Inter:Active Exhibition, CPH:DOX, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen
The documentary film festival CPH:DOX hosted an interactive exhibition featuring eight immersive artworks. Ironically, it was the non-VR work Civil Dusk (2022) by the Austrian-Nigerian artists David Uzochukwu and the Nigerian cinematographer Dafe Oboro that really stayed with me. I was utterly transfixed by this four-channel installation. When I entered the internal viewing space – a wooden cube with four muslin sheets – the projected videos radiated through to the walls. Ghostly, expansive, and tender, the work splits into three acts of disintegration, growth, longing, and belonging in the life of Chijioke, a now childless widower. The four adjoined screens provide both fracture and comfort; even in his loneliest moments, the figure is always held by a community of selves.
Tina M. Campt & Salad Hilowle, Malmö Art Museum
US scholar Tina M. Campt and Swedish artist Salad Hilowle sat down at Malmö Art Museum to talk about archives, contemporary art, and blackness – specifically, a blackness that isn’t defined by a relationship to whiteness. Campt elaborated on the Black gaze as a practice that “mobilise[s] Black precarity as a creative force of affirmation that cannot simply be seen or viewed.” On this point, she presented examples of artists that code works to protect their subjects’ dignity using varying degrees of legibility. The talk concluded with a screening of Hilowle’s poetic video Vanus Labor (2021), which explores ways of seeing that reject the myth of whiteness as a universal perspective and delivers a loving ode to Afro-Swedish life in art.
Jacolby Satterwhite, A Feeling of Healing, Museum for Contemporary Art, Roskilde
Thanks to the museum’s new itinerant format, the American artist Jacolby Satterwhite got to leave the white cube for a defunct night club, which was transformed into a warm, atmospheric extension of the works. Satterwhite creates digital universes of abundance, vibrance, sickness, and sanctuary. Maximalism and an interdisciplinary approach form key parts of their aesthetic. Here, they draw from disparate sources: a reinterpreted baptism remixed with Yoruba folklore, discourse around HIV/AIDS, and Spectrum, a defunct Brooklyn nightclub. Full of bodies, in praise of bodies, worried for bodies, A Feeling of Healing was a masterwork of world-building, a love letter to nightlife and the freedom it has historically held for Black and queer folks.
C. Grace Chang is an artist, filmmaker, and curator at Skånes Konstförening in Malmö. In 2020, she established the Third Space Residency for queer and trans artists of colour in the region. Currently, she is creating a lecture and workshop series on refusal, futures, and decolonial imagination for the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. In 2023, she will develop a podcast for Art Detox Sweden, a support network for BIPOC folks working in the art world.
For this year’s contributions to the Advent Calendar, see here.
