Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me)
Sky’s the Limit
"Racism is a scholarly pursuit and it always has been. It is not gravity or ocean tides. It is the invention of our minor thinkers, our minor leaders, minor scholars, and our major entrepreneurs. It can be uninvented, deconstructed, and its annihilation begins with visualizing its absence, losing it, and if it can’t be lost at once or by saying so, then by behaving as if, in fact, our free life depended on it, because it does."
— Toni Morrison (Morrison, 2020).
Imagine!
Thirteen striking portraits retain the viewer at the exhibition Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me). The portrayed are firmly demanding that their intrinsic legitimacy be seen, their voices be heard, and our collective imaginary be expanded. Almost everyone is looking at us, and no one seems to have a reason to smile. While ten of them are exploratory self-portraits from 2019 to 2021 by celebrated photographer and activist Zanele Muholi (1972, South Africa), the other three are hyper-realist, live-size oil paintings of historical Black figures by artist Ayogu Kingsley Ifeanyichukwu (1994, Nigeria). In this essay, we will examine this small-scale exhibition at HANGAR, which juxtaposes two artists from different generations as a starting point to attempt to contextualise their practice and to analyse the historical constellations that lend urgency and relevance to this form of portraiture and self-articulation.
With the exhibition title, which cites the eponymous song Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me), from 1971, about the hopes of attaining a blissful family life, by American soul group The Temptations, curator Azu Nwagbogu traces a parallel between the empowerment felt by Black artists, writers, and creators in the 70s—a time marked by the aftermath of the civil rights movements in the United States and the African independence struggles—and the multiplicity of Black and Brown representation finding its way into all art forms today. This association is warranted not only by the affirmative nature of the exhibited portraits, each presenting a profoundly intentional image of self, but also by the way they trace a consequential lineage from Malcolm X to Basquiat to the possible autonomy for artists now. Black portraiture becomes a vehicle for self-regard, conscious performance, and celebration, while simultaneously denouncing social inequality.
Kingsley’s exhibited creations, all from 2021, are detailed renderings of three similar “what if” scenarios. African-American human rights activist and Muslim minister Malcolm X (1925–1965) is in a sharp suit and shiny shoes, sitting on a leather chair while leaning forward, with his elbows resting on his legs and his hands interwoven. The look behind his glasses is serious. He is sitting in the Oval Office as President of the United States. The carefully chosen room details match this alternative reality. Kingsley places the bust of Martin Luther King Jr. on display, and the artwork on the wall depicts a Black body in combat. With his uncompromised activism, Malcolm X inspired many social movements, such as the Black Power Movement and the Black Arts Movement, while being a role model that effectively raised the self-esteem of Black people in the US. Having poignantly denounced the hypocrisy of the American Dream, Malcolm X examined the many ways in which non-white citizens were denied access to their dreams.
In Basquiat, it is the turn of African-American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) to be occupying the position that is considered the most powerful in the world. A famous photograph of Basquiat in a Giorgio Armani suit taken by Lizzie Himmel in 1985 serves as inspiration for this POTUS representation, in a defiant posture. The mural behind him in the picture becomes a painting rendered in Basquiat’s idiosyncratic style, hanging in the presidential Oval Office. Having taken part in the founding of the New York hip-hop generation, Basquiat was a street performer, DJ, graffiti artist, and a prolific painter, who broke through to the white-dominated mainstream art scene. Contrary to the widespread image of Basquiat as a wild, intuitive genius, he was in truth well-read, a jazz connoisseur, and deeply aware of African-American history and his own place in it. In his work, Basquiat references, among other subject matters, the traumas of colonialism, racism, police brutality, and the exploitation of Black professionals by the mainstream. He died of heroin overdose at the age of 27.
On the opposite wall, another vertical painting of a third imagined POTUS—iconic revolutionary leader Captain Thomas Sankara (1949–1987) is sitting with crossed legs on an elegant office chair while holding the corded handset of an out-of-frame telephone. In a white shirt, red tie, and his characteristic red beret, Sankara’s gaze into the future is focused and warm. As Prime Minister of Upper Volta, Sankara was arrested following French interference in May 1983, and was later freed by his close friend Captain Blaise Campaoré in August that year, when he led a coup d’état that installed Sankara as President. After renaming the country Burkina Faso (Land of Incorruptible People), with its people being called Burkinabé (upright people), and composing a new anthem himself, the charismatic Sankara launched one of the most progressive governments in history. His Marxist, pan-Africanist, feminist, and anti-imperialist stance led the implementation of social, ecological, and economic changes, including a focus on local production of goods and investment in local technology, as well as a refusal to join the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. He appointed a large number of women to high governmental positions, encouraged women to work outside the home and to continue their education also if pregnant, while banning female genital mutilation, forced marriage, and polygamy. In October 1987, Blaise Campaoré betrayed his friend and killed Sankara, installing himself as President and reversing Sankara’s policies. Kingsley condenses this history by placing a faceless, ghostly man standing with folded arms in the background—imperialism and corruption constantly haunting.
