Art In (COLOUR)

Much of history left profound emotional scars on the historicity of many cultures and any research on African values, creativity and ancestral practices aligns with a desire to reinvent the misconception and conservative notion that people of colour lack the spiritual acumen to conceive and comprehend art.

The common narrative has been that sites of memory such as museums should only be the preserve of white supremacist history that is both personal to many white and universally resonant with other projects of colonial displacement of various people of the land.

It become essential for any thinker to begin probing the boundaries between the mundane and the mystical as created by the artefacts in these places, the images, the antiquated furnishings and models clad in garments thought to reimagine the past.

Instead of indulging nostalgia, many artists of colour endeavour to reactivate marginalized cultural memories, backdropped by a vision of "ancestrality”, continually navigating a plethora of coaxed memories, others replicated and censored by veneers of self-illusory joys.

This act of artistically re-imagining sites of memory is a mode of inquiry into the intersection between physical and psychological impacts of such sites; a form of séance in relation to how spiritualism permeates art as a tool that captures times and spaces.

Falsifications of historical events and the ways in which identities of black people have been staged over time are falling apart at the seams however, and this mirrors how our silences are instruments and sites of racial anxiety which must be destabilised by confrontations, academic or artistic.

This cultural annexations of the past have left dissent perspectives on the value of monuments and other colonial sites of the oppressor’s visions of the past, yet it remains upon the shoulders of artists to examine how colonialism has shaped the ways museums, archives and other institutions of knowledge are perceived and understood, revealing the immaterial (and lack of material evidence of the colonised) scars imposed by systemic violence.

Debates surrounding the restitution of cultural heritage taken during colonial periods have intensified, accompanied by a growing recognition of persistent social injustices in society, yet while academics and museum professionals have led much of the discussion, artists  must play a role in expanding conversations around decoloniality, restitution, and reparative justice. 

In a time when traditional values are being lost under the pressure of consumerism; class, ethnicity, gender and many other factors that all too often result in social exclusion emerge. Those subjected to intersecting forms of discrimination such as racism, colonial trauma and brutality, perceive the role of colonial monuments, museums and their artefacts as entrenching memories of oppression, where blackness is confronted on all side by erasure.

Concerned with these entrenched hierarchies and their invisible role in shaping the world around us, artists of colour continue to forge connections between non-Western cultures and erased cultures of colonised people, often in ways that challenge conventional delineations and the Eurocentric gaze.

These artists provide examinations of the psychic conflict which results from the desire to both belong to and resist a society which denies blackness even as it affirms its inferiority, exploring boundaries between environment, politics and the personal which are constantly shifting.

Their work often leans toward forms of reprieve, towards possibilities of uplift after downfall, often in the context of the historic and ongoing oppression of Black people and the politics of their representation at the centre of global monoculture. 

Their work even dares to examine propensities for self-hate among people of colour (the oppressed), their self-destructive habits, and other patterns of social activity to analyse the nature of individual personalities. 

Yet, this form of solidarity with the oppressed is increasingly corroded by discriminatory practices and rhetoric that promote western monoculture, and only dissent and the generative potential of collective resistance can be the sole mode of confronting our collective mis-representations as obscured identities.

Often, these artists turn to atmospheres and residues that social practices leave behind; probing what persists in shadow, where light and darkness intertwine with notions of both individual and collective memory.

Like a poet reciting their words, the act of reading is a declarative gesture of presence, reclaiming the notion of memory as a dissident mode to critique norms of memory, conveying a sense of both precariousness and vulnerability, experimentation and ingenuity.

And contending with memory’s resistance to categorization, artists, writers and poets of colour often invoke alternate temporalities, amplifying their creatively transgressive voices and fostering critical conversations around identity and dissent.

