Jermaine Francis Archives

Performing Histories / Histories Re-Imagined

Impressions Gallery, Bradford

Exhibition review by Anneka French

Co-curated by Impressions Gallery and Peckham 24, Performing Histories / Histories Re-Imagined features works by eight photographers who reframe official and personal archives to explore the abuses of organised religion and colonialism. As Anneka French writes, the exhibition’s diversity of influences underscores the role and value of the archive and, more crucially, the importance of radical approaches towards its reuse and interrogation.

Anneka French | Exhibition review | 1 August 2024

A statue of the Virgin Mary repeated across two photographs is a potent signifier of the power structures and abuses that inform and then I ran (2023). This suite of photographs, in which experiences of Emi O’Connell’s grandmother are re-enacted, is hung formally, with a central diptych of a blurred, brooding landscape flanked by figures in this same location. Described as ‘performative self-portraiture’, O’Connell re-tells parts of her grandmother’s story of escape from an Irish Catholic mother and baby home – often referred to as the Magdalene Laundries, institutions in which the devastating treatment of those confined is still coming to light – when she climbed from a window aged 16 and heavily pregnant with O’Connell’s father, who was subsequently forcefully adopted. O’Connell can be seen tenderly holding a sprig of cow parsley in one photograph. She can further be seen running, falling and twisting, her head bent and body crouched in distress, in images that are as strangely still, sensitive and beautiful as they are full of trauma.

The visible shutter release cable in O’Connell’s photographs is evidence of the reconstruction taking place and indeed, and then I ran embodies many of the core subjects presented in the wide-ranging and complex group exhibition Performing Histories / Histories Re-Imagined at Impressions Gallery, Bradford. The exhibition asks questions about the impacts of ‘official’ archives, be these institutional or familial, on (but not limited to) communities, bodies, memories and identities. Eight photographers here disrupt, re-make, re-present or reinterpret these narratives, finding meaning of their own and revealing new ways of looking at difficult things.

As with O’Connell’s photographs, the unfathomable impacts of and abuses by organised religion also occupy key roles in works by Alba Zari and Jermaine Francis. Zari’s Occult (2019-23) offers a partial picture of her own mother and grandmother’s life as members of a Christian fundamentalist sect now titled The Family International, in India, Nepal and Thailand. This is revealed through archival photographs, and comic strip-like drawings and text that highlight ways the sect drew in recruits through practices of sexual exploitation very much at odds with the smiling family photographs that Zari has layered on top of and tacked-up alongside these.

Francis’ Once Upon a Time: a bible, multiple protagonists and the propagation of gospel in racial time (2024-ongoing) is shown in and on vitrines arranged in the shape of a cross. The work itself is focused upon Anglian Church archives held by the Bodleian Library, Oxford, pertaining to historic missionary initiatives in the Caribbean. Underscoring the abuses of black people under colonialism and its continuing reverberations, Francis’ work, elements of which are placed beneath magnifying sheets, and including grey archive boxes, bibles and layered prints made up of collaged archival imagery and text, asks viewers to lean over, look closely and implicate themselves within the work and its contexts.

Also working with found archival imagery, Amin Yousefi’s Eyes Dazzle as They Search for the Truth (2022) uses protest photographs from the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79 in Iran. Specifically searching out people from the crowd who look (or seem to look) directly at the camera, these isolated individuals form a newly reassembled archive of gazes photographed through a loupe. Extracting individual people from the crowd, the work presented features a cluster of small prints alongside one very large photograph that centres the wary face of a young child, pinpointing his smallness and his humanity among the protesting throng.

Woman Wearing Ring Shields Face from Flash (2019-23) by Odette England is comprised of a large paste-up and a series of glossy prints. On the left, the photographs are of male photographers, prominent camera lenses and flashbulbs standing in place of eyes as their cameras obscure their faces. On the right are photographs of women refusing to be photographed, their hands in front of their faces and heads turned away. England’s work flags the potential abuses of photography itself – how it takes, snaps, shoots and captures through the violence of vocabulary hidden in plain sight – and of the subject’s own limited power in this dynamic. England’s work assembles vernacular images, forming a new archive of resistance that speaks to contemporary feminist dialogue and ongoing challenges to patriarchal perspectives that seek to control women in body and in image.

Eleonora Agostini’s and Tarrah Krajnak’s works touch upon further feminist concerns in connection with personal identity. While Agostini’s collection of photographs A Study on Waitressing (2020-24) pays homage to her waitress mother, her sore feet and the dual performances of in/visibility necessary to her role, Krajnak’s SISMOS79 (2014) explores her identity as an Indigenous transracial person who has experienced adoption and generational trauma. Composed of five large prints, Krajnak’s work combines broken mirrors photographed in conjunction with political and pornographic magazine pages from the year of her birth, offering a highly fragmentary personal and social perspective of this window in time.