Looking at these three prominent and tragic leaders posing as Presidents of the United States, it is inevitable to notice the stark contrast between, on the one hand, what they have offered to the world and their commitment to what they stood for and, on the other, the actual 45 Presidents that have governed the US. Among them, only one was Black. Barack Obama served as the 44th President of the United States from 2009 to 2017. The candidate of hope took office as the first Black President of the US amidst grand celebrations. His legacy, however, was arguably hugely disappointing for many who expected profound change. Not only did neoliberal, profit-driven policies thrive, but US imperialism and its wars gained a vicious boost under Obama. Kingsley’s paintings can also be read in the context of the work of two artists who have represented President Obama, on the one hand celebrating his presidency and on the other denouncing the racism that the first Black President had to face.
Kehinde Wiley, who was commissioned to paint Obama’s official portrait, chose a confident sitting posture—not far from the one Kingsley chose for Malcolm X—with the chair and the President placed on a background filled with green leaves and colourful flowers, flatteringly symbolising hope and change. Wiley is known for replacing the protagonists in historical paintings from the European canon with everyday African-Americans. Though this gesture might seem close to Kingsley’s, Wiley is more concerned with questions of visibility and historical erasure. Kingsley goes a step further by actually imagining the prominent figures he paints in the position he places them, demanding we do the same. Seeing these three leaders posing as Presidents of the United States reminded me of the phrase “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” and how often we experience this feeling. As Toni Morrison points out, we urgently need to be able to imagine a world without racism, without capitalist exploitation, and without imperialist intervention, for which we must also recognise the ways in which these struggles are intrinsically interconnected. Kingsley’s envisioning might seem hard to believe, which reveals our collective lack of training, but it is certainly more useful than imagining the end of humanity. His works are embedded with an awareness of disheartening pasts, while simultaneously being full of hope for the future.
African-American artist Kara Walker chose to depict President Obama as a racialised tribesman, a saint, a hero, and a martyr in four large-scale drawings from 2019, where she sets the former President into various art historical allegories. As a whole, her gestures seem protective, highlighting the prevailing racism of our times, without holding Obama accountable for the unfulfilled expectations and the limited socio-political change. In Barack Obama Tormented Saint Anthony Putting Up With the Whole “Birther” Conspiracy, he is attacked by flying demons, alluding to an illustration by Martin Schongauer to reference the conspiracy around Obama’s birthplace; in Barack Obama as Othello “The Moor” With the Severed Head of Iago in a New and Revised Ending by Kara E. Walker, Obama is sitting as Othello, the Moorish general of Shakespeare’s tragedy, holding the head of Iago, who has Donald Trump features. The iconic leaders Kingsley portrays, however, bring to the representative central stage of the Oval Office the content, struggle, and integrity that many felt were lacking during Obama’s two terms.
Proclaim!
All three represented figures, although widely visible in their lifetimes and still deeply influential today, had their lives cut short by racism and capitalist imperialism. American scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism as “the state-sanctioned and/or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature (social, civil and/or corporeal) death.” (Moten, 2013) This means dehumanization is lethal, translating into dangerous treatments of Black and Brown people by the justice and health systems, the press, the police, and society in general within a globalised world. Growing up in the 1990s as a Latin-American in Europe, I experienced a profoundly disturbing Portuguese historical narrative about colonisation in the classroom. Portugal was one of the leaders in establishing the slave trade, abducting people of West Africa for forced labour in 1444. One of the consequences of the continued silencing of this colonial past is a dehumanising dismissal of past atrocities as if long gone, which contradicts the lived experiences of the descendants of the colonized. The so-called discoveries are glossed over, and the “brave” and “heroic” conquerors are glorified continuously. Instead of mourning the many lost human lives, we are taught to champion the “virility” of those who claimed authority and absolute power over others. These narratives, no matter how ancient or intricate, can be torn down, uninvented, deconstructed.
