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Good evening. I'd like you to welcome you to this boy that firstly to thank the Africa Oxford African Studies seminar series

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for inviting me to talk about my work on the title of this talk was due to be unmasking African and British art.

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But there was some work which I wanted to share with you that doesn't address British directly,

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so perhaps you should just think of the subject as unmasking Africana.

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And the reason obviously I want the lights to be dimmed is because primarily this is artist.

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From my perspective and. If you can't see the work properly, it doesn't make any sense at all, sir.

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And a lot of my work is some of it's like this pieces kind of nocturnal and it's some sort of a presentation.

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So yeah. OK, so that's the title of my doctorate was Africana, unmask fugitive science of Africa and takes British collection.

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I would it in 2016 and the thesis kind of documents,

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my discovery description and also critical analysis of what I call unmasking africana as an artistic methodology.

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So it was a practise based thesis, and the aim was to create artworks with a very visual African theme that would

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be visibly connected to artworks that seem to have nothing to do with Africa.

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So the purpose of making these kind of connexions is to fully facilitate through art a critique of those artworks,

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which appear to have nothing to do with Africa. And my work acting as a kind of conduit for that sort of understanding.

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And later this year, the the the Oxford University Press is going to be publishing a chapter which is based on part of my thesis court.

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And in an anthology called Classicism in the Black Atlantic.

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So perhaps I could send details if people want to buy this wonderful new publication because there are so.

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Africans have always been very important to my art. However, I have a very expansive view of the subject in the term,

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so that's why I frequently use the term Afrikaner because its usage by American US africana studies.

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Academics, I think, helps facilitate thinking about people, places, ideas and artefacts with a strong and definitive association with Africa.

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That's what the peoples of Africa and its diaspora. And before I talk in depth about the notion of unmasking Afrikaner, I want to just give a brief.

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You've my artistic journey that led towards those works for Sony to give it to somebody.

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So this painting that you can see on the screen now was made quite early in my career and is an

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imaginary depiction of two historical characters who played a leading role in the Haitian Revolution,

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which defeated slavery, including colonialism in in 1884, when Haiti gained its independence.

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And this picture here, which you can on screen now, it's Toussaint Louverture better, it is an artwork from the same series.

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And I suppose in terms of think, you know, in terms of what I was saying about Africano and thinking about Africa for me and you know,

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the question of Diaspora is is very important.

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So certainly at the time in the 19th century when the sort of people of Haiti and other enslaved Africans in the new world were, you know,

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struggling for that for their emancipation, many times they considered themselves to be African and in some respects still do,

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as we know from the the phrase African American.

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So, yeah, I think that says that.

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And by the way, if people want to ask questions in the course,

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if something really bothers you that you don't think you can wait and you can feel free to to kind of interject something really funny.

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And just to give you a kind of idea of the sort of the quiet these paintings are quite kind of large six,

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they're sort of designed to be, you know, gigantic paintings, but they sort of have a monumental feel when you approach them.

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This is quite big paintings, and that's a sort of installation view to something new to be taken last year at the Wolverhampton Art Gallery.

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And I suppose one of the things about this early work on was was that I was already thinking very much

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of how to navigate the use of black and African history in relationship to Western and European art.

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So for example, this this this painting,

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the Tucson painting has got a sort of a visual relationship to a painting by a French classic neo classicist painter Jacques Louis DVDs,

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which depicts Napoleon in a very similar pose to this sort of, you know, an equestrian warrior leading the troops.

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But when I created this, Toussaint knew the two painting. I did things to sort of subtly and which I can't shake the hand that David painting here,

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but sort of subtly make comments about the artistry around the paint around the sort of French painting.

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But also on. I suppose.

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I'm not trying to say this, this relationship to the to the artworks and also thinking about how oftentimes.

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There are elements of European history which have a strong connexion to black life and to African life,

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which aren't in any way visible in European artworks.

