Curatorial ProjectsKJ Abudu

Living with Ghosts | Pace Gallery, London

Curatorial ProjectsKJ Abudu
Living with Ghosts | Pace Gallery, London

The second iteration of Living with Ghosts was held at Pace Gallery, London, from July 8 - August 5, 2022.

Living With Ghosts is an expanded iteration of Abudu’s ongoing exhibition project, first staged at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University in New York. Each of the artists included in the exhibition are united by their formal, historiographic, and poetic interrogations of the enduring power structures birthed by the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, and imperialism, and equally consider the myriad resistances and refusals formed in response to these very structures. Living With Ghosts at once evokes the structural continuities of these African colonial histories into the present day, while also offering a transformative space for envisioning alternative and more just decolonial futures.

Spanning a diverse array of media, from video and installation to works on paper and sculpture, Living With Ghosts features work by Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Torkwase Dyson, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Bouchra Khalili, Abraham Oghobase, Cameron Rowland, and Tako Taal. Taking inspiration from Achille Mbembe’s theorising on the African “postcolony,” Jacques Derrida’s notion of “hauntology,” and Sylvia Wynter’s work on the “coloniality of being,” Living with Ghosts critically attends to the ghosts, spirits, and phantoms that abound in the modern calamities of Africa’s historical becoming, from the 15th century to the present day.

These “ghosts” are the unseen but deeply felt forces – at once dead and alive, visible and invisible, past and present, future and past – that continually disturb individual and collective relations within the African postcolony and throughout the world, leaving behind traces in archival materials, architecture, landscapes, and subjectivities. Heeding Derrida’s provocation in Specters of Marx (1994), as well as insights from various African indigenous thought systems, this exhibition foregrounds the ethical and political urgency of feeding, communing, and living with these ghosts rather than disavowing, burying, or exorcising them.

By centering contemporary art practice in spectral considerations of violent pasts that continue to linger and of liberatory futures that continue to haunt, Abudu frames the exhibition’s concepts along several axes, from the spatial and the temporal, to the psychological and the spiritual.

Living With Ghosts also includes a lecture series and a reader publication (more below), both of which provide complementary critical perspectives on the exhibition’s overarching concerns with coloniality, decoloniality, and hauntology.

ACT I

The gallery display included works by Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Torkwase Dyson, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Bouchra Khalili, Abraham Oghobase, Cameron Rowland, and Tako Taal.

The accompanying curatorial essay for this act can be found here. Below is a short excerpt:

“While the artworks presented in these galleries evidence distinct methodologies, sensibilities, and art historical genealogies, they all share an ethical and political commitment aimed towards inciting an anticolonial politics of memory. By working with and through unresolved pasts and elapsed futures, these artworks gather and in turn release specters in the world, with the hope that these specters haunt those that encounter them. In being haunted, we are forced to acknowledge the absent-presences of ghosts in everyday life. Such an acknowledgment –speaking of, speaking to, and living with these ghosts – inaugurates a crucial movement away from the blinded comforts of historical amnesia and orients us toward the possibility of truly reckoning with “past” colonial injustices (many of which are committed in seemingly far-away places) and the ways in which these injustices continually structure our present. Further, in being haunted through our affective encounters with these ghosts, we are opened up to the possibility of being possessed by the desirous visions they convey, of just, decolonial futures that were never realized and which we are now tasked with the responsibility of bringing about.”

Checklist:

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc 
Foreword to Guns for Banta, 2011 
Mixed Media: Synchronised slide show transferred to HD, 25 minutes, 40 seconds; Poster, 120 cm × 160 cm
Courtesy of the artist

Dineo Seshee Bopape
Lerole: footnotes (the struggle of memory against forgetting), 2018
Mixed media
Variable dimensions
Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery

Nolan Oswald Dennis 
biko.cabral (time/place), 2020 
Thermal printer, microcontroller, shelf
Variable dimensions 
Courtesy of the artist and Goodman Gallery

Torkwase Dyson
Black World Building, (Hypershape), 2022
Wood, graphite, acrylic
111.8 cm × 112.4 cm × 3.8 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery

Torkwase Dyson
Symbolic Geography #1 (Hypershape), 2022
Wood, graphite, acrylic, glass
49.5 cm × 58.4 cm × 8.9 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery

Torkwase Dyson 
Enclosure/Encounter – Study #4 (Hypershape), 2022 
Graphite and pen on paper 
29.2 cm × 41.9 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery

Torkwase Dyson 
Enclosure/Encounter – Study #5 (Hypershape), 2022 
Graphite and pen on paper 
29.2 cm × 41.9 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery

Rotimi Fani-Kayode 
Sonponnoi, 1987 
Hand printed gelatin-silver print from the original negative 
61 x 50.8 cm
Courtesy of The Walther Collection and Autograph ABP, London

Rotimi Fani-Kayode 
Under the Surplice, 1989 
Hand printed gelatin-silver print from the original negative 
61 x 50.8 cm
Courtesy of The Walther Collection and Autograph ABP, London