Taking outdated hegemonic colonial premises off centre stage crystallises as a plea that passes from generation to generation. Black, mother, lesbian, warrior, poet Audre Lorde wrote in 1979: “Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.” (Lorde, 2017) Zanele Muholi’s work incorporates a similar plea to reach inside and deconstruct layers of preconceptions. A tireless educator, they started out as a documentary photographer. South Africa has seen an array of significant photographers bringing the country and its people to the entire world, such as Peter Magubane and David Goldblatt, the latter a friend and mentor to Muholi. The generation after them saw legendary photographers like Santu Mofokeng and John Liebenberg, who documented the apartheid regime in South Africa, the Namibian War of Independence, the South African occupation of Angola, and the civil war in Angola during the 1990s. From the work of all these photographers, one can study the serious implications and the infinite aspects of image-making. Muholi, who defines their work as visual activism, deeply understands the way in which art can be a tool to stand with their queer community and fight against obliteration, displacement, and repression.
Muholi’s advocacy is fierce and committed, extending from photography to various projects within their communities, such as an art school in KwaZulu Natal, the Forum for Empowerment of Women (co-founded in 2002), the forum for queer media activism Inkanyiso (founded in 2009), and photography workshops for young women. Muholi became internationally renowned for their black-and-white portraits of proud Black LGBTQI+ women in South Africa, collated in the ongoing series Faces and Phases that they started in 2006. They see their mission as the rewriting of the history of queer and trans South Africa, to honour the overlooked existence and resistance of so many who, on a daily basis, face hate, threats, and death. The project is a way of preserving an often-invisible community for posterity, celebrating the beauty of Black skin, and addressing the serious issues of hate crime in South Africa and neighbouring countries, where the stigma of homosexuality is linked to numerous horrific crimes. Faces and Phases is against all kinds of discrimination. To not see someone because they are Black or because they are queer cannot be tolerated.
In Necropolitics, Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe writes that “Negroes—and in particular Negresses—go unseen because we consider there is nothing to see and that we have basically nothing to do with them. They are not one of us. Telling stories about the men and women one does not see, drawing them, representing them, or photographing them has been an act of supreme authority throughout history, the manifestation par excellence of the relation without desire.” (Mbembe, 2019) Speaking in an interview (Muholi, 2021), it is this objectification that Muholi refers to when remembering all the Black people who have found themselves at museums or galleries without their knowledge, with the names of the photographers highlighted but themselves going unnamed. Muholi goes directly against such methodologies of the colonisers—where they point their cameras with long lenses like weapons to shoot—by establishing long-term relationships with the subjects they photograph, interviewing the participants and noting all individuals who make a project possible. The subjects co-select the photographs and a percentage of the earnings goes back to the community. As artist and writer Olu Oguibe notes in The Culture Game, “the presence behind the camera must be one with that other, must share in a fundamental sense a certain identity with her, or else the photographic encounter becomes an act of trespass and violation.” (Oguibe, 2004)
The most recent work by Muholi, including the photographs shown in Nwagbogu’s exhibition, focuses on self-portraiture. On the one hand, the gesture of inverting the camera to shoot themselves is a political statement—it creates balance by telling the previously photographed that the photographer can also be in front of the camera, showing equality as well as a consciousness of those who came before, those whose voices were silenced, those who could never afford the same kind of resources as Muholi, and who were never exhibited at prestigious galleries and museums except as objectified material. On the other, it is a self-projection demanding to be seen and looked at, centring the Black person in conjunction with common, everyday materials that gain a re-signification.
The high-contrast, black-and-white portraits in black frames relook at domestic objects that are used daily, such as electric wires, toilet paper, hangers, nets, or clothespins, composing them into elaborate hair pieces and costumes. At the entrance of the gallery, a bust shot of Muholi looks the viewer in the eye. Dozens of white hangers are interwoven on their head and around their body, while a large plastic sheet serves as background. On their left shoulder, a tattoo of a uterus and ovaries is visible. Because of the texture of the plastics, the high contrast, and the light, the work almost resembles a painting, which is a curious reversal of Kingsley’s paintings that almost resemble photographs. Although not included in the exhibition at HANGAR, it is notable that Muholi has recently started to work on paintings.
Pose!
