Into the Black fantastic
From June 29 until September 18, the Hayward Gallery will present the UK’s first major exhibition dedicated to the work of black artists who use fantastical elements to address racial injustice and explore alternative realities.
In the Black Fantastic will showcase new works and special commissions, curated by Ekow Eshun.
The exhibition will bring together a group of artists who use elements of folklore, myth, science fiction, spiritual traditions, pageantry and legacies of Afrofuturism.
The gallery said the fantastical element considers alternative ways of being, and confronts socially constructed ideas about race. Encompassing painting, photography, video, sculpture and mixed-media installations, the exhibition seeks to create experiences that bring the viewer into a new environment somewhere between the real world and a variety of imagined ones.
Opening the show, a new commission by Nick Cave takes the form of a dramatic installation comprising hundreds of casts of the artist’s own arm, joined together like links in a chain. Alongside this, Mr Cave will present a group of Soundsuits: the legendary series of wearable artworks began 30 years ago in response to the brutal police beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles. A new Soundsuit commemorating the killing of George Floyd will be shown.
A summer season of events will accompany In the Black Fantastic, across the Southbank Centre, spanning literature, performance and music, as well as a series of outdoor installations. A parallel programme of film screenings curated by Ekow Eshun will be hosted at BFI Southbank.
Mr Eshun said: “As a concept, the black fantastic does not describe a movement or a rigid category so much as a way of seeing shared by artists who grapple with the inequities of racialized contemporary society by conjuring new visions of black possibility.
“More than ever, black visual artists, as well as writers, film-makers and musicians, are thinking in boldly imaginative terms in order to explore race and cultural identity in the contemporary era.”
Ralph Rugoff, director at the Hayward Gallery, said: “Thanks to the insights of curator Ekow Eshun, In the Black Fantastic will be the first exhibition to highlight this very significant – and still under-acknowledged – artistic territory that extends across the field of visual art to recent trends in literature, film, television and music.
“At once vivid and thought-provoking, lyrical and relevant, the works in the show embody the power of the fantastic to help us chart new ways of confronting legacies of racism and celebrating cultures of resistance and affirmation.”
Picture: © Nick Cave. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photos by James Prinz Photography
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