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So in this instance, for example, the reason I wanted to make a kind of allusion to this painting about Napoleon was

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because Napoleon was the leader of France at the time that Toussaint knew that two was,

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you know, battling against sort of French and French colonialism.

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So there's a sort of a biographical or historical connexion between my work and the other.

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And similarly, from the same kind of series, the title of this work,

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Backus and Ariadne is kind of related to similar to a Renaissance painting kind of similar composition.

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So I was thinking very much about how you could take motifs and ideas from Renaissance,

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the classic neoclassical western painting, and think about how that might be relevant to black and African history.

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And I should point out this painting was made in 2004, and it was specifically for the bicentenary of the Haitian Revolution.

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And here is another sort of installation photograph from when the painting

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was displayed at the Venice Biennale in the Diaspora pavilion 18 months ago.

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And then also, my work has very much focussed on the lives of black and African people in in the West,

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in the sort of western diaspora, what I say in the West, because I suppose Haiti's in the West, isn't it?

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But perhaps you could say in the metropolitan west, in and particularly in Britain.

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So this painting that was created in 2005, it's called under fire the shooting of Terry Gross,

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and I suppose it's a kind of self-explanatory title image.

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And again, this is to give you a kind of indication of what the paintings look like in situ.

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It's installation photograph from a couple of years ago in Nottingham.

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So I'm just going to start talking now a bit more about this question of unmasking Africana and what I mean by that.

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And what's on how that came about in my practise.

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So this painting or it's not painting, is a mixed media assemblage.

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It's called U.K. Diaspora. It was created in 2007 to mark the 200th anniversary of Parliament's 1847 act to abolish the slave trade.

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And I would say that one of the things that I do in my work on both of the titles and also through the the way which the work is created is,

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it's very attentive to this kind of specific details,

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historical details to the fact that this is created to mark the 200th anniversary is kind of

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emblematic of the way that I practise also using quotations and this kind of thing in the titles.

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So I always try to have these very kind of quite specific, detailed relationships with documented historical characters in different.

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And as you could probably tell, the work sort of brings together all these different canvases in a kind of map of the island of Great Britain.

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And, you know, they sort of arrange in that in that shape.

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And ask the kind of basic concept of UK diaspora is that it incorporates portraits of famous people connected with slavery.

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There was a kind of notion of thinking about a sort of a triad of concepts in a way to represent the notion of the on the the world,

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the Atlantic Triangle. And even the phrase was the phrase the of trade, a triangular trade.

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That's what this notion of a triad concept which underpins this work.

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So on the one hand, it is, and the idea was that each each sort of point of this triad would represent a kind of an aesthetic,

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not an artistic aesthetic associated with the geographical points of the triangular trade.

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So the portraits of famous people connected with slavery represented as it were the European and point of the triangle.

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There are kind of symbolic objects which you'll see in more detail than the sort of attached to each work,

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which are supposed to have a relationship to the voodoo, the various religions which appeared in the In the New World.

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A result of African enslavement such as Santeria.

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And condemned Blair and other, you know, Haitian beauty.

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And then around each of the individual canvases, the release of thousands or hundreds of nails,

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which represent the kind of like an appropriation of the Inquisition on the sacred sculpture motif, which obviously comes directly from Africa.

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If you go into little bit more detail about this notion of unmasking Africana, so on screen at the moment is a painting of one of Sir John Hawkins.

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Has anyone heard of Sir John Hawkins before? Yes, the devil himself.

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So what I'm doing actually is right now I'm digging in from a laser because.

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At work, I take that with me, OK, so.

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So John Hawkins, obviously a tutor to the sea captain, this portrait apparently done in 15,

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18, 15 and 81 and is permanent and permanent display in the National Maritime Museum.

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And I think they've kind of slightly changed when I first made this artwork to the way that they showed this painting.

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So what's different? So back we're talking about, you know, 12 years ago.

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And I think now the way they label it is a little bit more, it's a bit more clarity on.