Of all the eight photographers featured, Laura Chen’s work sits rather differently. Employing a dark sense of humour, Being Framed (2022) uses the rudimentary tropes of old-fashioned, analogue criminal investigations by police or private detectives popularised in film noir to develop a fictional case lead by avatar DCI Dean Wilson. Newspaper clippings, mocked-up case files, crime scene tape and a missing rabbit poster feature in Chen’s new archive. An image of a CCTV camera is positioned high up on the wall, while a footprint is playfully glued to the floor. Since Being Framed overtly refers to imagined or fictional events, it lacks the emotional and psychological force of other works on display.

The exhibition, which draws upon multiple international contexts and inputs, is co-curated by Impressions Gallery and Peckham 24, where it showed along with other projects and exhibitions in southeast London earlier this year. In Bradford, the exhibition’s diversity of influence, approach and subject makes for a challenging and, at times, uneven viewing experience but nonetheless it is one that serves as a useful reminder of the importance of the archive and, more crucially, of the importance of radical approaches towards it. ♦

Performing Histories / Histories Re-Imagined runs at Impressions Gallery, Bradford, until 31 August

—
Anneka French is a Curator at Coventry Biennial and Project Editor for Anomie, an international publishing house for the arts. She contributes to Art Quarterly, Burlington Contemporary and Photomonitor, and has written and had editorial commissions from Turner Prize, Fire Station Artists’ Studios, TACO!, Grain Projects and Photoworks+. French served as Co-ordinator and then Director at New Art West Midlands, Editorial Manager at this is tomorrow and has worked at galleries including Tate Modern, London, and Ikon, Birmingham.

Images:

1-Untitled from Occult, 2019-23. © Alba Zari

2-Untitled from A Study in Waitressing, 2020-24. © Eleonora Agostini

3-Emi O’Connell, and then I ran, 2023.

4-Untitled from Once Upon a Time: a bible, multiple protagonists and the propagation of gospel in racial time, 2024-ongoing. © Jermaine Francis

5-Untitled, from the series Eyes Dazzle as they Search for The Truth, 2022. © Amin Yousefi

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Carrie Mae Weems

Reflections for Now

Exhibition review by Jermaine Francis

Carrie Mae Weems’ work has long questioned how the representation of the Black subject has historically reproduced racism and inequality. On the occasion of Weems’ first major UK solo exhibition, Jermaine Francis considers her distinguished opposition to racial violence and all forms of oppression to engage us in a dialogue about the Black experience and narratives of resilience in the US.

Reflections for Now, at the Barbican, brings together a collection of installations, film and photography by the artist Carrie Mae Weems. For over 30 years, Weems has employed the use of multi-visual disciplines to interrogate the image and its effects on the contemporary Black American experience. Furthermore, the exhibition asks us to consider the work beyond reductionist readings of identity, as Weems has herself written: ‘There are so many avenues of exploration in the work. […] There are ideas about beauty, how beauty functions in the work.’

The exhibition opens with a series of abstract images in Painting the Town (2021), made in the aftermath of the protests that erupted after the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis in 2020. Large-scale and tightly-framed, the photographs of boarded buildings appear to resemble the visual language of abstract expressionism, but flipped on its head, once the context is revealed. The colour blocks demonstrate to the audience an act of erasure: the removal of the evidence of the protesters’ words, which in turn serves as a metaphor for a wider denial. In addition, Weems also suggests another subject of erasure: Black abstract expressionist painters, such as Mary Lovelace O’Neal, whose contribution to the discourse of painting and wider culture have often been overlooked.

The gallery space becomes the battleground in which the agency of the Black woman is asserted. Whether she is in front of the camera or behind the camera, Weems, in the words of Hilarie M. Sheets, ‘us[es] herself as surrogate for all possessed women, controlling narrative both subject and photographer.’ In Roaming (2006), which ends the show, a solitary Black silhouetted figure appears engulfed by institutions, museums, galleries and architectural structures, made even more poignant by Weems’ evocation of Benito Mussolini’s Rome, a reminder of the aesthetics of fascist desires.

Kitchen Table (1990) is an epic series that flows through two rooms, disrupting the one-dimensional representation of the Black woman through the presentation of an unapologetically complex set of narratives by the sophisticated incorporation of performance, construction, text and the self-portrait. In these photographs, Weems is centre stage, presenting her own story. Unlike so many historical depictions of Black women, she demands agency from the viewer, whilst engaging us in a rich dialogue about relationships, race, misogyny, sex and camaraderie.

The amplification of the presence and resilience of Black women is everywhere in this exhibition, and felt no more powerfully than in the installation Case Study Room The portraits of Black Panther members such as Angela Davies and Kathleen Cleaver are presented equally with their male counterparts, their contributions celebrated.

The exhibition takes us on another journey, one of dissonance and erasure that more directly addresses the issues around photography’s distribution and historical use. From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–96) is a deeply moving and emotional work which deals with the concept of what Mark Sealy refers to as ‘racial time’. Weems asks us to consider ‘the photograph’s function as a sign within the historical conditions’ and how Black people have been historically represented.

