[ Apache Indian, “Arranged Marriage,” music video stills, 1992. Courtesy of Universal Music. ]

South-South: Interruptions & Encounters

South-South: Interruptions & Encounters brought together eight artists whose work is situated at an intersection of African and South Asian history, politics, or culture. These encounters occur in a variety of forms and locations: Trinidad’s Carnival; a South African ghetto; the music of Black Britain; a family’s history of migration from East Africa; the colonial monuments of a historic slave port; a vial of perfume; and the actual speaking voice of an artist.

The eight artists work in a variety of different national and transnational contexts, including South Africa, Kenya, Trinidad, England, and Canada. However, each of their works engages one of the most contradictory legacies of European colonialism. Over the course of centuries, Africa and South Asia have been drawn together through Indian Ocean trade networks, systems of forced labour (like slavery and indenture), anti-colonial political struggle, and post-colonial migrations to Northern metropoles. At the same time, colonial racism—and later anti-colonial nationalism—frequently reified the difference between “African” and “Indian.” South-South sought to envision new geographies of colonialism and its legacies, for example maps in which the imperial centre is displaced or moments when the Northern city becomes a site of transit and exchange between different regions of the South.

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Barbershop: Afrosheen, 2007, oil on canvas, 208 x 250cm. Private Collection London. [fig.1]

Painterliness is a term that people throw around a lot, without qualifying or defining it on its own.  In a formal sense, it is the space of light and shadow created by colour, rather than by form, in a composition.[1] As such, painterliness connotes a more complicated manner of painting that deviates from the rote rendering of lines.  It is this connotation that can be expanded into the discussion of contemporary art and extended to define the visual qualities of other media. The first time that I saw Hurvin Anderson’s paintings, they were, in fact, not paintings but prints.

Technically, they were colour etchings from his first print portfolio, Nine Etchings (2005).Despite their process, they retained the expansive idea of painterliness for which he is known. The entire set appeared to be a riff on a view.

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A candid conversation between two contemporary Jamaican artists.

Ebony G. Patterson - Untitled I (Khani+di Krew) From the Disciplez Series

In the first section Oneika Russell asks questions of  Ebony G. Patterson. In the second section the roles are reversed.

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