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But obviously, Sir John Hawkins was to have his to have his portrait on display, the National Maritime Museum,

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as it has been for a very long time with a kind of a statement of, I suppose, praise for him.

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And whereas what I did in UK Diaspora, so I just go back a couple of slides.

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Sir John Hawkins, when is there?

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On Friday, the UK Diaspora acquired smaller work would arise, Sir John, and the idea of it was to kind of, I suppose, express my anger,

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if you like of my knowledge that this portrait represents someone who kidnapped the 1500 West Africans,

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sold them into a sort of slave labour camps during the 16th century.

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And so you could see that there's a piece of of a neo has been driven through, said Jones, head of faith.

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In my portraits. It's a kind of way, if you like.

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It's a kind of commentary not only on the life of this person and his evil deeds, but also on the artwork itself.

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And another. So just sit back again. So this is kind of the next to each other, this is this one in the assemblies.

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Elizabeth, the first this portrait hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.

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When I first saw it, it was in states. It was in Britain, but it's now going back to the National Portrait Gallery.

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And I suppose it was this particular work and this particular thing which sparked my decision to do the PhD thesis on.

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But by the time I kind of started it and it wasn't in state anymore.

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But, you know, so it's a 50 and 75 portrayed by Nicholas Hilliard.

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And you can see that my version of it sort of reverses the the the, you know, the orientation of the portrait.

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And the reason I wanted to include Elizabeth is because obviously, you know,

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obviously she loaned Hawkins a ship explicitly for him to carry out his treating and kidnapping activities.

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And then when he came back and with lots of money and treasure for her, she knighted him and appointed him admiral in the English Navy.

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And so the work has got a lot of my kind of work, it's got lots of, I suppose, symbolic things which relate to this history.

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And amongst them is which can just about see on the original Hilliard painting,

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you have all these kind of sort of like, I think they are supposed to be rose roses or lilies or something flowers.

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And so in my version, I sort of replaced them with faces of all of the.

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I mean, I've put 17, there's probably more than that. Cinema actors who over the years have represented Queen Elizabeth,

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including Oscar and BAFTA winners like Cate Blanchett and Helen Mirren and Duke Dench, and in all over this country, all of the films.

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Elizabeth is portrayed whether she's portrayed well or not so well in terms of her, you know,

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status in the movie slavery and her role in it is never meant to never ask me, including the current Queen Elizabeth film of the moment.

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And this was a was a film which I think came out in two thousand seven.

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So at the moment that Britain was supposedly claiming to be celebrating the abolition of the slave trade,

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the film industry felt it was time to show the movie in which the founder of the slave trade was,

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you know, seen as a great heroine of an English life.

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So this work, I suppose, was created as it as a kind of a kind of a protest, if you like, as a counterbalance to that kind of iconography,

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which permeates the British art world and British cultural life around figures

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who've been involved in the exploitation of African people over the years.

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And obviously, trading figures in the world can keep people like George Washington, Sir Isaac,

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Newton Francis Drake, then Daniel Defoe, all who had, you know, put their fingers in the pie.

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And this is a photograph of an installation photograph of the work,

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which I suppose gives you an idea of the kind of scale and you know, the way the world looks in in in when it's been installed.

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And it was acquired by the International Slavery Museum in 2017, which.

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You know, they had it there for this sort of 10th anniversary.

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So I want to move on to a work now, which was much more strongly featured, which kind of arose directly through the process to the doctoral process.

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Maybe you've seen for those of you don't seem so familiar with how practically theses work.

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So on, this painting is called your assent to inspecting the dispositions at AGC.

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It's 2014, and it says that the Muslim collection of the British Museum, they bought it last year,

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and it's hopefully going to be going on display later this year in Africa galleries on.

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And obviously you are sent to war on those who aren't familiar with that anti-colonial leader in nineteen hundreds West Africa,

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the portrait the woman he's displayed in, he's actually portrayed in the in the painting The Face of Him.

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So it was the painting represents your sense of what the actual portrait is of my partner.