Rotimi Fani-Kayode 
Nothing to Lose VII (Bodies of Experience), 1989/2021 
C-type archival print 
121.9 cm × 121.9 cm
Courtesy of Hales Gallery, London and New York; and Autograph, London

Rotimi Fani-Kayode 
Nothing to Lose IX (Bodies of Experience), 1989/2021 
C-type archival print
121.9 cm × 121.9 cm
Courtesy of Hales Gallery, London and New York; and Autograph, London

Bouchra Khalili 
Foreign Office, 2015 
Mixed media: single-channel digital film, 22 minutes, 6 seconds; 15 digital prints on paper; silkscreen print on paper
Courtesy of the artist and Mor Charpentier, Paris  

Abraham Oghobase 
Constructed Realities, 2022 
Wood, inkjet on fibre paper, inkjet on silk organza
130.6 cm x 373.5 cm x 226 cm (depth variable)
Courtesy of the artist

Tako Taal 
I fa mo ketta (It’s been a long time), 2017 
HD Video, no sound 
9 minutes, 27 seconds 
Courtesy of the artist

Tako Taal 
Absence/Baduja (the state of being away, the condition of being related), 2021 
Watercolour on paper, imitation leather, gold chain, seashell 
34 cm × 34 cm × 3.5 cm
Courtesy of the artist

Cameron Rowland 
Mooring, 2020 
AB-001-013 

William Rathbone and Sons was a timber merchant company founded in Liverpool in 1746. “[T]he foundation of the Rathbone fortune and business was built on the Africa slave trade.”[1] During the 18th century, they imported timber felled and milled by slaves in the West Indies and operated a number of trading ships that sailed to West Indian colonies as well as the Southern States of America.[2] Rathbone and Sons’ yard occupied a large portion of the Liverpool South Docks.[3] Rathbone and Sons supplied timber for slave ship builders in Liverpool until at least 1783.[4] These ships carried enslaved black people who were sold in the West Indies and in British North America. Ships built in Liverpool also carried the slaves who were sold on Negro Row at the Liverpool South Docks.[5]

Liverpool built the world’s first wet dock in 1716, allowing cargo ships to dock directly at the port. By 1796, Liverpool had built 28 acres of docks.

Liverpool’s proximity to Ireland also not only facilitated a profitable trade, but provided a relatively safer route that allowed Liverpool ships less chance to be captured by French privateers. Additionally, the copper and brass manufactures in Lancashire and Ireland allowed for local companies that manufactured African trade goods such as manillas to carry on a prosperous export trade, further giving Liverpool a competitive edge. The relationships forged with nearby merchants not only helped secure trade goods, but also valuable credit terms.[6]

In 1784, Rathbone and Sons imported the first consignment of raw cotton to England from the United States.[7] From this point, they became stated abolitionists and free trade advocates.[8] The abolition of the “West Indian monopoly” on the import of goods to the British Isles would allow for the expansion of U.S. cotton trading. Liverpool became the primary port of 19th-century cotton importation to England. Rathbone and Sons imported American cotton to Liverpool through the American Civil War.[9] The company continues to operate as the investment and wealth management firm Rathbone Brothers Plc.

The mooring at the Albert Dock: AB-001-013 is on the former location of the Rathbone warehouse.

This mooring has been rented for the purpose of not being used. It continues to be rented for this purpose indefinitely.

Courtesy of the artist and Maxwell Graham/Essex Street, New York

[1] Jehanne Wake, Kleinwort Benson: The History of Two Families in Banking (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 15.

[2] Wake, 16.

[3] Adam Bowett, “The Jamaica Trade: Gillow and the Use of Mahogany in the Eighteenth Century,” Regional Furniture 12 (1998): 22.

[4] Wake, 16.

[5] Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 2nd ed. (1944; repr. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 52.

[6] Katie McDade, “Liverpool Slave Merchant Entrepreneurial Networks, 1725–1807,” Business History 53, no. 7 (2011): 1094.

[7] Eleanor F. Rathbone, William Rathbone: A Memoir (London: Macmillan and Co. Limited, 1905), 11.

[8] Wake, 15, 31.

[9] Sheila Marriner, “Rathbones’ Trading Activities in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century,” Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire & Cheshire 108 (1956): 118.

ACT II

The second act consisted of three lectures:

An outdoor sonic lecture by Hannah Catherine Jones in Hannover Square

A virtual lecture by Sabelo J. Ndlovu Gatsheni, “Colonialism and its Afterlives”

A performance video-lecture by manuel arturo abreu

ACT III

The third act is the publication, Living with Ghosts: A Reader.

The reader, as the exhibition’s residual afterlife, further expands on the exhibition’s thematics through a combination of philosophical, historical, and literary approaches. Included are reprinted texts by thinkers such as Achille Mbembe, Avery F. Gordon, C.L.R. James, Jacques Derrida, Walter D. Mignolo, and Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni as well as newly commissioned texts by Adjoa Armah, Joshua Segun-Lean, Emmanuel Iduma (on the work of Abraham Oghobase), and myself (on the work of Black Audio Film Collective and John Akomfrah). Also featured is an in-depth conversation between artist Bouchra Khalili and myself.

The introduction to the reader can be viewed here.