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Review

**Karina Irvine** is a writer based in Vancouver.

_Flowers for Africa_, an exhibition by Kapwani Kiwanga and organized by Kathleen Ritter at the Or Gallery in Vancouver, showcases nine floral designs. Each design rests on its own plinth, representing the moment when an African country gained independence from colonial rule.

Looking through photographs and film footage of the celebratory events that took place in each country, Kiwanga’s attention focused on the floral arrangements: on a speaker’s lapel, a bouquet or a wreath. These arrangements are taken out of their original contexts – groups of people, grinning faces, microphones and shaking hands. They represent an archive as a physical corpus, not of humans but of plants, animated by duration as they lose their vibrancy and wither throughout the course of the exhibition. As with the physical photograph, this living and fictive archive resurrects the past while being vulnerable to its own temporal degradation – quickened in this case and questioning the lack of fixity a document really has. Kiwanga’s act of selecting a single reoccurring element from a photograph or film still also brings to mind how history is a constructed discourse – in this case, recalling “celebrations” haunted by systems of oppression.

The context of this encounter is presented as a sort of showroom, brightly and evenly lit, with floral designs placed on plinths throughout the gallery space. A local florist was asked to interpret the photograph or film still chosen for each of the nine countries represented: Tunisia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Algeria, Nigeria, Mozambique, Uganda, South Sudan, Tanganyika. Portrayed as documents, or witnesses of an event, these flowers similarly shape an experience. As if materialized from a photograph, they emphasize affect over what might otherwise be seen as evidence, representing not a direct copy but an interpretation. Henry Fox Talbot, one of photography’s pioneers, understood photography to represent similarity over sameness, where the interplay between fact and fiction becomes blurred. In this sense, perhaps it is more useful to think of them not as documents at all but as analogies, as described by Walter Benjamin in _Little History of Photography_ (1931). Benjamin suggests that rather than thinking of the photograph as a facsimile, or exact representation, it is disclosive and concerned less with a stable image than with its development or, in the flowers’ case, its regression. These floral arrangements are presented as documents in and of themselves, derived from photographs and film footage. But, they are unstable documents threatened by the processes of duration and a flower’s natural inclination to dry up when cut from its source.

Kiwanga’s taxonomic approach blurs the role of the archive, questioning representation, visibility and what constitutes the production of knowledge in exhibition display. Each arrangement in _Flowers for Africa_ has been extracted from its historical context. In so doing, what can we understand from the event and those preceding it – the struggles, assassinations and coups that led to it, and after? How do these flowers function when removed from their surroundings? The absence of the political leaders affiliated with each country’s Independence Day, bringing an accessory or background decoration to the fore, lends weight to the celebratory moment while acknowledging its presence as memorial.

_Flowers for Mozambique_, for instance, makes visible a floral decal tea cup, holding a small bouquet on a tall plinth just wide enough to accommodate its saucer. This is perhaps the most peculiar arrangement in the gallery space. Why a tea cup? The florist Kiwanga worked with saw in the grainy image for Mozambique a small indication of what could be a bone china tea cup and saucer. This process of moving from interpretation to representation demonstrates the ease with which material evidence can oblige different truths.

Mozambique gained its independence on June 25, 1975, following four centuries of Portuguese rule, becoming the People’s Republic of Mozambique. Preceding this day was a decade of war between the guerrilla forces of the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) and Portuguese Armed Forces (PAF). At least 10 years were marked by village massacres, rape, mass murder, disease and starvation. It is in recognizing this history that the dried-up flowers occupy a position of remembrance, while also pointing to the vulnerability of memory. In Kiwanga’s representation, or resurrection of these flowers, we are reminded of these events and of the ongoing process of decolonization.

In _Flowers for Africa_, the relationship between the original photographs and the flowers they represent has been reversed: the photographic document is absent here, and so is its authority, the flowers take its place. With this gesture, Kiwanga underscores the instability of the photograph and emphasizes its affect by focusing on a reoccurring motif. The floral designs on display are impressions of introduced species, materialized from the ones seen in the photographs and film stills. If we begin to recognize that these objects are present and very real, as is made apparent through their degradation, we can, as Benjamin suggests, begin to redeem “what is” with “what was.” With these flowers, the main question that persists is how it is that we can recognize and feel what is not made visible?

Writer

Time

issue-137-p52-54.pdf

Karina Irvine reviews Kapwani Kiwanga’s exhibition “Flowers for Africa” that was on view at Or Gallery in Vancouver from September 9-October 14, 2017.

Kapwani Kiwanga: Flowers for Africa 

Sally McKay is a Canadian artist, art writer and independent curator. She has a PhD in Art History and Visual Culture from York University and currently teaches art full-time on a contractually limited appointment at McMaster University. 

Lisa Myers’ latest curatorial project, _Carry Forward_, presents works by 11 artists, addressing themes of deeds and documents. Myers explains that the title references “passing or transferring something on to the next generation, yet also refers to taking account of gains and loss.” For me, it also suggests momentum; this show has lift under its wings, much like an owl or an airplane.

Myers’ curatorial focus here is on how documents accrue and transmit forms of value “outside of the paradigm of things.” Writing about Mike MacDonald’s video installation, _Electronic Totem_, for example, she suggests that “Shots of berry picking, fishing, waterways, language, and song together create a document of relationships and bond to territory.”

