At Peace
‘At Peace’ is an exhibition in London at a commercial art gallery, Gillian Jason Gallery. The show features artists Alanis Forde, Miranda Forrester, Sahara Longe, Cece Philips, and Emma Prempeh.
Curated by Jade Foster
Ethereal artworks feel ‘at peace’, radiating and basking in a tangible presence of their own by embodying pleasure, contentment, or accepting confliction. The artists place Black womxn within and among, yet never bound by, Western naturalistic classical and modernist traditions within Painting. Collectively, the paintings manifest a palpable Blackness, exploring Black performativity as unbounded, complex, and fugitive. The works and exhibition itself are a practice of world-building, developing past imaginaries within Black abstraction and figurative Painting, which establishes Black figures as the protagonist.
No longer depicted as being at service or taken out of habitat, the artists visualise everyday interiors (bodily and spatially) across centuries, owned or inhabited by the figures depicted. Black as a cultural identity is understood in this regard “not as an essence but a positioning” (Stuart Hall).
Is the artistic canon itself, and are art institutions capable of self-destruction and re-birth?
Ndiritu declared 2020/2021 as the ‘Year of Black Healing’; in opposition to the co-option and hyper-fetishisation of Black Culture, more broadly. This ethos is an experiment into re-birth and ‘wake work’ — a coming to consciousness (Christina Sharpe), especially with what lingers and has come to past. On reflection of this notion, At Peace contemplates the aftermath of a dying, irrelevant gallery/museum and archaic historical framings rooted in the western canon of art history. The exhibition speculates a sharp re-birth and re-constitution from the remains — envisioning versions of existent and fictitious (art)worlds, old and new, that aren’t upheld by Western methodologies towards ethnographic categorisation, restriction, and regulation. Therefore, the exhibition begins to speculate, rendering ineffectual, monolithic systems that subsequently reinforce notions of the Other.
At Peace embodies ‘exhibition as research’ driven by a holistic approach to curating by establishing a temporary space of healing in which the artists and the artworks exercise a collective agency.
At Peace has been curated to reflect deeply on the themes of Everyday Interiors, Intimacy, and Pleasure in Authenticity. The artists are intrinsically interested in the human experience of intimacy, closeness, and consciousness, something that isn’t fixed to one singular cultural practice but is universally experienced. These explorations are reflected not only within their journey but also in the artworks themselves, which communicate to us: ‘I’m here, I’m present with you in the fullest way I know and can be right now’. Cultural identity “is constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth” and “are the unstable points of identification or suture, which are made, within the discourses of history and culture” (Stuart Hall). Each artist seeks to speak and reconcile with this notion by compositing historical, collective, and personal experiences. Expanding through and within instability, all five practitioners seek authenticity, presenting itself as a patchwork of presence or influences, which connects them more than their overarching shared racial and gender identities. This type of authenticity is not objective truth or absoluteness but the pursuit of personal or communal joy, honesty, and becoming in the everyday experiences of work, dating, hangouts with friends or strolls on a daily commute or our interaction with private interior spaces. Of course, these everyday experiences are entangled in the politics of race, gender, and sexuality. However, private spaces can negate what is propositioned onto our bodies in public space. This exhibition is practice-based research into the ability for everyday and artistic interiors, such as houses, museums/galleries, studios, to cultivate honesty with oneself and each other. Within these interior spaces and those of the artists, ‘B’ and ‘b’ are interchangeable; you can stand, sit, think, feel, present however you wish, and with whomever you want to.