Liberation and Futurity

 

Skunder Bohossain Nightflight of Dread and Delight  1964 

Oil on Canvas with collage 

5x5 ½ ft

 

Bohossain’s Nightflight, also referred to sometimes as Juju’s flight of Delight and Terror immediately captured me. I think it is the blurring of edges, the multiplicity of forms in the aesthetics, and the necessity to figure out different layers of structures formed from this superimpositions that appealed to me. Presented in The Short Century exhibition, this                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          work by the Ethiopian born and London-educated artist who eventually settled in the United states 10 years in 1972, speaks to the logics of Pan-Africanist intellectual thought and ideas of liberation pertinent at the time. Where many African countries that at this point existed under European colonial rule were beginning to demand their freedom to govern themselves. This allusion to Juju  as a substitute word here used for African philosophy and as embodied through this cosmological aesthetic imagines liberation through an Afro-centric philosophical lens, and the drawing on African cosmological epistemologies through which to envision futurity for incoming independent countries across the continent. Furthermore, the aesthetic synthesis of this ideology with surrealist aesthetics also employs a sort of possibility and framing for imagination through the allusion to these animal figures (cat and owl) envisioned as cosmological beings formed through geometric patterns.

 

Elizabeth Catlett Gossip  2005, Print.

The ways in which Gossip might read as an injunction toward ideas of futurity and liberation speak to some sad but true realities for communities of Black women. The demonisation of Black women’s “gossiping” and discussion as a mode to curtail discourse, coming together and proposing futures continues to prevail in dominant popular culture. The stereotype of Black womens’ exuberance, loudness and therefore discordance with polite society deters the practice of sharing, solace and moreover productivity in these moments that are often confined to the private sphere. The presentation of two Black women, holding hands, intent on understanding one another through their intense gazes toward one another, completely ignoring the observer, gives the impression of a look in at a private moment, but also dismisses the voyeur’s gaze in a powerful reclamation of “gossiping”. Their poised body language, turned in communion to eachother, disregarding the onlooker, embodies a comfort freedom to ignore the outside perspective, left in peace to gossip, theorize, laugh, cry, connect, disagree, and partake in discourse without fear is the purview of futurity and liberation I read in this work.