In her exhibition In the Blink of an Eye, Curator and Writer Ryan Nuckolls, considers four artists to address the benefits of performative narration as a coping mechanism for grappling with the complexities of personal identity. By utilizing the malleability of perception the artists help us consider the possibilities of consciousnesses that lie beyond the bounds of contemporary social stigmas. The selected video works will show that though society attempts to label us, our identities in a digital era are nebulous and will become increasingly abstracted.
Presenting:
Rehema Chachage, KWA BABA RITHI UNDUGU, 2010, 2 minutes 46 seconds
Nina Mangalanayagam, Balancing Act, 2012, 10 minutes 19 seconds
Shaun Leonardo, Battle Royal, 2011, Performance video, 11 minutes 17 seconds. Videography by Chris Santiago
Sofia Cordova, Echoes of a Tumbling Throne (Odas Al Fin De Los Tiempos) Liveles #1, 2, 3, 4, 2014, 19 minutes 29 seconds
Artist introductions below.
In the Blink of an Eye
The entire narrative of this country argues against the truth of who you are.
– Ta Nehisi Coates
Inspired by Between the World and Me (2015), the proposal builds upon the notion of collectivism shaping individual consciousness. The exhibition is configured around two key curatorial axes. The first is that social classifications of identity—such as, gender, race and nationality—are mere dialectical conceptions; the enforcing of prescribed social categories gives shape to otherwise abstract forms of identity. The second is that, in a continued effort to rationalize the abstract, we regard our own lives as narratives. Performative narration allows us to make tangible the ineffable, thus asserting our individual autonomy over the control of the collective whole.
Anglo-Saxons first institutionalized our modern perception of the term race in the 17th century, as an ideological justification for the enslavement of persons of color during the transatlantic slave trade. Like many minority Americans, Coates suffers from a lifespan of endemic physical and mental subjugation; in his most recent publication, the author offers a framework for understanding race in the U.S. in a series of revelatory personal experiences, imbued with historical semblance. But in order to comprehend the realities of discrimination in America, we must look beyond concepts of prejudice, bias, stereotyping and intolerance.
Sociologist and social theorist Joe Feagin explains that, though these conventional concepts are important to recognize, they are ultimately shortsighted because they focus on individual racial and ethical issues rather than society’s systemic racism. In his book, The White Racial Frame (2009), Feagin explains that racist ideologies, narratives, images, and emotions, as well as individual and group inclinations to discriminate, have reinforced oppression of minority groups.
In the Blink of an Eye argues that these truths extend beyond the American lens. The compilation opens with an artist who has suffered from inescapable prejudice – within a hierarchal class system reinforced by undeserved financial and political advantages – Rehema Chachage’s works explore themes of voice and voicelessness. Her video installation Kwa Baba rithi undugu forces viewers to make a choice—they can either disassociate with the moving image before them, dubbed in Swahili (a language presumably unfamiliar to them), or they can attempt to listen and engage with the work.
Chachage’s video is here presented as a back-to-back two-part inversion. In the first video, the artist explains that viewers may not initially realize that they are looking at a living, breathing human, but rather presume that it is a still image before them. This misreading is a result of the woman’s masked identity; she is prevented from emerging from behind the radio interface projected – almost forcibly – upon her. This aesthetic choice by Chachage invokes feelings of suffocation. The tuning dial of the radio moves continuously across her and as it centers upon her body the voice of a man crystalizes. In the corresponding film, which immediately follows the first, her form resurfaces and for the first time we are able to clearly see the woman’s face. Now, as the dial passes over her, the man’s voice becomes unstable. Unlike the first shot in which the protagonist has been visually and audibly entrapped, in the latter video a sense of control has been reasserted with her unveiling.
