Exhibition Features the Works of Nine African Canadian Artists

By Neil Armstrong

Sylvia D. Hamilton in front her installation, Naming Names, a 12-foot suspended fabric containing more than 3,000 names. Photo contributed

An exhibition exploring the Black Canadian presence and history in this country and issues of belonging opens at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) later this month.

“Here We Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art” features the contemporary works of nine African Canadian artists from January 27 to April 22.

“Challenge yourself to think differently about the deep-rooted histories and enduring presence of Black Canadians, gain a new and multifaceted understanding of Canada, through these unique and visually compelling installations,” says the ROM.

The artists are: Sandra Brewster, Michèle Pearson Clarke, Chantal Gibson, Sylvia D. Hamilton, Bushra Junaid, Charmaine Lurch, Esmaa Mohamoud, Dawit L. Petros and Gordon Shadrach.

Hamilton, a Nova Scotian filmmaker and writer who is known for her award-winning documentary films, says what is significant about the exhibition is the acknowledgement of the Black presence in Canada for many generations.

The exhibition gets its name from the title of her own work, “Here We Are Here,” which the ROM curators liked so much that they asked her permission to use it to encapsulate all of the work that is being shown.

“The work that I’ve been doing around history, around memory, around the Black presence in this country is very important. It’s always been important, but I think right now, right at this moment there’s a sharpness to that importance to have the work that I’m doing now brought in with the work of other contemporary artists. It’s quite an honour and I’m really pleased to have my work in conversation with the work of other contemporary artists.”

Hamilton says this installation that she has been working on for a few years changes depending on the site that it’s in.

Initially, the idea of the project was to excavate memory and history and she has presented different iterations at shows at the Dalhousie Art Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia and the Thames Art Gallery in Chatham, Ontario.

Hamilton says she is inspired by the people who came before her as someone who grew up in a small rural black community in Nova Scotia where she was surrounded by elders and by people who were trying to do the best for their families and their children who worked to create community.

Hamilton said she saw women in the community who were multi-taskers in the church before that term came into contemporary usage. 

She said when she was in school and at university none of those women were present in any of the things that she studied or saw.

“I felt it important that their work and then the work of so many others who appeared in the films – their stories had to be told,” she said, noting that she felt that she was in a position to do that and it was a way of honouring and recognizing that ancestry and what it has meant to her.

Hamilton’s ancestors are the black refugees from the War of 1812 and she notes that they had a lot of imagination because they had to imagine a life beyond chattel slavery.

She hopes that visitors to the exhibition will be challenged by what they see and might come away with different perspectives and ideas about who people of African descent are in Canada.

One of the pieces of her work that is on display is called “Naming Names,” a 12-foot suspended fabric that flows down the wall containing more of 3,000 names.

“That particular piece, I think, for me is significant because it renders visible the people by allowing their names to be listed but also read into the record because there is an audio soundscape in that particular piece of work.”

There is also a short video projection called “The Passage” which deals with the Middle Passage.

Sign, an image from Dawit L. Petros' installation, Transliteration. Photo contributed

Petros is a visual artist who investigates boundaries in artistic, geographical and cultural contexts.

Working with installations, photography, research and extensive travels, his practice centers around a critical rereading of the relationship between African histories and European modernism.

Almost 16 years ago, Petros created “Transliteration,” a play on translation.

“The project was really interested in questions of representation and thinking about the language through which and the signs through which images and subjectivity coalesce around black subjects in Canada.”

He said all of his work at this stage was interested in complicating the expansive communities that he is a part of – he’s an Eritrean Canadian, black, and he was in Quebec as an Anglophone.

“This project really was a way for me to think about how the signs with which individual subject communities are translated or legible through image.”

One of the images in his exhibition was made when he was an undergraduate student at university in Quebec.

When he was in Quebec questions regarding his transnational subjectivity were still in play and so “Sign” or “Transliteration” – the larger body that this image comes from -- was part and parcel of other bodies of work.

For example, there’s another project called “Some Families” that was being done simultaneously to this. They all looked at the various communities that he was a part of.

“’Sign’ are mostly Haitian Francophone African Canadians in Quebec that are in that work. ‘Some Families’ was a lot of Eritreans. I’m simply trying to say that part of where this body of work fit in then with an analysis of these different transnational communities that I was a part of. Blackness is a part of it but that’s not the totality of what I was interested in then or what I’ve ever been interested in.”

Petros said he has always been interested in problematizing what we mean by black, “even when I was making this work I always understood black not just as a racial cipher or racial signifier but I also understood blackness as a political position.”

“One did not have to have dark skin in order to have a black politics. My understanding of blackness doesn’t really draw from American and Canadian understanding but more from the British. My thinking of race and representation is informed by my work and speaking to people like Stuart Hall and the cultural studies group of thinkers in England.

He says it’s an expanded sense of blackness and the political possibility that he was interested in then and now.

“The thing that happens within the context of American or Canadian American examinations of blackness is that these sorts of nuisances get lost.”

Petros said it is important for him that when the ideas that are in the works are discussed the conversation does not begin “at a certain concept of race and end at a certain concept of race.”

He says his inclusion in this exhibition means that the work continues to have ongoing relevance through the mandate of institutions to the cultural mandate of Canada.

An image of Simone from Michele Pearson Clarke's installation Suck Teeth Compositions (After Rashaad Newsome). Photo contributed

Pearson Clarke’s “Suck Teeth Compositions (After Rashaad Newsome)” is a three-channel video and sound installation that presents a choral symphony structured around the everyday Caribbean oral gesture of sucking teeth.

