Living with Ghosts | Wallach Art Gallery, New York
The first iteration of my ongoing curatorial project, Living with Ghosts, was held at the Wallach Art Gallery in New York from March 26-April 10, 2022.
Living with Ghosts initiates an exploration into the ways the unresolved traumas of Africa’s colonial past and its unfulfilled project of decolonisation continue to haunt the global present. The exhibition critically addresses the ghosts, spirits, and phantoms that abound in the modern calamities of African postcolonial history. These are the apparitions, the unseen but deeply felt forces – thus at once visible and invisible, material and immaterial – that continually disturb individual and collective relations within the African postcolony and throughout its diaspora, leaving behind traces in subjectivities, landscapes, architecture, and archival materials. Conceiving of this notion of “hauntology” along several axes, from the spatial and the temporal, to the psychological and the spiritual, Living with Ghosts centres contemporary art practice in considerations of the spectral given the phenomenon’s crucial yet ambiguous relation to categories of presence and absence.
Living with Ghosts returns to Jacques Derrida’s provocation in his text, Specters of Marx – one that inspires this exhibition’s title – on how we might live with these ghosts, rather than eradicate them. Moving beyond the stultification of trauma, this exhibition frames haunting (and its attendant melancholic affects) as that which impels us to “to live otherwise and better.” This is to say that the specter, which bears the affective weight of arrested possibilities and unfulfilled promises, leads us to demand and bring about alternative and more just African futures.
The exhibition comprised three overlapping acts, including an intimate gallery display, an art-film screening program, and a live virtual lecture series.
Featuring artworks, films, and lectures by John Akomfrah, Kader Attia, Zarina Bhimji, Filipa César, T.J. Demos, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Onyeka Igwe, Bouchra Khalili, Serubiri Moses, Abraham Oghobase, and Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa.
ACT I
The gallery display included works by Bouchra Khalili, Abraham Oghobase, and Rotimi Fani-Kayode. Crucial to the spatial realisation of this act was the installation of two translucent scrim walls.
ACT II
Thinking beyond the gallery as the primary venue for encountering exhibitions, the first iteration of Living with Ghosts screened a selection of six single-channel artworks over the course of an afternoon. These screenings formed a constitutive segment of the exhibition, and in their collective terms of viewership, aimed to echo the poetic-political aspirations of Third Cinema – a revolutionary cinematic movement arising in Asia, Africa, and Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s that sought to expand the decolonial imagination amongst its audiences. All the selected works, which speak to multiple regions within and outside the African continent, thematise and materialise notions of ghostliness through audiovisual and discursive references to memory, trauma, archives, architecture, and landscapes. Featuring works by Kader Attia, Filipa César, Onyeka Igwe, Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, Zarina Bhimji, and John Akomfrah.
Screening Schedule
1:30 PM
Reflecting Memory, 2016
Kader Attia
45 minutes, 56 seconds
2:30 PM
The Embassy, 2011
Filipa César
37 minutes, 6 seconds
a so-called archive, 2020
Onyeka Igwe
2020, 19 minutes, 40 seconds
Promised Lands, 2015 - 2018
Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa
20 minutes
Jangbar, 2015
Zarina Bhimji
26 minutes, 37 seconds
4:30 PM
The Nine Muses, 2011
John Akomfrah
94 minutes
ACT III
This act consisted of two live virtual lectures given by T.J. Demos and Serubiri Moses.
T.J. Demos “Return to the Postcolony: Spectrality in the 21st Century”
Art historian T. J. Demos, reflects on his groundbreaking study, Return to the Postcolony: Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art, released nearly a decade ago in 2013. A major inspiration for Living with Ghosts, Demos's book closely examines a range of post-documentary photographic and film-based practices that materialise the lingering absences of European colonial specters in postcolonial Africa. Noting how not just Africa, but the global order, continues to be haunted by these colonial specters, Demos discusses the ongoing relevance of spectrality in contemporary art during these times of intensified global precarity.
Serubiri Moses “The Subjunctive Form(s) of Fani-Kayode”
This lecture is a series of theses and propositions on the work of Rotimi Fani-Kayode in relation to the subjunctive form of a potential or future being in his art. The lecture departs from Fani-Kayode’s photograph of Denis Carney and Essex Hemphill (1987) that opens his book Black Male/White Male (1988), as well as Philip (1987-1988) included in the same volume, and examines ideas of birth, death, future creation and future being following the subjunctive form in the thinking of art historian Moyo Okediji. The lecture locates the subjunctive form in Fani-Kayode comparatively with its use in modernist poet Christopher Okigbo. Okigbo’s “the forms were formed after our forming” reveal the same probabilities that appear in Fani-Kayode’s art.
