{"id":121862,"date":"2021-08-07T10:26:25","date_gmt":"2021-08-07T08:26:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/?page_id=110190"},"modified":"2024-04-10T15:42:11","modified_gmt":"2024-04-10T13:42:11","slug":"having-a-party-hope-you-will-be-there","status":"publish","type":"cfa_live","link":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/cfa_live\/having-a-party-hope-you-will-be-there\/","title":{"rendered":"Having a party (hope you will be there)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Damien & The Love Guru, Brussels<\/a><\/strong>
Isabella Costabile, Deborah Joyce Holman, Shaun Motsi, Jim C. Nedd, Josiane M.H Pozi, Lee Scratch Perry. Organized by Mickael Marman. Text by Olamiju Fajemisin
1 July \u2013 7 August 2021<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe subaltern cannot speak,\u201d so let them laugh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Though the imperial body came into possession of itself on the advent of the postcolonial turn, it remains subaltern. Saidiya Hartman characterises the \u201cnascent individualism of emancipation\u201d as a \u201cburdened individuality.\u201d She theorises that the transformation of BlacK subjectivity\u2014from subjugation to self-possession\u2014occurred when the double bind of freedom thrust the newly emancipated into the \u201cfold of liberal individualism,\u201d currently presenting as neoliberalism. At worst, this abstracted equality yields antagonism; at best, pessimism.
Writing in 1989, in the full knowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a matter of when, not if, Francis Fukuyama suggests that the \u201cend of history\u201d occurs not just with the inevitable end of the Cold War, but with the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. In the decades since, the subaltern European has been forced to inhabit a permanent state of liminality in which the hegemony of globalism is often cited to \u201cnumb\u201d the after-effects of colonialism. The subaltern are afforded no autonomy when surveyed under a global neoliberal economic framework, therefore it becomes the burden of the subaltern artist to evince self-determination in their work, evoking subjecthood through the poetics of gesture, humour and refusal, all the while avoiding the paternalism of commodification. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While dominant Western (read: European) centres of power assume that the postcolonial and the neoliberal do not co-exist, that the freedoms of the latter condition should usurp the trauma of the former, the Black European cultural worker mimics the precarious and very real tension of these overlapping contexts in an attempt to uncover a legitimate place for the subaltern in a society which otherwise considers itself \u201cpost-racial.\u201d One cannot, however, invoke the subaltern as a monolith. As noted crucially by Amelia Winata, writing on the tension between the postcolonial and the neoliberal in the renegade curatorial oeuvre of the late Okwui Enwezor: \u201cFurther complicating this reading of the subaltern body is the identity of the artist who represents it.\u201dIn the second half of the twentieth century, when the transcendence of race-based ideological movements such as N\u00e9gritude and Pan-Africanism \u201cshifted the terrain of critical thought from the racial to the national,\u201d the claim to legitimacy for new, sovereign African nations evolved to depend on the extent to which their national cultures \u201ccatalysed and participated in the liberation struggle.\u201d For the generation of post-independence subaltern \u00e9migr\u00e9es to Europe and their children, this meant the synthesis of new, forward-moving national cultures of Black Europeanism, or Afro-Europeanism, or Afropeanism.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Having a party<\/em> (hope you will be there)<\/em>, named for a lyric from the 2008 Lee Scratch Perry song, Mickael Marman unites himself, Perry, and the artists Jim C. Nedd, Isabella Costabile, Josiane M.H. Pozi, Deborah Joyce Holman and Shaun Motsi in consideration of their mutual ability to exploit the elastic tensions of the postcolonial-neoliberal condition through the interpretation of inheritance\u2014of objects, behaviours, traumas and debts\u2014and vitally, the refusal of this inheritance.
Costabile, attending to the mutability of perception, engages a compositional methodology which reflects on the possibility for recognisable forms and language to evolve before the viewer\u2019s eyes. Her ready-made assemblages\u2014much like Perry\u2019s collages\u2014evoke the tensions between realism and documentary, in turn complementing the pervading themes of Nedd and Pozi\u2019s photographic and videographic works.
Importantly, the artists\u2019 distended invocation of the Black and the banal obfuscates the neoliberal gaze through the generation of humour. Holman\u2019s impossibly long kanekalon braid coils like a snake in a pile on the floor; Motsi limns chocolate as an \u201cappropriately dumb\u201d substitute for a potential depiction of a Black body for consumption; Marman\u2019s counterfeit Prada bag bears a distinct Ankara-like impasto of paint and tape, and is titled with the airport codes of all the cities through which it transited and was produced.
The legitimacy of this humour (particularly that of the invitation, \u201cHaving a party (hope you will be there)\u201d) lies not in its overt funniness, but in its ability to feign obscurity and self-possession through in-jokes and refusal. By toying with the \u201cethics and aesthetics of representation,\u201d this diasporal presentation allows for the reconciliation of the burdened individuality of contemporary Black Europeanness, or Afro-Europeanness, or Afropeanness through the reconfiguration of the depersonalised self.
<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Olamiju Fajemisin<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","event_label":[2389],"class_list":["post-121862","cfa_live","type-cfa_live","status-publish","hentry","event_label-past"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cfa_live\/121862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cfa_live"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/cfa_live"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"event_label","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/event_label?post=121862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}