Submitting to the Cry from the Abyss: Opacity, Exorbitance, and a Brief Exercise in the Erotics of Decipherment | Jupiter

Published on the occasion of Jupiter Magazine’s latest issue, which explores the notion of the diss track (as a means to reinvigorate not-always-positive black criticism of black art), this text tarries with the now over-applied concept of opacity (à la Edouard Glissant) in black, decolonial aesthetics and curatorial frameworks. Rather than embody the polemical form, the text honours the spirit of Glissant’s critique, inhabiting an oblique, ekphrastic mode of decipherment to articulate various textures of visual, conceptual and linguistic non-transparency materialised in artworks by Roy DeCarava, Diedrick Brackens, Rahima Gambo, Ima-Abasi Okon, and Kameelah Janan Rasheed. A constellation of artists and theorists are in turn incorporated in a collage-like manner into the text to perform this exercise.

Image: Ima-Abasi Okon, Infinite Slippage: nonRepugnant Insolvencies T!-a!-r!-r!-y!-i!-n!-g! as Hand Claps of M’s Hard’Loved’Flesh [I’M irreducibly-undone because] —Quantum Leanage-Complex-Dub (2019) Installation view, Chisenhale Gallery, 2019. Photo by author.