Somerset House’s show presents historical works alongside new narratives created by 18 contemporary artists
Visual ArtsIn “Instant Model”, taken on Coney Island in 1976 by the photographer and former model Ming Smith, a young woman in a white headwrap looks back at the camera from a crowd, her arms folded in relaxed self-possession. The image is all the more startling because of her candid unselfconsciousness in the context of art that knowingly responds to the often grotesque misrepresentation of black women in western art.
Male artists, from the Harlem Renaissance to Britain’s Association of Black Photographers, Autograph, have been among those dismantling the caricatures. But this exhibition, curated by Aindrea Emelife, aims to foreground art from a perspective that’s often been overlooked.Archival images illustrate a shameful inheritance.
In Alberta Whittle’s digital photo-collage “C is for Colonial Fantasy” , a repeated image of a spreadeagled woman in a bikini, with holes gouged into the photograph around her vulva, is flanked by four huge, voyeuristic, blue eyes. At its centre is a large cowrie shell — a hint at the financial transactions driving this fantasy.
At times, seeing these works through the lens of identity risks obscuring other meanings. In Cox’s “Miss Thang” , a yellow-bikinied woman smokes a yellow sobranie in a Jacuzzi beside a bottle of Jamaican rum. The image is described as one of Cox’s “powerful, positive images of Black individuals” — yet the series title, “The Discreet Charm of the Bougies”, alluding to Luis Buñuel’s 1972 satirical film about the bourgeoise, suggests more is at play here.
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