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Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021
Zanele Muholi, Phaphama, at Cassilhaus, North Carolina, 2016, installation view ‘Somnyama Ngonyama’, Queen’s University Belfast quadrangle, 2021; photograph by Simon Mills, courtesy the Naughton Gallery.
THE NAUGHTON GALLERY, located in Queen’s University Belfast, hosts
Portraits of Resistance COLIN DARKE REVIEWS ‘SORRY, NEITHER’ AND ZANELE MUHOLI AT THE NAUGHTON GALLERY.
two exhibitions which both incorporate considerations of African history and culture, coming from differing perspectives, but sharing a number of visual and ideological characteristics. The first, ‘Sorry, Neither’ (25 May – 11 July), is a group show in the gallery of mostly Autofuturist work and the second, which is shown in partnership with the Belfast Photo Festival, is a remarkable selection of self-portraits by South African visual activist and photographer, Zanele Muholi (3 June – 1 August). These are printed large scale and shown in the university grounds. Sorry, Neither The multi-layered art and activism movement Afrofuturism has developed over a number of years, with the jazz of Sun Ra, the funk of George Clinton and the science fiction novels of Octavia Butler its forerunners. In visual terms it has developed a recognisable, but fluid, aesthetic and the lineage of many of the recent works included in ‘Sorry, Neither’ can be traced back particularly to Sun Ra, whose costumes and stage sets evoke the future cosmos from which he claimed to have travelled, seen in the low-budget 1974 film, Space is the Place. Afrofuturist film has developed considerably from this rather rudimentary beginning to, for example, the beautiful and moving ecological sacrifice in a futuristic East Africa in the short from 2009, Pumzi, written and directed by Wanuri Kahiu. The aesthetic reached a wide audience in Ryan Coogler’s 2018 Marvel blockbuster, Black Panther. Afrofuturism is an art of resistance, grounded in objective analysis and imaginative rethinking of history. It blurs the distinctions between past, present and future to create new realities which can highlight the nature of injustice and oppression or present alternatives which negate them. This marks a distinction from (other) forms of resistance, which assert the primacy of material reality over ideas – ever since Marx stated that it is not
