Excoriating The Wound and the World: On Khahliso’s ‘At Virtue’s Zone’

At Virtue's Zone

It is not helpless, it is not hopeless, it is just being portrayed that way. Without us paying attention, they will have nothing. Without us paying them for our attention, they will earn nothing. Without us bending over backwards to please them, they will break. Without us wanting to be just like them to be just like them to be just like them, their self image will shatter. Without us affording them the quality of anothers discomfort, there palaces will crumble. Without us conspiring and conforming with them, shelling out our cold finger cash to fund the completion of their high rise egos, there will be no more theaters of war no more cinemas of celluloid pain no more carbon copy shopping streets of fat ass consumers suffering from diminished muscle mass no more websites wiping clean our consciousness no more playgrounds for political savagery no more selling us choice when we realize that there is not much to actually choose from Without us being present they will be left to bite their fingernails down to the cuticles. Without us attending their feast they will still continue to be cannibals but will have less meat to pick off the bone. Without us they, the providers of helplessness and givers of hopelessness will be confronted by a new found silence one where the only sound to be heard will be that of their own heavy labored breathing alone and without us.

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Joshua Baumgarten 

Re(Thinking) Artistic Praxis - NEW Imagineers (Jalal Toufic)

 

Jalal Toufic in (Vampires), proposes that death is not a future event but a condition in which we already exist while physically alive. He also asserts that we constantly receive signals from versions of ourselves dwelling in the realm of the undead.

Politics, religion, social phenomena, colonialism and its irrevocable gestures, incisions that transform man without the possibility of reversal, and the instincts that arise from them, continue to inspire artistic practices of many artists of colour. 

This seems more attuned to what Jalal Toufic calls “the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster,” when grief and care of many beings who have crossed the boundary between life and death have taken a spiritual dynamic and reverence.

What then, is death when there are the un-dead?

Is death a state of continuous life at a level of decay, an inversion towards the negative, a way of undoing the orchestrated linearity of being?