with time and memory is central to diaspora art practices. For many of the artists in Manifold, living in cities away from where they are from, or having a distance from the lands of their parents, nostalgia and a longing for home become important facets in their work. For Emmanuelle Loca-Gisquet, she thinks of her photographs of Martinique, her home, as physical embodiments of nostalgia. She thinks about what Caribbean culture means to her specifically, what are the parts of it she wants to capture, and how possible it can be to represent a moment, a feeling, an identity.
Irene Antonia Diane Reece made I Look Out For Mine, this series of photographs of her hometown Houston, Texas, while studying in Paris. She couldn’t relate to the buildings in Paris that her classmates were drawn to photographing, she was thinking about the notion of home and archive. She wanted to capture the diversity of the community that she grew up in, especially in response to increasing change, gentrification and stereotyping. For Daëna Ladéesse, she is concerned with embodying history, through performance and her sweeping brushstrokes, she is thinking about what it means to engage with diaspora and her ancestors through movement and paint. For Isabel Okoro, there is a different kind of nostalgia in her work, wistful almost. Her photographs operate on multiple registers within the show, firstly as a hopeful, melancholic glance back at a summer romance, thinking about its emotions and its lessons. On another level the large-format images are hard to miss, giving room to black sapphic romance in an exhibition context.
Oftentimes, when exhibitions of artists of colour are arranged in countries in the global North, their practices are placed in problematics that directly relate them to whiteness. And yes, that is an unavoidable reality, but it is not always pertinent. One of the most important aspects of Manifold is to look at blackness in relation to blackness, and to think about the variety that exists across diaspora cultures. The exhibition asks questions about seeing and consuming. How can artists demand complex readings of their work? Here, they encourage audiences that might want to impose simplistic and flat interpretations to come a little closer, and to see through a lens of abundance.
1 Lubaina Himid, Letters to Susan, https://makinghistoriesvisible.com/portfolio/letters-to-susan/
2 Chris Hayes, “On the Internet We’re Always Famous”, The New Yorker. September 4, 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/on-the-internet-were-always-famous/
3 Kobena Mercer, “Aubrey Williams: Diaspora in Abstraction”, British Art Studies. June 8, 2018.
4 Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art, 1950s–Now, ed. Farquharson and David A. Bailey p. 6
5 Katherine McKittrick interviewed by Chanda Prescod Weinstein in “PUBLIC THINKER: KATHERINE MCKITTRICK ON BLACK METHODOLOGIES AND OTHER WAYS OF BEING”, Public Books. February 1, 2021.