Art practice as resistance, celebration, telling, showing, expressing and living otherwise.
"Having one’s identity dismantled, marginalized and regulated to non-human status demands action. This led me to critically engage image-making in art history and pop-culture, and ultimately grapple with whatever power and authority these images have over the female figure". Artist Deborah Roberts.
When we consider the significance of recognition, and ponder how art offers a site where recognition is also possible, we extend the sites where practices of recognition may occur. We ask our clients and ourselves - where else do I feel recognised, given back to myself, received, embraced? How does art address some of that need and experience?
BETWEEN THEM
80 x 61 in Mixed Media Collage on Paper
2019
From the ICA website: In this work, DJ Lynnée Denise offers a layered audio-visual response to the 1986 Guardian talk with Toni Morrison at the ICA. The visual essay brings together intimate reflections and propositions framed by Morrison’s 1992 novel Jazz. DJ Lynnée Denise explores the Black Atlantic sound, visuals and craft to render the life worlds behind Morrison’s oeuvre visible. Morrison’s writing is expanded into a visual vocabulary in which transatlantic conversations and new connections emerge. A praxis in translation. Claudia Jones. Eartha Kitt. Fannie Lou Hamer. Lorraine Hansberry. Winnie Mandela. Sarah Vaughn. Lady G. Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Elizabeth Cotton. Augusta Savage. Judy Mowatt. DJ Lynnée Denise creates what Louis Chude Sokei calls a diasporic “echo chamber” of Black women’s craft animated by the bricolage of drum and bass in which the sonic influences of Black Britain and Black America are an electronic undercurrent. The drum machine mixed with Morrison’s gestures, mannerisms, and reading speak to how Morrison’s is experienced through a multi-sensory engagement. In Morrison’s interview with A.S. Byatt, she references the important inspiration of paintings in her writing practice and the relationship between musicians and their audience. In this work, a visual remixing of worlds happens in which Black girls jumping rope, everyday live in Harlem, the market space in Brixton are the aesthetics to Morrison’s writing or in her words “the access to the scene”. In DJ Lynnée Denise’s rendering, “the scene” is about Black wayward diasporic women whose craft is read through astrology, the politics of refusal and the secrets of Black social life.
To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Dionne Brand's "A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging", Arthur Jafa presents AGHDRA an excerpt from an upcoming film. Presented in conversation with Rinaldo Walcott.