Still from The Burial of Kojo, Blitz Bazawule, 2018
Reflecting on the work of four contemporary Black artists who encapsulate the scope, nuances and freedom of an Afro-surrealist ethos
words Irenosen Okojie
Where mainstream presentations of blackness have previously felt limiting, offering tired tropes around black identity and power, a growing tide of contemporary black artists are embracing the extraordinary and absurd to construct new realities which reconfigure what blackness as an aesthetic can be. This essay examines the use of surrealism in the work of four black artists who create escapist portals for modern audiences to experience blackness in a fantastical and otherworldly way.
Afro-surrealism, which couples the bizarre with ideas of black identity and power, allows for more expansive explorations of blackness. If blackness shrinks or feels limited under the crushing, often insidiously damaging weight of western systems of oppression, specifically the endemic tolls of structural racism, then the extraordinary provides space to construct new realities and absurdist visions that reconfigure what blackness as an aesthetic can be. The likes of Henry Dumas* and Sun Ra paved the way. Recently, artists such as Lina Iris Viktor, Jenn Nkiru, Blitz Bazawule and Tierra Whack have boldly come to the fore with works that encapsulate the scope, nuances and freedom of an Afro-surrealist ethos. If ‘Space is the Place’ as Sun Ra lamented, one of the godfathers of Afrofuturism and Afro-surrealism as a by-product, then this fraction of artists create whole new worlds in the space; revising, reconstructing and re-imagining tired tropes around blackness.
In her stunning display at The Autograph Gallery London last year, artist Lina Iris Viktor’s magnificent exhibition Some Are Born To Endless Night — Dark Matter showcased hallucinatory, visionary pieces filled with lustres of black, punctuated by incandescent 24 karat gold and decadent blue hues. Viktor creates luminous universes where black is the centre, the framework, the default setting. By placing herself as the subject matter in these dreamlike photographs, paintings and sculptural installations featuring her darkened body in lush Eden settings, Viktor infuses her work with black diasporic histories. Here, the multifaceted notions of blackness, delivered within a surreal milieu, are transformative and enriching. Blackness is presented as the essence of life, as matter, as colour, as socio-political consciousness.
We Are The Night — The Keepers Of Light, Lina Iris Viktor, 2015-2019
Similarly, Ghanaian musician turned director Blitz Bazawule’s dazzling film The Burial of Kojo, an intoxicating mixture of fable, allegory and myth-making which follows a young girl struggling with the conflicts between her father and uncle in rural Ghana, is a heady Afro-surrealist brew. An immersive, sensory experience full of striking, symbolic imagery: a car engulfed in flames by the sea, a masked figure on horseback chasing the young girl on an empty road, water as weapon and healing, smoke as transportation between the physical and otherworldly realms. Bazawule creates space for the internal landscape of his young, African female protagonist. An act that feels rebellious in its refusal to limit its imaginings of blackness to solely the physical. The dualities of our heroine are fully realised in this luminous tale, underpinned by Bazawule’s afrobeat score. The film feels ancestral in its composition yet wholly new with fantastical flourishes.
Nigerian-British director Jenn Nkiru’s film Rebirth Is Necessary offers an intricate tapestry within the genre. Archival footage on black cultures is spliced with fresh scenes shot by Nkiru, mixed with historical references. Nkiru is heavily influenced by video artist and cinematographer Arthur Jafa. And like Jafa, there is no linear narrative to her shorts on blackness, which she refers to as “cosmic archaeology.” A term that captures pieces imbued with elements of the psychedelic and the supernatural. Nkiru disrupts straight forward notions of representation. She is not interested in producing palatable works in which ideas or intentions get watered down to suit the audience. Instead, Nkiru wants to not only radicalise the way blackness is presented through form but also embed blackness in spaces simply just by being without the pressures of accomplishing remarkable feats. Several scenes illustrate this in her work, where the stillness of black bodies is juxtaposed against the beauty of movement when time is not in continuum. Indeed, Rebirth Is Necessary auspiciously opens with a recording from Sun Ra: We hereby declare ourselves to be of another order of beings, the Astro Nation of the United Worlds of Outer Space, Sun Ra. The commentary plays over a series of fleeting images: a woman with a flower pinned to her braids on the ground howling, a black cherub painted blue in a stark landscape, black figures in an intimate embrace, their skin dusted with coloured jewels as they undulate to rhythms beyond the confines of celluloid. A flurry of images ensues, each striking shot anchoring its own mode of blackness, its own repository of liberation.
Still from Rebirth is Necessary, Jenn Nkiru, 2017
In 2018, hip hop artist Tierra Whack released the visual accompaniment to her critically acclaimed album, Whack World. The fifteen-minute film consists of one-minute videos for each track. Whack World feels like a series of installation pieces rather than a run-of-the-mill video. Like Solange Knowles, Whack has pushed the boundaries of what music videos can do for a black female artist, perhaps subconsciously even conjuring the influence of Missy Elliot’s The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly), not in rhyme style or delivery but a desire to use the medium as a cultural currency to create a stand-alone artist. Rather than a broader commentary on blackness, the film feels specific and much more personal in its focus on the hypnotic, mind-altering world of Tierra Whack with its bright, bubble gum-like milieu tinged with elements of darkness.