As a dark skinned Tanzanian woman, Chachage’s skin at her predominantly white South African university, was an imprint affirming her perpetual otherness. This undoubtedly impacted her assimilation into the community and how she was treated. As a Swedish native with a Danish mother and Tamil father, Nina Mangalanayagam has been confronted with similar superficial projections. In her split screen video work, Balancing Act, the artist questions what it means to exist in-between. Mangalanayagam explains that she felt she has always been denied a sense of nationhood, as a result of her mixed heritage background.
Research for Balancing Act, a video work commissioned by Radar for the Home/Land conference, took place on the campus of Loughborough University. During that time Mangalanayagam became alert to the relationship between the rules of sport and the imagined and enforced normative borders that influence our day-to-day interactions. The artist explains that the lines of the gymnasium are a manifestation of the ways in which sport is used as a tool of discipline and behavior: run between the lines, swim in your lane, and move within the prescribed frameworks of the game.
Similar to Chachage, whose video and audio creations were woven together to create a powerful message, Mangalanayagam’s video, text and music are each imperative to the construction and total impact of her work. The artist commissioned an entrancing cello piece by Oliver Barrett, which was created in response to the Sri Lankan, Danish, Swedish and British national anthems. Her vision for the soundtrack stemmed from a historical analysis of sport, but specifically the role of the national anthem during Olympic games and similar world tournaments. The lyrics of these songs – which oft include a pledged allegiance to a single state or ruling faction – are quite forceful in connotation. Citizens’ declarations unofficially ensure mass undivided faithfulness, thus denying the possibility of multiple belongings. The visual and musical elements of Balancing Act are derivatives of societal constructs that have influenced the personal narrative of Nina Mangalanayagam herself.
In his text The Souls of Black Folk (1903), sociologist and civil rights activist, W. E. B. DuBois, asserted that a sense of displacement was a common phenomenon for black Americans. He defined his theory of double consciousness as a result of negotiating a sense of self in the face of discrimination and cultural dislocation. For global citizens of the 21st century, internal negotiations of cultural hybridity have become increasingly complex. Many artists, like Mangalanayagam, are grapping with states of triple consciousness, and some might argue that this is a conservative estimate when considering increased opportunities to travel and easily accessible technological resources.
In order to deal with these manifold identities, we see a commonality between the artists In the Blink of an Eye —the utilization of performative narration. Dominican- Guatemalan American performance artist Shaun Leonardo does just this in his series of works, in which he personifies his alter ego “El Conquistador.” The artist uses his own body to convey how preconceived societal notions of masculinity and achievement have been thrust upon men. In his performances, he is able to make light of the absurd assertion that men are meant to be superheroes; the romanticizing of their bodies and disregard for their unique individual identities is a mere spectacle that is both arbitrary and irrational.
In a series of performances from 2004 to 2007, El C. fought hand-to-hand while blindfolded, sometimes with as many as 20 men. Battle Royal drew inspiration from the opening scene of Ralph Ellison’s novel The Invisible Man, in which a group of African American men are likewise blindfolded and forced to fight to the finish—the winner then being rewarded with college tuition. By facilitating and partaking in a matchup between The Invisible Man and El Conquistador (whose aesthetic resembles those of Lucha libre professional Mexican wrestlers) the artist is articulating the physical and metaphysical invisibility of men in society, combined with the complexities of hyper-masculine identity in Latino culture.
While many artists struggle to definitively portray “who they are” – an increasingly complicated task due to 21st century identity politics – Leonardo accepts that El C. is merely one of many amplification of his selfhood. Like Chachage and Mangalanayagam, the protagonist in Leonardo’s video work becomes lost in the performance. The audience forgets in fact that they are watching a piece of art at all. Like Leonardo, whose works stem from the cruelties of forced identity, Puerto Rican American artist Sofía Córdova recognizes the conditions of current societies and chooses to look beyond, to a world 1,000 years in the future. Echoes of a Tumbling Throne (Odas Al Fin De Lost Tiempos) imagines a world in which our current models for perceiving race, gender, technology, industry, and the environment have been uprooted and reconfigured.
