joseph scissorhands: In the Black Fantastic

Lina Iris Viktor - Eleventh, 2018

"I am black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos." - Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask 1952

"In the Black Fantastic is the first major exhibition to gather together artists from the African diaspora who embrace myth and science fiction as a way to address racial injustice and explore alternative realities. The Black Fantastic doesn't describe a movement or a rigid category so much as a way of seeing shared by artists who grapple with the racial inequities of contemporary society by conjuring new narratives of Black possibility. Beyond visual art, it encompasses many other works, from the spectacular imagery of Beyonce's Lemonade and the movie Black Panther to the enthralling novels of Toni Morrison and Octavia Butler. In all these instances, we see Black culture at its most wildly imaginative and artistically ambitious. The Black fantastic is what freedom looks like". - Ekow Eshun.

I liked the way in which this exhibition actually starts outside the gallery spaces, in the street, among the concrete walkways of the Southbank complex, with the assertion writ large billboard-style that - "There are Black people in the future". This statement is affirmed inside the Hayward Gallery with the exhibiting 11 Black artists displaying works rooted in their own Afrofuturistic visions. Each artist has quite sensibly been assigned their own gallery space to evoke new worlds, and realise and display their artistic visions with interesting and varied results. Despite the artists separate exhibition spaces the artists and artworks relate to one another sharing a similar aesthetic, and at times techniques and materials which makes for a cohesive exhibition and interesting dialogues between the artworks. Personal highlights were Nick Cave's sculptural Soundsuits, Lina Iris Viktor's regal female portraits, Wangechi Mutu's short film - The End of Everything, as well as Hew Locke's wonderfully decorous horsemen, like nomadic Magi journeying through an apocalyptic landscape. We have had strong exhibitions by individual black artists in the past here and here, but I had called for a strong group exhibition of solely black artists for awhile in London after seeing the Talisman in the Age of Difference exhibition at Stephen Friedman which was really inspirational, but needed to be expanded and shown in a bigger space. Somerset House's black showcase - Get Up, Stand Up Now, in 2019 was messy and chaotically curated, and didn't show the artists work in its best light. In the Black Fantastic though shows off the artists works perfectly, having been beautifully curated by Ekow Eshun. It is the group show by black artists I have wanted to see, and is easily one of the best exhibitions visited this year.

Nick Cave