Olu Oguibe traces the history of photography in the African continent as a process of image-making—that is, photography as an extension of the image-maker’s tools, as opposed to a process considered devoid of human agency. Speaking about Yoruba and Ethiopian photographic processes, Oguibe notes that “in these cultures photography is simply another process of image-making, a process of making rather than taking,” (Oguibe, 2004) a concept which Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar evokes in his piece You Do Not Take a Photograph, You Make It (2013). Oguibe goes further into this idea by analysing the words used for "photograph" in the Ethiopian Semitic language Amharic: “It is not unworthy of note that the photographic image was named se’el-fotograf in Amharic, a term that translates exactly as ‘photographic image’ but also reminds us, in its specificity to two-dimensionality and reference to drawing and painting [...]. Ethiopian painter Wossene Kosrof, an Amharic speaker, indeed confirms that the singular word se’el could be applied to drawing, painting, design, and the photograph.” (Oguibe, 2004) A photograph is therefore on the same level as a sketch or a drawing, and “rather than the innocent register of a literal configuration evacuated of the extra-aesthetic, the photographic image is rightly understood as a dominable site, the frames of which must be guarded and contested for.” (Oguibe, 2004) In essence, the making of photography incorporates a responsibility in regards to the created space that is inherently manipulated.
It is this contested space that Muholi is occupying and redefining. They come as a messenger of hope, allowing Black and queer people to be heard, recognised, and respected. By revealing themselves and their subjects through portraiture, Muholi encourages the subjects to be visible without fear. This self-articulation is liberating. According to Oguibe, “it is enunciation, the ability to reiterate our power over our selves that subjectivises us. It is this ability and freedom to enounce, too, which precludes us from dominance by others, which takes us, as it were, beyond the bounds of power.” (Oguibe, 2004) For Muholi, the visuals become a key of expression, because once seen they have to be immediately processed. Words can fail, or be too complicated, while images are universal and can speak to the unconverted, regardless of their language. Their work becomes a tool for communication and education, to unlearn the received misinformation, and to advance intergenerational conversations. Muholi also speaks about photography as personal therapy, where they try to shoot every day in order to validate themselves and their purpose.
Beholding Muholi’s portraits, the work of seminal Nigerian-British photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955–1989) inevitably comes to mind as a bold precursor, having defined British gay aesthetics during the 1980s. Fani-Kayode was the son of a Yoruba priest who played a significant role in Nigeria’s struggle for independence. His upbringing in a political and religious household, and the forced migration to the United Kingdom following a military coup d’état in 1966, had immense influence on his artistic explorations on race, sexuality, religion, and cultural crossovers. In his large-format photographs, nude Black men are portrayed using a chiaroscuro that enhances their body features. Through the use of masks, feathers, shells, plants, fruits, candles, body paint, and other artefacts, Fani-Kayode invokes a complex cultural matrix.
Being of Yoruba ancestry, Fani-Kayode applied “photography to the imaging of Yoruba deities and principles connected with the cult of abiku, the cyclic changeling fated to repeat death and rebirth, and especially of the most engaging yet singularly photogenic deity of the Yoruba, the divinity of ambiguity and fate, Esu.” (Oguibe, 2004) Esu’s conceptual essence is that of a trickster deity, characterised by “mischievousness, ambiguity, multisexuality, indeterminacy, perpetual mobility, and unpredictability.” (Oguibe, 2004) Here again, the idea of image-making and of self-proclamation are foregrounded, while the encounter between the artist’s native Yoruba heritage and his experience of the West is queered. Although over 30 years old, Fani-Kayode’s Black and queer vocabulary remains as relevant today, when the conversation about the inability to belong fully is pervasive. His legacy lives on through Autograph, Association of Black Photographers, which he co-founded and is still in operation in London. Fani-Kayode died at 34 from an AIDS-related illness.