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He's British born and of West African heritage and sort of the the scenery, the the landscape, the background in which the this.

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Putri said it's based on my photographs of the countryside in Ghana.

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And so now on screen is a painting by John Singer Sargent,

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who is the sort of school is the pre-eminent portrait artist of the late 19th century and early 20th century Britain and America.

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And this painting is it's like it's held by Tate, is held in Tate Britain.

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It's often on display in Britain.

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It's not at the moment, but it kind of comes in and out of display in the Victorian paintings room, and it's called a study of Madame through.

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And I should say let him go.

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He was made in Paris in 1884. And it's a kind of the the portrait of a Parisian socialite called Madame Gertrude.

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She was the wife of a wealthy Parisian banker. And the text here on the side, she probably can't read if you sing far back.

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It's basically taken from the the sort of online caption in, you know, in Tate's website about the work,

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which in itself which itself is extracted from the sort of catalogue entry for when,

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you know, when they'd created the catalogue of this of the collection with its work in it and nothing in this text mentions it.

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This is where Madame Gertrude is from. She's from a Louisiana plantation family.

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This is a photograph of her dad in his Confederate uniform.

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They were very ardent Confederate kind of slave holding family.

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And so there's nothing about that in the text about her, which, you know, it's fair enough.

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They can write what they like, honey about this lady.

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So enslaved Africans, Peabodys, Madam Gertrude's inheritance are not visible in portraits or curatorial takes.

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So from our perspective, in terms of my sort of theory, my thesis about my art and it relates to,

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I consider this to be what call most africana because there's a there's a there's a way in which by,

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you know, producing the wealth which allowed her to become the subject of this high value portrait.

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There's a kind of a as it were a very strong connexion between her and the African people who laboured on this plantation in.

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And you can see there's a slight difference between this painting and this other one, because there's two of them.

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There's a two paintings which are more or less exactly the same.

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I mean, this one is on display permanently in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where it's one of their sort of signature.

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Pride of place. Paintings and what you call it, you know, the way they curated it,

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the way they contextualise this work doesn't have any sort of mention of the the history that lies behind Madam Gertrude social position.

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So from my perspective, unmasked africana, which is, I think,

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what I'm trying to make their intended as visual appropriations of the the the masking work,

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but they function is what I'd call it, the tournament, which is an art world, which means turning around a reversal of meanings.

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So you can see that it's a very close to the fun.

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Visual relationship between the E.R., he was basically the same pose, the same body, but she's the the the figure has become a black woman.

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But even there's lots of other sort of similarities. So when you see my painting,

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you can't help but understand that there's a strong relationship between the two

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artworks in terms of proportionality where they sit in the frame of the picture.

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And even then, there is obviously a kind of ironic differences.

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You know, the fact that I'm your sense you are, who is this military commander and anti-colonial leader is holding up a shotgun,

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and she's wearing a sort of a toga of, you know, it's it's part of the sort of Ghanaian and, you know, high status dress.

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Of the 19th century. So I suppose if you think the press,

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the theoretical question that I was asking and making these kind of investment artistic investigations was does this artistic

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gesture of mine expose critique or perhaps become complicit in the original glorification of elite colonial privilege?

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OK, so. I think the.

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I think this is the more it's the last kind of work which I'm going to interrogate in this respect.

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It's a painting called For Moses had married an Ethiopian woman, numbers 12 to one.

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And it's where I suppose this notion of unmasking africana moves away from, you know, British art who even art, to be honest and into another field.

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And one of the few which I'm particularly interested in is underway the if you do religious culture and Christianity, especially so on.

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So the idea is that this painting is supposed to represent alludes to the ancient Jewish hero of Moses.

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And there are certain kind of things in the painting, which I suppose a symbolic or give you a clue to that intended meaning.

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So, for example, Moses in the Bible famously had sort of a broth road around which was code will be transformed, transformed into a snake.

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And that's one of his sort of symbols of power and of his divine powers through this use line there on the ground.