The controversial Harvard daguerreotypes of Black slaves, now recontextualised with overlaid titles, proposes the process of dehumanisation, the photographs being complicit in the reinforcement of racial ideologies. It is further into the sequence that we are presented with the Gary Winogrand image of a white woman and a Black man, a couple, holding two chimpanzees. Some Laughed Long & Hard & Loud (1995–96) is the title, and Weems is asking us to consider this and the other images in the room in the context of ‘racial time’. It also calls to mind Jean-François Lyotard’s ideals of the sublime – ‘presenting the unpresentable’ – as well as the work of Alfredo Jarr, which employs aesthetics to unpack social injustices.

These avenues of exploration are what we are constantly asked to engage with throughout the exhibition. Articulating these overlapping themes and strategies most powerfully is The Shape of Things: A Film in Seven Parts (2021), a 45-minute-long panoramic video piece taking the viewer on a nonlinear journey through the history of the USA. Comprising a rich mosaic of archive material, news footage, noir, sound and soft monologues, it gives me a sensation similar to one I felt hearing Larry Heard’s Waterfall (1987). The panoramic screen dominates not just the room but also our eyeline, conjuring parallels to Weems’ protagonist in Roaming. There are particular scenes that are distinctive, a sumptuous frame of a Black woman fixing her gaze towards us, while papers, documents and newspapers cascade around the figure. The appearance of multiple female figures, and one male who dances in the rain, can be read as a sense of defiance but also healing. Early on, we experience a sensation of dissonance, with the screen split vertically to project repeated 1960s archival footage of a Black protest. On the right, a white crowd directs their anger to the image on the left, where a Black man verbally retaliates. A monologue in a male voice informs us that, in the end, they stopped trying because some people cannot be convinced to change.

From the multi-image work, The Push, The Call, The Scream, The Dream (2020), certain images haunt my mind. The first is a portrait of two women side by side, one young and Black, the other white and wearing the uniform of the Ku Klux Klan. The other is of a young boy crying at a funeral, which takes me to a place where I contemplate various events that have happened, and continuous cycles of hate.

We are presented with scenes of modern tragedies in which desperate people attempt to flee wars, famines and droughts: news footage of Afghani families trying to board the disembarking planes, refugees fleeing on boats, combined with ladies of leisure drinking tea from a bygone era; archival films of old comedy circus performances, devious clowns, alongside views of the Capitol riots. These are the consequences of this modern day pantomime and Weems asks us to reflect on America’s polarisation and the collateral damage being the Black demographic. This is reinforced by a scene in which a Black man runs in front of three clocks all set to three o’clock, whilst a voice undulates the dream-like sequence: “commemorating all who have fallen, and all those who have endured, commemorating every Black man who sees age 21…”

The words speak of the other reality; of the Black and brown victims, repeatedly killed at the hands of those in positions of authority, who wear the same uniform as Goodman. In the hypnotic darkness of It’s Over – A Diorama (2021), an installation which I would describe as a memorial to the fallen, Weems presents a sense of hope. We are given propositions by a male voice whilst a camera sweeps over illuminated individuals in a crowd. A kind of manifesto exploring how citizens in the US can maybe find a better way of living, the film ends with the image of Weems swinging to the Jimmy Durante song, Make someone happy. Reminiscent of circus acts, it all feels appropriately bittersweet.

I often found myself questioning whether the wall texts need to be so descriptive of Weems’ intentions, yet this is a criticism that could be levelled at any exhibition. Maybe I wish it was left more to the viewer than some institutions might like to imagine, or maybe what’s most important is to experience a journey, one that tries to engage us in a dialogue about the Black experience and resilience in the US. In a world in which dialogue appears to be under attack, maybe we need this more than ever. ♦

All images courtesy the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York / Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin and the Barbican, London © Carrie Mae Weems.

Carrie Mae Weems: Reflections for Now runs at the Barbican, London until 3 September 2023.

—
Jermaine Francis is a UK born and London based photographer and visual artist. Originally from the West Midlands, his work explores power, space, identity, social and political issues. He has exhibited at the ICP New York, Photo Oxford, Saatchi Gallery, Galeriepcp, and the Centre for British Photography. He co-curated Notes on a Native Son at Peckham 24 2023 together with Emma Bowkett.

Images:

1- Carrie Mae Weems , Untitled (Woman Standing Alone) from Kitchen Table Series, 1990 

2- Carrie Mae Weems , Untitled (Woman and Daughter with Make Up) from Kitchen Table Series, 1990

3- Carrie Mae Weems , You Became A Scientific Profile; A Negroid Type; An Anthropological Debate; and & A Photographic Subject from From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, 1995-96 

4- Carrie Mae Weems , If I Ruled the World, 2004 

5- Carrie Mae Weems , The Assassination of Medgar, Malcolm and Martin from Constructing History, 2008 

6- Carrie Mae Weems , Still from Cyclorama – The Shape of Things: A Video in 7 Parts, 2021 

7- Carrie Mae Weems,  The Louvre from Museums, 2006 

8- Carrie Mae Weems , Philadelphia Museum of Art from Museums, 2006 

9- Carrie Mae Weems , When and Where I Enter — Mussolini’s Rome from Roaming, 2006 

10- Carrie Mae Weems,  The Edge of Time — Ancient Rome from Roaming, 2006 

11- Carrie Mae Weems , Lincoln, Lonnie, and Me — A Story in 5 Parts, 2012 