 

Each channel consists of shots of Black Canadian participants looking directly into the camera and sucking their teeth, while making any other accompanying nonverbal gestures that feel natural to them (for example, rolling their eyes or pouting their lips, etc.).

Referred to variously as kiss teeth, steups, chups, and stchoops, to suck teeth is to produce a sound by sucking in air through the teeth, while pressing the tongue against the upper or lower teeth, with the lips pursed or slightly flattened. 

West African in origin, this verbal gesture is used to signify a wide range of feelings, including irritation, disapproval, disgust, disrespect, anger and frustration. 

“Given that representations of African-American Blackness dominate and define Canadian mainstream understandings of the Black experience, my aim here is to use this gesture to examine the tensions experienced by many Black people here, due to this erasure and the national invisibility of our complex and nuanced experiences of Blackness,” says Pearson Clarke.

As a Black Trinidadian living in Canada, the recent emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement has brought our national invisibility into sharp relief. While many Canadians know the names and stories of African-Americans Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner, very few would recognize the names Jermaine Carby, Andrew Loku, Abdirahman Abdi, or Pierre Coriolan, all Black men who were killed by Canadian police forces in the last few years, notes the artist. 

“Suck Teeth Compositions (After Rashaad Newsome)” builds on Pearson Clarke’s ongoing examination of the personal and political possibilities afforded by sharing Black/queer experiences of negative emotions such as disappointment, loneliness and grief. 

The video installation is in conversation with a work by Rashaad Newsome, an African American artist. 

He is well known for “Shade Compositions (2005-2012),” a series of live performances and videos that explores issues of Black authorship, appropriation, identity and belonging by conducting choirs of women (and sometimes, gay men) of colour who snap their fingers, smack their lips, roll their eyes, and cock their heads, creating expressive linguistic symphonies out of the nonverbal gestures and vocalizations of African-American women.

Pearson Clarke had seen that work many years ago and it left a deep impression causing her to reflect on the ways that African American blackness dominates global understanding of what it is to be black.

“As somebody who grew up in Trinidad the first twenty years of my life I had one relationship with blackness formed by a Caribbean upbringing, a Caribbean history. I didn’t think of myself as black in the North American conception of blackness. And then I moved to Canada and had to develop a new relationship with blackness based on the dynamics of Canadian society and that took a really long time to understand, both with white people and with black people – people’s ideas and expectations of who I was, what I would like, what I would not like based on that.”

This installaion was really a way of expressing both to a Canadian audience but also to an African American audience the frustrations that come along with being black but not being African American. 

“And I think, particularly, for blackness in Canada, for better or for worse, African Americans I think have a shared psychological relationship to their blackness they have a shared history. Obviously, there’re differences and there’re huge regional differences but in Canada we come from all over the place. Many of us have been here for a very long time, many of us just came, all types of blacknesses have ended up here to form this new thing that we call blackness in Canada.”

Pearson Clarke thinks that even within black communities we often don’t see each other or understand each other because of those differences. 

The other thing that she is interested in with this work is “most of our energy and effort is spent, for good reason, in dialogue and in conversation and pushing back against whiteness, and the impact of whiteness on our lives.”

“But I’m also interested in what it means to turn to each other and have a within blackness conversation because I think we have our own histories and our own tensions and our own issues within blackness that we often do not stop to take the time to understand each other so.”

The artist also thinks that it is very risky and tense for black people to express the frustration and anger most have experienced. 

“We get punished when we speak up against racism, when we speak up against discrimination. When we even tell people microaggressions exist there’s always a pushback and so most of us learn to police our emotions and avoid making white people uncomfortable. Because we know if we make white people uncomfortable they don’t pay the price, we pay the price.”

The other thing with this piece is to make an intervention to allow black bodies to express anger, to express frustration, to express irritation in a public forum. 

“It’s art; it’s in a public forum. These are real people, these are not hired actors; these are not performers. These are all Black Canadians living in Toronto who I had this conversation with and decided is this your experience, is this your emotion, do you feel these things and they said yes. So they are expressing their own emotions. This is not me just asking them to suck their teeth for the camera as an act. This is them expressing their own frustration and irritation around the microaggression, the discrimination, the racism, the invisibility of what it means to be black in Canada.”

Pearson Clarke says it is extremely meaningful to be participating in the exhibition.

“It doesn’t happen very often in Canada that you have an exhibition that features all Black Canadian artists. When we do have a lot of black artists featured in Canada it’s very common again to have African American artists exhibit in Canada. Which is great, we want to see that work as well, but it’s rare to have an exhibition of this many artists that are all Canadian so it does feel like a real privilege to be included in that group.”

She says the ROM has such a different audience compared to art galleries and so people will come into the museum to see everything and hopefully they will stop in and see the exhibition as well. 

Pearson Clarke said there is the movement around black joy and black girl magic and there is a way of trying to reclaim other emotional experiences. 

“In the end we’re trying to claim our humanity to say we’re fully human and we experience joy, we experience pleasure, we experience these things that we don’t often see ourselves being represented as experiencing.”

In her work she is also interested in what it means to be denied representation of other negative emotions like anger or frustration or loneliness. 

“Our emotional experience is a part of how we understand each other in the world.

“With this piece I’m really interested in opening up an opportunity to look at what does it mean for Black Canadian frustration and Black Canadian anger or Black Canadian irritation to be seen as something that exists and to be understood as something that’s part of what it means to live in a country where we deal with daily racism.”

The curators of “Here We Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art” are Dr. Silvia Forni, ROM curator of African Arts and Culture; Dr. Julie Crooks, assistant curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO); and independent curator, Dominique Fontaine.

[A shorter version of this story was published in the North American Weekly Gleaner, Jan. 11-17, 2018 issue.]