The didactic information in the show is excellent. Myers provides deeply researched context and gentle suggestions for ways to relate the works to each other. I will describe some connections that particularly stuck out for me.

Works about wampum by Nadia Myre open the exhibition, announcing that documents come in many forms. _Monument to Two-Row_, Revised (2000– 2002) is made with genuine wampum beads, and represents the diplomatic arrangement of two peoples (Haudenosaunee and Dutch) travelling two parallel paths. In _Portrait As A River, Divided_ (2002), these parallel paths resemble scars burned into the land; the Two Row Wampum Treaty has been eviscerated. These works challenge Canadian colonial complacency by registering the acute, persistent pain and anger of broken treaties. The invocation of wampum also sets an aesthetic precedent, assuring us that documentation can impact the non-linguistic dimensions of lived experience.

Nadia Myre’s wampum thus informs Dana Claxton’s series of magnified documents from FBI surveillance of members of AIM (American Indian Movement). Here, the documents point to a particular kind of language: the cold, bureaucratic voice of government. Yet, sections have been heavily redacted with black marker, and, because each page has been magnified, these black stripes convey the indexical wobbles of the human hand that made them, the impersonal voice of the state expressed by living beings. By claiming and magnifying these documents, Claxton renders them legible as tangible behaviours of violence and erasure.

Other paper documents include Deanna Bowen’s “\_1911 Anti Creek-Negro Petition” from Immigration of Negroes from the United States to Western Canada 1910– 1911\_ (2013), which hangs in a grid of 233 pages, bearing the signatures of Canadian racists. Again, the human hand produces indexical evidence – clear, direct and awful – the signatories blatantly stating their prejudice in ways that affirm the experience of those who know that mainstream Canada has been trying to deny a deeply racist past.[^1]

Claxton and Bowen’s pieces recall the language-based aesthetics of conceptual and neo-conceptual art, but without the detachment of modernist formalism or post-modern irony. Here, there is no expectation that written words or concepts could be considered as distinct from politics, emotions and lived experience.

For me, these works by Myre, Claxton and Bowen operated as conceptual touchstones throughout the exhibition. Joining this conversation was Marjorie Beaucage’s 1992 video documentary about Rebecca Belmore’s project _Speaking to Their Mother_, which was projected in another gallery across the hall. If Claxton and Bowen’s documents seemed pulled from the filing cabinets and office spaces of settler institutions, this video document is firmly located in the voice of the people on the land.

In the video, Belmore describes her decision to create a giant megaphone in response to the Oka crisis. She explains how she initially wanted to direct it, in anger, at the government buildings in Ottawa, “because they don’t listen.” But, instead, she chose to bring the megaphone to the people.

The Cree community recorded by Beaucage are members of the Protectors of Mother Earth Wiggins Bay Blockade, gathered next to a clear-cut. People stand in front of Belmore’s megaphone and speak from the heart – in Cree. There are translations of their words on the wall of the gallery. Myers explains that the decision to provide translations was not an easy choice, but was made at Beaucage’s request. The video has no subtitles, but none are needed: the communicative affects of speakers’ gestures, body language and intonation, combined with the contexts of community gathering, the clear-cut and the land, powerfully convey the transformative aspects of the event, even to the English-speaking settler viewer.

I was struck by the fact that, while the early 1990s still feel like yesterday, they are fast becoming long ago. Beaucage’s video refreshes that moment for viewers who remember it, and perhaps the decision to translate speeches from Cree into English speaks to the continued urgency for action around land claims and resource extraction. As Myers suggests,  
“If we think of land as a document that can be read, imbued with meaning and understood, then every change also alters its legibility.”

It is fitting that the show effectively ends with a documentary video, because Myers cites Mike MacDonald’s video documentaries as her initial inspiration for _Carry Forward_. There are two of his installations in the show. In the label for _Seven Sisters_, Myers notes, “Considering land as document, MacDonald reminds us that deforestation and other forms of ecological degradation function as a kind of redaction.”

Themes of redaction, or erasure, resonate with Claxton’s _AIM_ series, but also with works by John Hampton and Maika’i Tubbs, while works by Jamelie Hassan and Brenda Draney read as affirmative expressions of situated identity. Objects that buzz with loaded presence include Maria Thereza Alves’ giant bronze jackfruit seeds – referencing Portuguese slavery in Brazil – and Krista Belle Stewart’s reworking of an archival photograph from the Nisga’a museum as a jacquard weaving. When this image of Nisga’a chiefs was displayed at the museum, a figure in Western dress had been cropped out of the frame. That same figure was again cropped out by a technical glitch in the process of weaving, a section that Stewart chose to keep hidden in a mailing tube. The two-sided tapestry hangs next to a red wall, steeped in radiant red light that recalls darkrooms, negatives and the shifts of value that occur in the processes of bringing images forth into the world.

At every turn, these works remind us that history is a living process. Through a thoughtful examination of documents to reveal and reconfigure relationships of power, this exhibition tallies, lifts and carries forward the value of past, present and future acts.

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Sally McKay reviews “Carry Forward”, a group exhibition curated by Lisa Myer at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery featuring the work of Maria Thereza Alves, Marjorie Beaucage, Deanna Bowen, Dana Claxton, Brenda Draney, John Hampton, Jamelie Hassan, Mike MacDonald, Nadia Myre, Krista Belle Stewart and Maika’i Tubbs. The exhibition took place from September 29, 2017-January 14, 2018.

Carry Forward

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