“As a Black person, you’re an inheritor, wherever you live, of really quite complex cultural legacies,” says Ekow Eshun, the curator behind the Hayward Gallery’s rousing summer exhibition.
This summer, The Southbank Centre’s Hayward Gallery, situated on London’s River Thames, is home to In the Black Fantastic, a motley of works by artists from the African diaspora exploring identity, mythology, and future possibility, curated by British-Ghanaian writer and Mission’s contributing arts and culture editor, Ekow Eshun.
At first glance, the exhibit appears to be a billet-doux to Afrofuturism, a wide-spanning term coined by cultural critic Mark Derry and developed by Alondra Nelson, which encapsulates the possibilities that African mythology, technology, and science fiction hold when combined. Over Zoom, however, Eshun is reluctant to confine the exhibition to a singular concept, “I felt this Black fantastic, as a territory, was wider and ran deeper in fact than a term like Afrofuturism could really contain.”
In the Black Fantastic incorporates soundsuits by conceptual artist Nick Cave (full-body costumes designed as a means of coping with collective trauma), post-apocalyptic paintings by Sedrick Chisom, provocative depictions of America’s white supremacist past by Kara Walker, and gold-plated paintings by British-Liberian artist Lina Iris Viktor.
With a book of the same title, corresponding talks by Eshun, and a simultaneous film schedule at the BFI showing films like Daughters of the Dust and Sankofa, In the Black Fantastic is a summer-long exploration of what it means to be a Black and living outside Africa.
In the interview below, which has been edited for length and clarity, Eshun opens up about how he went about selecting pieces for the exhibition, the “strangeness” of the Black experience, and why we need to embrace, or at the very least least accept, unfamiliar spiritual practices.
Juno Kelly: How did you come up with the title In the Black, Fantastic?
Ekow Eshun: The title follows work I have been interested in for a long time, the musicians and writers and filmmakers [who are], as artists of African origin, engaging with myth and speculative fiction and using that as a way to interrogate the present day, even as they look into the future or back into the past or out into the cosmos. The title follows the observation that you could look at Wangechi Mutu, or Chris Ofili, or Octavia Butler, or Beyoncé, or Black Panther, and see some connections between those. I suppose the title comes from thinking about this territory as the fantastic zone of interrogation through fantasy, from the perspective of those figures, and therefore a Black fantastic. The aim was to think about the “in” of the title, not just as a descriptive thing, but as an active term so that you’re moving through the Black fantastic as you go through the exhibition.
JK: The exhibit is focused on the future, whereas in popular discussion at the moment, especially when it comes to race, we’re often looking backwards. Why did you think it was so important to look forwards?
I don’t think it’s focussed exclusively on the future. It’s about the simultaneity of the past and the present and the future. There’s a phrase from Ghana, Sankofa— the definition is loose—but it means something like to draw meaningfully from the past or to turn to the past and take it back into the present. How can you look into the future, carrying these histories and these interconnections of people and place and race and collective memory and cultural identity? What happens if you look into the future with the perspective of all these things still in mind? When I talk about the Black fantastic, for me, it’s not a genre or a movement even. It’s a way of seeing. Connecting these difficult, sometimes painful pasts of Black presence in the West, that’s also about connecting with African cultural origins and spiritual practices and different histories and saying that as a Black person, you’re an inheritor, wherever you live, of really quite complex cultural legacies.
JK: How did you go about choosing which pieces you wanted to include? What was the common denominator?
EE: What unites them is the seriousness and depth of the work. These works are reaching out in all sorts of imaginative ways, but they’re also about grappling with the racialized every day. They begin from an awareness of the extraordinary strangeness of the Black experience in the western world. The extraordinary strangeness of being othered, of being taken for alien, of being considered less than whole or less than human, which is one of the ways that Black people have experienced the western world since forced migration in the 17th century. So I’ve been interested in the different ways the artists take that awareness as a root position from which they make all sorts of work.
JK: Two of Nick Cave’s works that are included in the exhibit reference police brutality. Why did you think that was an important subject to include?
EE: Nick Cave is known for making these very elaborate, heavily decorated soundsuits. The first soundsuit that Nick Cave made was after the beating of Rodney King in L.A. in the 1990s. And he created this soundsuit as a kind of army of the self because he was so conscious of the vulnerability of the Black body. So he created a soundsuit which defies racialized definitions of the Black body. It doesn’t have a race. It doesn’t even have a gender. What it does have is possibilities of self-fashioning. This most recent one, inspired by the murder of George Floyd, follows the same trajectory, which is to ask a number of questions, “how do we mourn the dead? And how do you do that in a way that affirms our own right to life?” On the one hand, the soundsuit is gorgeous and colorful, it’s full of flowers and sequins. But another way, it’s a memorial to a life that wasn’t allowed to flourish or flower in its fullness.
JK: How do you hope the exhibition makes people re-address social injustice and racism?
EE: That’s perhaps a big ambition. Hopefully the show offers a framework for thinking about racial belonging, for wanting to go beyond some of the ways that Black people are thought about or constrained within ordinary society. The show interrogates the condition of race, but it does that by reaching beyond the white imaginary, by creating spaces of new dreaming and new possibility. I wanted to see what freedom looks like, to see what things look like unconstrained by a constant desire to tell Black people to know their place.
JK: You’re selecting films for a corresponding festival with the BFI. How did you go about choosing those?
EE: All the films I chose are about this porous territory between the everyday and what you might call the supernatural, where the apparently ordinary starts to meld with histories and cultural imaginings that come out of Africa and the African diasporic sensibility. There is no hierarchy between Western knowledge and technology, the kind of world we know from a Eurocentric perspective, and cultural influences or ideas that come from Africa out of the diaspora.
JK: Is there anything that you hope viewers or readers take away from the book and exhibition?
EE: I’m very excited by the breadth of Black dreaming and Black imagining that’s on show. This [the exhibit] looks like the real world. The strange world is the one outside our doors every day. I want to highlight that inversion, that many of the things we take for granted, including the idea of race itself, are just extraordinary, odd things, ideas that we have chosen to make ourselves comfortable here. So if anything, I’d like people to come out of the show, or put down the book, and look at the world around us with some heightened sense of its peculiarity.
Inside image: Soundsuit by Nick Cave, captured by Zeinab Batchelor, courtesy of the Hayward Gallery.
Homepage image: Installation by Tabita Rezaire, courtesy of the Hayward Gallery.