The eye-popping visuals combined with Whack’s lyricism and playfulness positions her as a groundbreaking artist possessing the foresight to give a social media-obsessed generation something to talk about. Whack is also significant as one of the few dark-skinned black women in hip hop with gravitas. This is an important aspect because the video medium gives her the scope to showcase interior and exterior narratives beyond the reductive stereotypes often attached to darker-skinned black women. The images in Whack World are visual candies, euphoric shots made for audiences with a short attention span. Each video has its own concept, its own set of references. If black is often regarded as monolithic in various socio and political contexts, Whack has firmly pushed back against that by producing a visual album that feels radically unique.
Still from Whack World, Tierra Whack, 2018
Blackness is often heavily policed. By critiquing the structures imposed on black bodies through a surrealist cultural aesthetic, this group of artists offers alternative contemplations on past, present and future modes. As a writer, I have been frustrated by the lack of freedom afforded to black artists, the limited, imposed narratives internalised then regurgitated for audiences to watch our pain but look away from our joy and the spectrums of our existence. Our complexities are frustratingly made small in inauthentic ways. There is much to mine from the fullness of blackness, the beauty of it, the depth of it; its glimmering edges, its kaleidoscopic matter, its concave refractions of light. I embraced my own combination of marrying the everyday with the surreal to translate my lived experiences as a black woman in the UK and to create other ways of existing beyond deliberate, maligning limitations. Never more so than through my experimental short story collections Speak Gigantular and Nudibranch where the transcendental nature of blackness is rooted not in the margins but as the centre. Each distinctive story, each portal of colourful characters are perhaps extensions of myself, other lives lived, other universes traversed. These reimaginings of worlds give agency and provide blueprints against the erasure of blackness, in particular, the complicated hidden lives of black women.
In the current climate where the Black Lives Matter movement has extended its global reach, these works feel prescient and necessary even as the embodiments of true freedom. If we are to say that Black Lives Matter with the fervour of a clarion call then it must do so at every level, not just in obviously political spheres. The familiarity of black pain touted as the main marker of our existence is not only often used as leverage to give access that often feels anticlimactic but it is intrinsic to the functionality of the very societies that impose second-class status on us. The full beauty of the movement lies in absences not yet captured, made indelible on TV screens as the norm, not the anomaly. If we are to embrace all the dimensions of the movement, its symbiotic potential through an Afro-surrealist lens, then there must be room for black joy, black virtuosity, black mediocrity, space to fail upwards. The autonomy to define our stories, to operate within and beyond frameworks that already exist should lie in our hands. Storytelling is power. It is cultural currency. The elasticity of Afro-surrealism gives room for every facet of blackness to be explored.
Afro-surrealism has long existed in one form or another, bubbling away, slowly encroaching, thriving in the margins before occasionally spilling into the centre. The Negritude movement in 1930s France, spearheaded by the likes of Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Léon Damas and Aristide Maugé, saw a focus on Africa despite their sense of displacement. Surrealism shared striking commonalities with traditional African art and literature which they drew from to inform a revolutionary politic that included presenting the ‘new black’ whilst aiming to decolonize the country as well as its minds.
Death and the Conquistador, Aubrey Williams, 1959 (a Negritude artist)
The genre still maintains its radical, fringe-like aesthetic even in its modern iterations. Terence Nance’s outstanding Random Acts of Flyness, which premiered on HBO, is an avant-garde, culture-shifting take on black male vulnerability, as well as the absurdities of the black experience that are both metaphoric and achingly real. Its polyphonic feel speaks to Amiri Baraka’s ‘dream logic’ definition where different mediums are deployed to frame each other. The show does not exist in a vacuum. Ten years ago, HBO would not have commissioned such a wildly experimental, collaboratively made series from a gifted, unorthodox director. It arrived in a period that ushered searing black works to the landscape including Moonlight, Insecure and Sorry To Bother You. The game changer was Black Panther, an Afrofuturist juggernaut which broke records globally. In its specificity of depicting a particular black future, it spoke to wider audiences, laying a foundation for more uniquely told black stories. There is now an increasing appetite for black stories. The critical and commercial success of these films indicates that our experiences resonate. They matter. Blackness contains multitudes. By imagining the limitless possibilities of blackness, this vanguard of artists offers new ways of seeing, being and ultimately defining our humanity.
*Editor’s Note: The term Afro-Surreal was initially coined by American writer and activist Amiri Baraka, who first used the term ‘Afro-surreal expressionist’ to describe American writer and poet Henry Dumas and his work. In 2009, writer D. Scot Miller published his AfroSurreal Manifesto in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, expanding on the term and defining the movement in greater detail.
This essay was originally featured in Issue 4, The Reverie Issue.
See more of Irenosen Okojie’s work here.