Theirs is a sensitive attunement to histories that remain excluded from official narratives, but that are contained and conveyed by nature, buildings, and landscapes and gravesites where unnamed ancestors are buried. Through words and other crafted methodologies of reflecting on memory, artists often have to summon histories of colonial resistance,

Vandalising the status quo and its foundations. Yet these acts of ruination constitute a quiet defiance, a deep confidence in the poetics of lived experience, deeply rooted in the history of the land and those to whom they belong.

What counts as truth as espoused by science, for instance? Science is not a conclusive system but a subjective construction—a temporary attempt to impose order on something that ultimately remains unknowable.

But in what ways can art expand and safeguard the language of truth and the process of truth-telling in an era of falsifications and non-truths?

To safeguard this reverence of truth as a spiritual force, fostering psychological and physical healing simply through presence and exposure, artist use various rituals, resurrecting diverse cultural matrices shaped by resistance and creativity, narratives that are languorous, humorous and somewhat melancholic.

The fault line between what we think we know and what eludes our understanding, tests our perception and dismantles its boundaries, and it is precisely in not knowing that the imagination begins.

Often reworking popular formats into speculative, allegorical forms, the artist new trajectory is now towards investigating how built environments embody histories of forced migration and displacement and exploring colonial intent and possibilities for infrastructures of knowledge that evolved into falsities that haunt todays rediscovered truths.

And as the global discourse around reparations maintains a negotiation between museums and other governmental bodies and communities for the return of cultural objects, artists question the intent of mechanisms of contemporary preservation. Are museums best places for the luted heritage of victims of colonial plunder?

Although there have been several instances of successful returns made possible by these inter-institutional collaborations, there remains a vast array of valid and legitimate criticisms of their shortcomings in addressing the wishes of affected communities, who are often left in the margins. 

Museums have long been recognised as custodians of imperial legacies, eliciting sustained critique and repeated calls for their deconstruction. Attempts to address these entangled and often contested pasts have generated both significant critique and meaningful collaboration. 

The dissident artists seeks to critically engage with this paradox, posing the question of what further strategies and frameworks might be developed to advance the transformative potential of museums in the present.

Crucially, these disparate creative practitioners take a comprehensive and obsessive questioning of why there aren’t any architecturally resilient infrastructure created for intellectual and cultural heritage of people of African descent?

Colonial artists produced some of the earliest depictions of Indigenous and enslaved people of Southern Africa —idealised scenes that obscure the violence of colonialism. They also painted elaborate hunting still lifes and portraits of patrons whose fortunes derived from imperial trade and slavery, which populate many museum walls, exposing the operations of the white gaze.

And as whiteness often seems a reactionary society strongly influenced by the church and the fascist past rooted in white supremacy, it begs one to confront the dissolution of this myth at all its enclaves; from the monumental churches and museums, to the states littered across landscapes of usurped lands.

But to prove the non-durability and bad craftsmanship that goes into projects that purport to commemorate collective memories of black folk, it has also become essential to investigate these meagre spaces in contrast to the vandalised monuments erected under the auspices of the colonialist historian and religionists.

For the dissent artists confronting dissonant heritage, a number of pivotal questions should be addressed to reimagine the realities of division and colonial oppression from the lens of conquest, as the past remains a contested space where we can exist not as conquerors or observers, but as participants in an ongoing dialogue of meaning. 

But to sense anew the pulse of the present that flows through every living thing, dissident art should transform into an agent of self-definition and resistance, it must transform personal longing into a public cultural expression; a moment suspended between past and possibility, where the act of creation and recreation mean the broken bits of an illusive past and its truths.

And in order to respond with these colonial artefacts and images from our own archives as people of colour is a collective project of confrontation, confronting erasure and censure, creating a space of resonance within the past through the present, where the past and future exist in communion with the deep rhythms of the possible.

It is a confrontation of grief that often forces art to return to the traces left behind by what is lost, striving to combine empathy with the impossible. This creative ritual is a critical process of mourning that embraces both the personal and collective dimensions of traumatic experiences, akin a family archive and the collective dimension of a shared heritage.

***