The commonalities between the work of Zanele Muholi and that of Rotimi Fani-Kayode are multiple. They are able to familiarise the strange and mystify the familiar, allowing for the myriads of meanings that “strange” or “familiar” might have for each different viewer. Because they both work in long series, there is a vulnerability that emerges in a dialogue with the viewer. The more images we are exposed to, the more we enter into their expansive universes, where we can challenge differentiating categories, going far beyond dualities. It opens up an important space for us to realise the possibility of an enriching difference instead of a threatening “otherness,” encouraging us to practice our sociality and participate in collective care and shared responsibility. The achieved defamiliarisation here is linked to the distinction that poet Nathaniel Mackey draws between other as a social noun and other as an artistic verb: “Artistic othering has to do with innovation, invention, and change, upon which cultural health and diversity depend and thrive. Social othering has to do with power, exclusion, and privilege, the centralizing of a noun against which otherness is measured, meted out, marginalized. My focus is the practice of the former by people subjected to the latter.” (Mackey, 1992)
Both artists have worked with subjects that are closely related to their identities, Muholi photographing Black queer women and Fani-Kayode photographing Black queer men, while at the same time inserting themselves as well in a performative gesture of self-articulation. Fani-Kayode stated in 1988: “My identity has been constructed from my own sense of otherness, whether cultural, racial, or sexual. The three aspects are not separate within me. Photography is the tool by which I feel most confident in expressing myself. It is photography, therefore—Black, African, homosexual photography—which I must use not just as an instrument, but as a weapon if I am to resist attacks on my integrity and, indeed, my existence on my own terms.” (Fani-Kayode, 1988) To use Mackey’s words, Fani-Kayode, as well as Muholi, both position their work as exercising a liberating healthy othering as a verb, while being subjected to a violent social othering.
Fly!
Perhaps the arresting portraits at Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me) are not smiling because the work they are set to do is of extreme seriousness. The importance of crafting one’s own image is not to be underestimated, since not doing so comes at a high price. All over the world, people have worked hard to meet the need to self-project and intentionally articulate their own complex identities. Not only does this proclamation combat preconceptions of imposed othering gazes, it also dissolves the distorted images we have of ourselves, allowing for much strived-for acceptance and healing.
The path towards advancement within these intricate fronts is more often than not arduous to achieve, and progress is slow. There are also distances to confront between the multiplicity of peoples, cultures, and classes. The way that the multi-headed hydra that is capitalism and white heteropatriarchy traverses us, our minds, and our bodies can be profoundly different for each and every person. On the other hand, othering as a verb is possible because of cross-pollination, a vital element of cultural innovation, without which culture would decay. So much conversation has revolved around issues of legitimacy, where artists and writers are expected to speak only from their personal ethnic experiences, but, as writer Cathy Park Hong explains, “such a politics not only assumes racial identity is pure—while ignoring the messy lived realities in which racial groups overlap—but reduces racial identity to intellectual property.” (Hong, 2021) Without the option of speaking with and nearby our allies and comrades, any idea of coalition becomes an impossibility. At the same time, strict categorisations are a direct reaction to whiteness and do not have the necessary power to decentre it—an aim of the utmost importance in order to move towards equality and justice.
We turn to art for this vital task of self-enunciation, because, in the words of Toni Morrison, “art invites us to take the journey beyond price, beyond costs into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be. Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it from even the most tragic of circumstances. Art reminds us that we belong here. … Its conversation with the public and among its various genres is critical to the understanding of what it means to care deeply and to be human completely.” (Morrison, 2020)
Sky’s the Limit when artists are our visionaries. Sky’s the Limit when the racialized, the gendered, the colonised, the displaced, the hunted, the expelled, the shipped stand and speak within infinite pockets of resistance. Sky’s the Limit when we confront the perpetuation of racializing, gendering, colonising, displacing, hunting, expelling, and shipping as individual and collective psychosis. Sky’s the Limit is an album from 1971 by The Temptations. Sky’s the Limit when “I tell you I can visualize it all.” (Temptations, 1971) “We are in a mess, you know; we have to get out, and only the archaic definition of the word ‘dreaming’ will save us: ‘to envision; a series of images of unusual vividness, clarity, order, and significance.'” (Morrison, 2020)
Hangar: Centro de Investigação Artística
Ana Salazar Herera [1990] is curator at the Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen, writer, and initiator of the Museum for the Displaced, a para-institution addressing issues of forced migration. Through undisciplined explorations of nomadic, poly-lingual, and transcultural subjectivities and expressions, her work proposes inventive ways of challenging established geopolitical world mappings. From 2016 to 2020, she was Assistant Curator for Exhibitions at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. Ana was a curatorial fellow at Shanghai Curators Lab [2018], a mentee of the global exhibition program Project Anywhere [2020-21], and a curatorial fellow at Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral [2021-22]. She graduated with an MA in Curatorial Practice from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and a BA in Piano from the Music School of Lisbon.
Proofreading: Diogo Montenegro.
Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me). Exhibition views at Hangar: Centro de Investigação Artística. Photos: Ana Garrido. Courtesy of Hangar.
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