In May 2023, vandals attacked De La Warr Pavilion cultural centre, in the small town of Bexhill on the southern coast of England. Under cover of darkness, they used spray paint to deface a sculpture that had been installed in the pavilion garden just a month earlier. The work in question was the American artist Tschabalala Self’s Seated (2022), which depicts a seated Black woman dressed in cheerful yellow clothes. This was not a random attack, but a purposeful and meticulous act, carried out until the sculpture’s skin was covered with white paint.
Self’s sculpture has since been restored, but despite its carefree appearance, it will forever be associated with racist vandalism. The incident elucidates with shocking clarity the circumstances in which Self operates: a Black woman depicting another Black person is inevitably a political act. In art, the white body is neutral, while the non-white body becomes a statement or representation of othering.
This is the first time Self has shown in Finland, adding new political dimensions. The exhibition Around the Way at EMMA in Espoo coincides with a period when the right-wing nationalist party The Finns is in government, and the Finnish parliament is led by a speaker convicted of incitement to racial hatred. In 2018, the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights published a report naming Finland as the most racist country in the union. This represents an entirely new context for Self, whose work is deeply rooted in the American Black experience. Racism in Finnish society persists, but it is different from racism in the United States or southern England.
Self works with sculpture and large-scale paintings with elements of fabric appliqué. She is best known for her hybrid collages: from everyday textiles such as jersey, lace, or denim, she cuts abstract pieces and sews them onto canvas with a machine. There is something Frankensteinian about the way living creatures emerge from the overlapping pieces of fabric. The symbolism is not exactly new, but she distorts proportions in an exhilarating way. She’s not trying to create pleasant shapes, and makes room for dissonance. At EMMA, for example, many of the people in Self’s paintings have heads that are too small for their bodies. Another characteristic are the enormous hands that swell and float through the images. They convey a sense of freedom, even as they become grotesque.
Self sometimes draws on objectifying racial stereotypes, such as big butts and penises. However, the exhibition does not include the part of Self’s oeuvre that explicitly highlights the hyper-sexualisation of Black women in American culture. The works with obvious hip-hop references are missing from this exhibition, as is her breakthrough series Bodega Runfrom 2015. The latter is primarily about the neighbourhood shops in the non-white areas of Self’s hometown of New York, but in addition to consumerism, the work is also about sexuality. Here the focus is on individuals. Self calls Around the Way an ode to her neighbourhood in Harlem, and this idea makes the diverse portraits come together in a coherent whole.
Zooming in on an ordinary neighbourhood is an effective way to depict life in a mythical metropolis. The meticulously planned exhibition design adds significantly to the atmosphere. Risky choices like painting bricks or tiles on the walls manage, against all odds, to add a measure of intimacy. The real strength of the exhibition, however, is that Self never repeats herself. The Harlem residents she depicts have a common experience: living as BIPOC in today’s United States. But this does not mean that they necessarily have overlapping experiences in other respects, as Self shows, for example, by including people of different ages. The triptych 12pm on 145th Street (2022) is dominated by a broad-shouldered young man in white sneakers, denim shorts, and a sleeveless shirt with Raphael’s painting of St George printed across the chest. In The Patriarch (2023), on the other hand, an old man with an emaciated face peers out of the picture with sharp eyes. The neighbourhood is also inhabited by a well-dressed couple waltzing on a checkered floor (Waltz, 2023) and a young woman whose lilac living room overlooks a brick wall (Harlem Sphinx, 2024).
The exhibition’s strongest moment is one of three 3D-printed sculptures. In Negligé 2 (2023), Self depicts a very voluptuous woman dressed in a tight-fitting transparent garment. Her left arm is raised, but her palm is turned towards her face. This is not a wave or a greeting; the movement is difficult to interpret. The woman’s red-painted lips are smiling, but one of her eyes is bloodshot and a huge tear is rolling down her cheek, suggesting domestic violence. But despite the injured eye and the tears, she is not subdued. Nor does she fit the stereotypical Beyoncé-fied image of a strong Black woman. The sculpture is thus not a representation of a theme or a female role, but something more ambiguous. Negligé 2and the related Negligé 1 (2023) definitely feel like the most intellectual works in the exhibition.
In Fearing the Black Body (2019), sociologist Sabrina Strings describes how Western art contributed to the objectification of the Black female body hundreds of years ago. From being depicted as the aesthetic counterpart of the white European woman during the Baroque period, the Black woman came to represent her aesthetic opposite during the 18th century. The Black Africans with whom Europeans came into contact were, of course, enslaved, and human trafficking is reflected in countless works of art.
Strings cites Peter Paul Rubens’s Venus in Front of the Mirror (1614–15) as an example of the increasing difference between the aesthetic presentation of white and Black bodies. She argues that from this time onwards, the Black woman is also depicted as inferior in a social sense, thus completing the process of dehumanisation. Later in history, of course, we encounter the appalling fate of the Khoikhoi woman Saartjie (Sarah) Baartman, who was exhibited as a freak show attraction in early 19th century Europe under the name ‘Hottentot Venus’. Self’s Negligé sculptures are about all this and much more. Their extreme curves don’t let us forget the body parts to which Black women have often been reduced.
Self is the youngest artist to date in EMMA’s international exhibition series, which has introduced artists such as Pierre Huyghe, Chiharu Shiota, and Alicja Kwade in collaboration with the Saastamoinen Foundation. She is also the first American. In a Nordic context, Frida Orupabo’s assemblage comes to mind, which deals with the grotesque othering of non-white bodies by the white gaze. But Self brings the racist stereotypes into the present in a way that is neither consistent nor easily interpreted. She is uninterested in having her characters walk around suffering. They all appear at ease with their bodies, moving through everyday life and putting on skimpy clothes when they feel like it. This is likely to both arouse moral panic and infuriate Finnish racists.