By creating an imaginative stage upon which anything is possible, Córdova has obliterated the social boundaries that often unconsciously influence and guide our every action. Our responses to the people and experiences around us become mere reflexes, rather than pointed choices of independence. Though her collective video performances initially prompt us to look to a future where post-feminist, colored and queer realities abound, in emphasizing the differences between this distant place (in an inconceivable dimension), the artist actually forces viewers to consider the problems of their current social condition. She has created an alternative space within which diverging opinions and realities are able dialogue freely with one another—this platform has the added benefit of being non-corporeal, thereby allowing discursive participation from both fixed and non-fixed positions.
The musical score for Echoes of a Tumbling Throne is constructed in part by covers of English pop songs, translated into Spanish and performed by XUXA SANTAMARIA. XUXA is a collaborative project with musician Matt Kirkland, which originally developed from a performance piece in which Córdova appeared as her alter ego ChuCha Santamaria. The ChuCha project gained followers outside of the visual art community, thus developing into a full-fledged band. Interestingly, while both Leonardo and Córdova began their journeys of performative self-reflection from a personal lens, their shows could not have been realized without involving other performers, who may or may not have been embodying alter egos themselves. The act of such partnered creation means that in both cases reality and fiction became increasingly intertwined, thereby abstracting the conversation in ways that could allow for potentially impartial reflection.
The sartorial articulations of the artists’ works in In the Blink of an Eye recognize and challenge the power structures at play within our contemporary ethnography. The manipulation and reimagining of biographic details by each artist impacts viewers’ reading of the people and artworks before them. Using a range of media, we see the creation of varying stages, on which the exhibition’s proposed performers are able to develop a sense of self, away from the collective prejudice of their state, though often using these ever-present social constraints as a backdrop for their individual narratives.
The grouping asks you to denounce notions of fixed identities. Realize that reality is a construct. Accept that our memories and perceptions are flawed. Create new structures for narration. Take solace in knowing that our experiences are not unique, thus affirming that we are not alone. Assert your individual presence and self-worth every day, because everything could change In the Blink of an Eye.
Artwork Introductions
KWA BABA RITHI UNDUGU
It explored themes of ‘voice’ and ‘voicelessness.’ The installation consists of two objects shaped like radios, but with screens in them playing footage of human figures, with indexes and disconnected discourse. By muddying the transmission with noise from some unknown source, the artist draws attention to the difficulty of relating to the other in situations in which there is an absence of voice, a prerequisite for interlocution and the construction of discourse. Drawing upon the idea of dialogue as a fundamental of human experience, the work speaks of the voice as a symbol of personal and political expression.
Balancing Act
Across a split screen, a pair of female feet walk the coloured lines marked out on the floor of a sports hall, tracing the boundaries of the basketball or badminton courts. Shot from a low angle the viewer is never allowed to see any other part of the artist, dislocating her from the scene.
Taking inspiration from historical mapping and the origins of sports rules, Nina Mangalanayagam questions what it means to be in between, to cross physical and mental borders. The accompanying music composed by Oliver Barrett echoes the national anthems from Sweden, Denmark, Sri Lanka and Britain. They hint at Nina’s migratory history while the text reveals personal anecdotes and internal negotiations of cultural hybridity.
Balancing Act is a disorientating experience, questioning the rigidity and arbitrariness of systems we take for granted, the maps and borders, how these may be negotiated and how we might fall between.
Battle Royal
Inspired by Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, twenty professional wrestlers fought blindfolded until only one man was left standing as an intense, theatrical recreation of the book’s opening scene also entitled Battle Royal. Occupying a space between literary representation, wrestling spectacle and art performance Battle Royal was a vicious, unscripted event hearkening back to the actual fight to-the-end bouts African Americans were encouraged to enter for prize winnings during post-slavery American South; while manifesting the artist’s own investigations into masculine identity.