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And then also, as we know, Moses is famous.

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Give me the saw, Lewis, with his tablets of stone.

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I've got to they're not exactly tablets, but my computer actually does fold around into a tablet as well,

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so he's got his two tablets of stone, if you like to remind you who he is.

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And then obviously key to an understanding of the painting is the title for Moses had married an Ethiopian woman,

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so numbers 12 to one is where in the Bible you find this particular quote.

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And there are very oh, sorry, there are very few depictions.

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Well, I say very few. Is it fair to say this is more than one?

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There might be more than one. There is a paper about this by a really cool historian, Elizabeth McGraw,

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and she's identified this particular painting by Jacob Jordan's 17th century supposed Dutch golden age painter of Moses and his Ethiopian wife.

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But I think that is more or less it. And in terms of depictions of Moses as Ethiopian wife in Western history,

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even though Western art history is kind of filled with images of Moses because he's such an iconic figure in this Christian,

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this this part is so Christian based culture.

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So, for example, we have, Mike, you know, a lot of great artists like Michelangelo depicted Moses,

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who obviously Moses tablets there, but why isn't there?

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Fair enough. You know, Michelangelo didn't often paint people with their wives.

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And there's a few other Moses's from the highest sort of ranking parts of Western culture, which is cinema.

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And there's no real sort of attempt in the casting of Yvonne to call or marry a velvety alongside John Huston and Christian Bale to think of Moses,

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his Ethiopian wife on. And he's not in a way that it's recognisable or obvious or certain, you know, extension on, you know, obvious.

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And so you can see this is a tradition which has lasted, you know, quite a long time from the 50s up until today.

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There's not much understanding really of Moses as an African person either, because obviously he was born in Africa, according to the Bible on.

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So, you know, but you know, that's another another question.

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So when I so I made that painting as part of a residency when I was in undertook in

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South Africa in 2015 and one of the things which was really sort of I found really.

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You know, I don't think the word inspiring, but which I wanted to kind of deal with, I was thinking about this on the massacre,

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which had taken place a couple of years earlier of miners, American and mine,

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which obviously there's a press photograph here because as we know, the massacre took place on TV.

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And so when I was there in spending time travelling around the region, I kind of,

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you know, made some studies photographic studies of where the miners live,

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their sort of accommodation and the British owned Marikana platinum mine and these sort of figure in the painting.

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So it is quite you can't quite see on this side of the painting, but I think if I go back.

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It's kind of become a bit more of it's sort of on the horizon, the mine and then the shack,

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it's kind of there close in the foreground when of close in the background.

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And I suppose of it for me, you know, the purpose of thinking about that in that context is that.

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Excuse me, sir. Was this a very strong historical if you like,

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Link Moses is considered as a freedom fighter and one of the first acts which he carries out in the Bible is he he?

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He witnesses a slave, a slave master beating a slave, and Moses steps in and and dispatches the slave master.

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So this this notion of him having this anti-slavery and of freedom fighter type of role in Jewish history.

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And I should also say is that I am sort of Jewish as well.

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So my my heritage is part Jewish, so on.

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And this is an installation for you of the painting at the gallery moment, Johannesburg.

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And that's just to give you an idea of the gallery.

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I was really happy to sort of participate in with the work we've got to remember.

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It's one of the few sort of major black owned galleries in in Johannesburg, in South Africa, I should say.

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And in fact,

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quite a few that it's these paintings also had sort of religious themes as well as it related to biblical and apocryphal religious stories,

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and that's just the picture of the gallery from the outside and in the painting as

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well became part of my installation of the gospel feeling it finished in 2017.

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I suppose that gives you an idea of. You know, the sort of scale of the painting as well.

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And. This slide 40 or 41 minutes.

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Is catching up to come out. There you go. Then it goes away again, I sell real food.

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It's my website. If you want to see any more of my artwork to find out more about my practise, that's the end of my talk.

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Thank you very much for listening. I hope you can hear me at the back.