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70 body of land Awuor Onyango and ekai Machache 12 June – 1 August Street Level Photoworks Like many exhibitions on view this summer, Body of Land waited a long time to be unveiled – the works it comprises were produced chiefly in 2019. Part of Glasgow International 2021, originally scheduled in April 2020, the show is the result of a 2018 Fòcas Scotland collaborative project between Nairobi-based Kenyan artist and writer Awuor Onyango and Sekai Machache, artist and curator of Zimbabwean descent, based in Dundee. While the British Council-funded show is a result of collaboration undertaken during residencies in Glasgow (at Street Level Photoworks) and Nairobi (at the Kuona Trust), each artist presents their work in a separate gallery at Street Level. The visitor’s eye is bound to be summoned by the indigos of Onyango’s heavily manipulated photographic portraits, made still more beckoning by the rich patterns of textiles worn by the sitters, as well as their glittery body paint and celestial haloes adorning their warmly lit bodies. Although this is a series, collectively entitled Memorituals (2019), and although all women photographed by Onyango are represented within a similar schema, every single portrait allows the individuality and unique sensibility of the subject not just to shine through but, ultimately, to shape the image. This stems from the collaborative process on which Onyango expressly insists: each portrait is a fruit of their conversations with the subject, and each is intended as a vehicle for selfexploration. Onyango performs rituals of memory inspired by Luo spirituality to help women they work with navigate their ancestral roots and their present-day identity as members of the African diaspora living in Glasgow. Sara, for example, wears an evil eye talisman on her forehead, while the lavishly ornamented fabric in which she is wrapped presents itself as ‘made in Egypt’. Her slightly turned head and her sidelong gaze suggest she reveals only that which she wishes to the viewer – it is this combination of creative agency and freedom to negotiate one’s identity with the camera lens that Onyango grants her subjects-collaborators. The woman-shaped vase Sara is pictured holding, vaguely reminiscent of vessels made in Egypt some 1,500 years BC, asserts the role of the photograph as a means of moulding the subject’s representation. Indeed, Onyango has devoted their practice to reclaiming visibility and voice for women historically subjected to the cruelly silencing ethnographic gaze, so often transmitted by the camera. Nina II, from the series Memoritual, Awuor Onyango Memoritual displays a wide array of intentional distortions, blurs and afterimages, countering the stillness of the sitter’s pose, as if to convey diasporic movement between ancestral past rooted in Africa and everyday life in contemporary Scotland. The surface play Onyango engages, both by portraying shimmering body paint and intricate ornament and by manipulating the ensuing image, evokes Krista Thompson’s theorisation of contemporary African diasporic lens-based practices as foregrounding the surface to forge a representational space for figuring black subjects. Onyango’s investment in surfaces is corroborated by the inclusion of a patterned fabric installation as a framing device, or perhaps a conclusion, of her portion of the show. The use of fabric as both a frame for photographs and their recurring motif is echoed in Machache’s section of the exhibition. Entering the gallery, viewers pass under a heavy, draped red curtain, tied with a red braid which some may recognise from Machache’s contribution to the
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exhibitions 71 Installation view of The III Aspects Zamani (The White Aspect), Sekai Machache 2018 edition of Glasgow International – then, it served simultaneously as a photographic motif and a performance device. The symbolic role of woven hair as an ancestral link crossing spatiotemporal lines, known from the work of the Cuban artist María Magdalena CamposPons among others, is perhaps the most express response to the subject of the present exhibition. The symbolic resonance of Machache’s photographs is enriched further by her deployment of colour. Invoking spiritual readings of red, black and white – one could think of their functions in funerary rites in Ghana, for instance – a series of newly presented photographic prints is divided into three colour aspects. The photographs in the Red Aspect triptych (2019) resemble ballet snapshots, centring on the energy of a moving body, which is both painted and dressed in red, with the red braid woven into the model’s hair. In the singular Black Aspect (2019), the figure can hardly be seen, the body being painted black and plunged into darkness. It is only the reflectiveness of the darkened skin that reveals the model’s presence. Indeed, these and other photographs in Machache’s part of the show, oscillate between presence and absence of the figure. Although the model in White Aspect (2019) is depicted in high contrast – covered in white powder and wrapped in a white sheet against a black background – her presence in the gallery is cast into doubt, as the photograph is printed on translucent fabric and hung against the gallery window. If anything, it is the impression of constant move- A Silent Gifting II (with Grace Mark), from Ritual Manifestations, Sekai Machache ment between presence and disappearance, ancestral memory and contemporary rituals, dream and reality, that provides a thematic link between Onyango’s and Machache’s works in the exhibition. Otherwise – their collaboration notwithstanding – the two artists have produced very different photographs. Whereas Onyango uses her portraits to provide their subjects with a platform for construction and communication of the self, the women photographed by Machache operate as vessels for spiritual powers and assume abstract roles the artist encountered in her dream. Onyango brings their sitters up close, fusing skin with image surface, while Machache’s subjects never really figure properly, evanescent and fading into darkness. It almost seems that these are two separate shows. Yet, beyond obvious similarities such as the framing textile installations and the shared communities the two artists engage (the women photographed by Onyango are members of the Yon Afro collective founded by Machache), Body of Land brings together divergent anti-monolithic approaches to exploring women’s African diasporic identities, with all their complexities and fluctuations. — Martyna Majewska

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exhibitions

71

Installation view of The III Aspects Zamani (The White Aspect), Sekai Machache

2018 edition of Glasgow International – then, it served simultaneously as a photographic motif and a performance device. The symbolic role of woven hair as an ancestral link crossing spatiotemporal lines, known from the work of the Cuban artist María Magdalena CamposPons among others, is perhaps the most express response to the subject of the present exhibition. The symbolic resonance of Machache’s photographs is enriched further by her deployment of colour. Invoking spiritual readings of red, black and white – one could think of their functions in funerary rites in Ghana, for instance – a series of newly presented photographic prints is divided into three colour aspects. The photographs in the Red Aspect triptych (2019) resemble ballet snapshots, centring on the energy of a moving body, which is both painted and dressed in red, with the red braid woven into the model’s hair. In the singular Black Aspect (2019), the figure can hardly be seen, the body being painted black and plunged into darkness. It is only the reflectiveness of the darkened skin that reveals the model’s presence. Indeed, these and other photographs in Machache’s part of the show, oscillate between presence and absence of the figure. Although the model in White Aspect (2019) is depicted in high contrast – covered in white powder and wrapped in a white sheet against a black background – her presence in the gallery is cast into doubt, as the photograph is printed on translucent fabric and hung against the gallery window. If anything, it is the impression of constant move-

A Silent Gifting II (with Grace Mark), from Ritual Manifestations, Sekai Machache ment between presence and disappearance, ancestral memory and contemporary rituals, dream and reality, that provides a thematic link between Onyango’s and Machache’s works in the exhibition. Otherwise – their collaboration notwithstanding – the two artists have produced very different photographs. Whereas Onyango uses her portraits to provide their subjects with a platform for construction and communication of the self, the women photographed by Machache operate as vessels for spiritual powers and assume abstract roles the artist encountered in her dream. Onyango brings their sitters up close, fusing skin with image surface, while Machache’s subjects never really figure properly, evanescent and fading into darkness. It almost seems that these are two separate shows. Yet, beyond obvious similarities such as the framing textile installations and the shared communities the two artists engage (the women photographed by Onyango are members of the Yon Afro collective founded by Machache), Body of Land brings together divergent anti-monolithic approaches to exploring women’s African diasporic identities, with all their complexities and fluctuations.

— Martyna Majewska

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