Echoes of a Tumbling Throne (Odas Al Fin De Los Tiempos)
A live and video performance suite imagining our world 1,000 years in the future, in which current social structures – racial and gender hierarchies, humanity’s relationship to nature, the environment vis-à-vis technological, industrial, and capitalist society – have been radically upended. The landscape of this future world – its denizens, artifacts, and culture – provides both a site for considering new realities, unfettered by the current social order, and also serves as a distorted lens aimed at our present in keeping with the tradition of dystopian science fiction.
This work speaks of the possibilities inherent in redefining ourselves in a world that – due to the conditions we’ve concocted in the anthropocene – has become aggressively hostile to our existence. The images, sound and video here constitute the various experiments towards the completion of this performance, which is currently on-going.
Artist Introductions
Rehema Chachage (b. Dar es Salaam, 1987) is a mixed media artist working mostly in video and sculptural instillations, as well as performance. She graduated in 2009 from Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town where she received a Bachelors of Arts in Fine Art degree. Themes explored in her work are very much determined by her situatedness, but the most prominent ones are ‘rootedness’ ‘gender’ and ‘identity’ explored in her earlier works from the point of view of a stranger, the outsider, the other, alien and often voiceless—a feeling gathered from the social alienation she experienced in the four years spent as a ‘cultural foreigner’ and a non-South African, black female student in a predominantly white middleclass oriented institution. Of late, her interest in these themes have steered her in the direction of exploring rituals as valuable tools for reading into social norms and tensions, including women’s identity, gender relations and subversion.
Nina Mangalanayagam is a Swedish artist and educator based in London. She recently completed a PhD by practice at the University of Westminster on a CREAM scholarship, focusing on hybridity in the visual arts, analyzing racial constructions and identity formations. Nina’s background is Tamil and Danish and she uses this diverse experience to explore the fluidity and unfixed nature of identities, how they are influenced by and impact on societies, families and environments. Her training is in photography, but her current practice and research include moving image, text and performance.
Shaun Leonardo is a Brooklyn-based artist from Queens, New York City. He is a multidisciplinary artist who uses modes of self-portraiture as a means to convey the complexities of masculine identity and question preconceived notions of manhood. The portraits take the form of cutout paintings, drawings, and sculptures, while also brought to life through performance.
Sofía Córdova was born in 1985 in Carolina, Puerto Rico. The artist began her career as a photographer, and her practice has expanded to include performance, video, and installation. Her work draws from the conventions and pictorial language of mainstream music videos, pop culture, science fiction, and literature while creating a narrative surrounding specific issues of the Caribbean diaspora and identity politics. Córdova also works with sound through interventions performed under the sound collective, XUXA SANTAMARIA. The collective, made up of herself and partner and artist Matthew Kirkland, works within both pop and experimental frameworks to create albums and performances.
Cordóva received her BFA from St. John’s University in Queens, NY in 2006, and her MFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2010. She also completed the one-year certificate program at the International Center for Photography in New York in 2006. She has performed at SFMOMA, SOMArts and Galeria De La Raza among others.
Curator Introduction
Ryan Nuckolls is a Shanghai-based art practioner, with curatorial and production experience in commercial, not-for-profit and institutional spaces. Previously, as Head of Productions at Arthub she helped realize over twenty-five exhibitions during her four years with the organization. Now, she’s working as Assistant Curator in Research and Public Education Department for the Shanghai Project, Shanghai Himalayas Museum. She has written freelance pieces for publications such as, KALEIDOSCOPE Asia, Obieg and Art World Korea. Her curatorial interests lie in the investigation of identity, complicated by our 21st century inter-continental capabilities and new media expansion.
Arthub would like to thank Ryan, Sofía, Nina, Shaun, and Rehema, for their involvement—all of whom have gone above and beyond in their efforts to realize the grouping for, “Exhibition on the Table.” Join us Wednesday, December 7 for a panel discussion at Arthub’s CREATE SPACE in Shanghai to discuss, “In the Blink of an Eye.”
