Until October 2024 the exhibition called When we see us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting is on view in Kunstmuseum, Basel. Apropos of this, there was a conversation in Art Basel about black figuration, black identity and the visualization of blackness with two of the exhibited artists, the Zimbabwe-born, London-based Kudzanai-Violet Hwami and the Harlem-born Tschabalala Self. Moderated by Koyo Kouoh, the executive curator and chief curator of Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town.
The exhibition shows the continuum of figurative painting, the multiplicity of black experience, the essence and phenomenon of black joy but also the radical and political aspects of blackness. The show still refuses to centralize violence and trauma and focus on everyday life, sensuality, spirituality, triumph, emancipation and so on.
These artists have never been put together, but their practice is very related to each other, all of them come into a conversation to express sentiments and positions around blackness. The moderator also pointed out that the figuration is one of the oldest artistic practices that we know: it is established as a canon of study, and it is also very accessible because we all navigate this existence that we are gifted through the body. Hwami added that the exhibition covers a wide spectrum of time and generations, forms and practices from the 19th century to nowadays and examines blackness from a global context.
In this talk, Kouoh asked both of the artists about their own practices. Both artists engange issues of identity and with representation of the black body sexually and spiritually.
Hwami’s practice has a nonpainterly starting point, she uses digital pictures and old photographs and from those she makes collages. “For me photography preserves the history of colonialism and of migration, but I want to reimagine them. Instead of telling the preserved stories, I approach these pictures in a playful way to erase the past and rewrite the original ideas”. Kouoh sees a lot of nostalgia in these artworks, but Hwami pointed out that she wouldn’t be bound to what these figures are. For her, these photos open up more stories and ideas.
Tschabalala Self also combines paint and other materials to make collages, but she talks from a more political aspect. “My works are definitely politicized, and it’s deeply influenced by a Black American experience, by the aspect of the diaspora which is related with American slavery”. She added that the black body was mostly a euphemism: incomplete or flattened. “I’d like to add formal complexity, figures that are multi-layered, that have various aspects. I want to show the complexity of the true experience”.
And however figurative works are about the inherited and fashioned black identity, figuration is also for inscribing themselves into space, it’s about self-writing, self-narrating as well. Figuration for the black artists, as the moderator pointed out, is to liberate themselves to temporal, emotional, dialectical prison that has locked their imaginaries.
Breaking the trinity, the boundaries of enslavement, colonization, apart?
Hwami said that she wouldn’t want to talk about trinity, she wants to talk about her own identity as a human being. “I don’t even like the term black body because it places the figures in the paintings as simple objects, something to observe”. She wants to bring her works back to humanity and create a universe in which these figures are free from trinity.
Tschabalala, on the other hand, agrees with trinity because she thinks it is important to have conversations about blackness that have no relation to whiteness. Conversations about what the black identity means within the vacuum of the black identity. She believes that it has to have space for both conversation: about trinity and about what it means to be a human being in a world where there is a lot of stress, which all affect the identity. She also pointed out that making art has an egocentric aspect because it’s about identifying and liberating oneself, but it has to also give inspiration to other people that have the most in common with herself. Kouoh added that black art can bring to the table the unusual topics like beauty, spirit, playfulness as well, things that blackness is not associated with.
Hwami said that if your day-to-day experience is about being aware of racism, sexism, then in your studio you want freedom from these topics even if you are already existing in that framework. Tschabalala added that paint is a great material to enter a different universe because with paint you can do whatever you want.
Kouoh also asked the artists about the idea of home. For Tschabalala Self home is a community of people that feels like home with. She pointed out that home is a political but also a psychological space, a boundless environment where there is a lot of performativity as well. In her earlier works her figures were in a non-defined space because her interest focused on the figure, but later her compositions are dedicated to special location, the space became the subject. For Hwami home is the Internet because she has always been communicating with her family through Whatsapp even when she was living in Zimbabwe because her relatives have always been living in different parts of the country. She also thinks that existing without being placed in one country is freedom. And even if she is very connected with and influenced by the Internet, her works have a lot of colors, textures, lushness. She said it’s because the human spirit has to exist somewhere outside the digital world, and she can express this existence through the materials.
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