Hieronymus Bosch, St. John the Evangelist on Patmos, circa 1500, oil on oak panel, 63 cm × 43.3 cm (25 in × 17.0 in), Staatliche Museen.
The second image is a grisaille on the reverse of the painting.
Viviane Sassen, Pikin Slee
Read the full, incisive, anti-colonialist critique from the always-great @greatleapsideways:
We are thus invited to consider the extent to which these images, in their repetitive subjugation of nubile black bodies, might expand our sense of ourselves or of the photographer’s perspective – that is, we are invited to consider ‘Africa’ as an expression of the West. On this logic, Africa’s representational function is purely to mirror the pressing nature of largely western preoccupations. And so the bodies in these images exist purely to serve.
[…]
It is precisely in the lack of any reflexive critical capacity that Sassen’s portraits are most problematic, because they indulge a derogatory trope in an unquestioning manner, suggesting themselves to be a cultural celebration which devolves into theatrical fetish. They are a sort of arresting, colourful reprieve from the homogeneity of the industrialised landscape, or from the characteristic western disjuncture of body from mind. They purport to ennoble an inscrutable and endlessly malleable body by heightening its lushness and its fertility, but in so doing the portraits reconfirm an essentialist worldview in which blackness is commensurate with inanimacy and animality.
Elena Anosova, Saagan Sag [White time]
«A rare sense of elevation and inspiration is experienced at the Baikal, as if at the sight of eternity and perfection you were touched by the secret fingerprint of these magic notions, and the close breath of the almighty presence poured over you, and a bit of magic secret of all became your second nature»
–Valentine Rasputin
«I wondered whether the stillness on the face of the immensity looking at us two were meant as an appeal or as a menace. What were we who had strayed in here? Could we handle that dumb thing, or would it handle us? I felt how big, how confoundedly big, was that thing that couldn’t talk, and perhaps was deaf as well. What was in there?»
–Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Liz Orton, A Handful of Soil for the Whole Horizon
My ongoing series of work, A Handful of Soil for the Whole Horizon, uses an idea of gestural excess to propose an expanded natural history in which the body becomes irretrievably entangled with the specimen. The body is drawn into action, through touch or observation. Through small acts of force of anxiety I to produce disturbances that sabotage all notions of a still, isolated nature.
I appropriate a language of display from diverse sources, using the influences of found photos, text and diagrams to produce a new ecology of images.
waneella