Master’s house the first stage
That made my body famous
Beauty caged in
Tainted
Behind the lust for blue eyes and blond manes and I’m saying
It started with that slave ship that set the journey flaming
Blackness as a determinable thing, as a what or who, gives us a conceptualisation that exhibits the unnerving qualities of a mirage: from a distance, it appears clearly cogent, but up close, Blackness evanesces […] Blackness, then, is largely a matter of perception or made up of moments of performance in which performers understand their bodies as Black.
The installation What made my body famous is located at the intersection of poetics, performance and photography. It explores the temporalities and localities of knowledge.
What information remains when we obscure or morph the temporality of an object, body, or body of work? How much information can we strip the object of our attention of before it becomes illegible? How is legibility related to time? Where and how do we understand knowledge beyond the literal linear act of reading a text, an object, an artwork? How does it manifest and expand beyond the “object” itself?