Fugitive Photography with Anique Jordan and Fred Moten

At Patel Brown, I was excited to see the photography of Anique Jordan and hear the wisdom of Fred Moten. Underbelly, a solo exhibition showcasing what Moten described as Anique’s particular “photographic pallet” paired perfectly with Moten’s work, namely The Undercommons. I noticed immediately that, unlike most exhibitions I have frequented, the displays did not include the didactics expected to accompany each piece. Instead, patrons were immersed in a seamless experience of installations that told a story using folds in light, time, colour, space, and worlds.

It felt like a bending in time as well as a playing with time. There were obvious callbacks to a familiar Black childhood. There was a preservation of a time and space that we could connect to as safe, available to leisure, an enclave away from our public selves. And yet the figure in the photographs is unknowable: metonymic for a Blackness we can retrieve from our memories. The Black figure in the art is so many Black figures we remember.

We can imagine the smells of that room, breadfruit and plantain frying nearby. We can imagine the sounds of that room, Miles Davis, Nina Simone, Shabba Ranks, or The Fugees pumping from a big, heavy speaker against another wall. We can imagine the taste of that room, some rum or whisky or fruits soaking to make cake that we are not allowed to touch is probably hung on some floating shelf on the other side, a wet bar the grownups gather around occasionally.

For Black kids, this is some quintessential home from our childhood, whether that be a neighbour, a grandparent, a shopkeeper, or someone’s auntie who would watch us sometimes. There is a Blackness to it, and it is inviting. It is familiar and safe although we cannot say for sure where we are or how we are related to the homeowner.

Black hair was being kissed by the sun as we entered the garage space for the artist talk. Black hairstyles and all their sheen were getting their shine on. Old friends reunited, close community expanded to meet other artists. People continued to gather, exchange greetings, make introductions, laugh, and quite simply welcome each other. There were chairs for those who needed chairs, and some cold beverages were available. Most of us stood in the space behind the chairs, or sat on the concrete floor to the left of where the speakers were sitting.

The room was buzzing. Anique had done what Anique does best: she put out a call, and the community responded. In the room I recognized some of the best of Toronto’s Black arts community, including Liz Ikiriko, Nataleah Hunter-Young, Charmaine Lurch, and Dr. Ola Mohammed. There I also met Sarah-Tai Black, Janine (Anique’s brilliant studio assistant), and Black scholars who teach at McMaster. In walked a platform Dr.Marten-plaid neon green skirt paired with a crisp white Tupac t-shirt and a clear PVC purse-wearing Dr. Evelyn Amponsah. I was in awe. I saw people who were comfortable, curious, interested, and smiling. The vibe was joy mixed with the easy cool of success that you know you damn well earned. 

The talk begins with an explanation of this exhibition and its title. From the promotional material, “Jordan invites us to experience the power of the Underbelly. The power that is made visible when other worlds are seen. Underbelly is not a place and so Jordan’s invitation isn’t to somewhere. Rather, it is an invitation to nowhere; an invitation to practice seeing what we cannot see; an invitation to be haunted by other worlds…We are told, ‘if you go there, you may not return, in fact you will not return…’ Jordan suggests, maybe we want to go to these other places and offer them space in this one- for the exact reason that we do not want to return to this world as it currently is” (Dr. Evelyn Amponsah). Let’s tease the contradiction: why is colonialism a direction that is “desired” to not return from, while Black radicality comes with a warning? I suggest that the contradiction is a confession: colonialism knows we can think our way out of it and into so much more, so much else. Colonialism warns us against dreaming not for our own safety, but for its own. Its authority rests in nobody asking questions, everybody following the program, and colonized people abandoning what they know is their own power.

The legacy of thinking this way comes from pairing Christina Sharpe’s “in the wake” to Fred Moten’s “in the break.” Moten explains during the talk that “vulnerability requires further vulnerability” and that “if the underbelly implies a secret, it has to be shared.” We the audience and Black artists like Anique and their work are committed to the vulnerability. We are actively engaged in the re-arrangement. Moten remixes what we think of as an “archive” and how we are absented from it into an “air-chive,” which means that we are always present, in the ether, in ways that are not written down or codified in legible ways, and that is some of the magic – and hauntology- of Black culture. The work we see in the gallery employs what Anique calls a visual palette (language dubbed onto her by Moten) including glitching, shadows, blur, blackness, repetition, portals, dust/imperfection or residue. The work again reminds me of Marx, particularly on “camera obscura,” or the distorted outcomes of our social worlds. All of these techniques build upon Saidiya Hartman’s work on critical fabulation, Robin D.G. Kelley’s exemplification of surrealism in Freedom Dreams, and a host of other scholarship Anique has piled at the reception desk of her exhibition as inspiration for Underbelly.

Moten continues to describe Anique’s work as “the ongoing refreshment of aesthetics sociology,” all while also giving us his tiny rendition to the Trinidadian soca song with the lyrics “hold yuh woman round she belly, workey workey workey workey" (by Burning Flames). This mix of elite academia and quotidian diasporic Blackness is what I love about this talk. We gather to learn from the best, and the information is presented to us in ways that are accessible, as if what we seek already belongs to us. It is an active practice of the undercommons, whether you have read the text or not. The work of Jordan and Moten are both practices of decolonization, made only possible by a legacy of marronage. I think of the marooned, then and now, on islands rich with spirits and in ideas which float and connect us together.

In an interview with Anique, she explains some of the Shouta (or Shouter) Baptist traditions including fasting before doing the very serious work of resting, dreaming, and using imaginative and meditative powers to find our ways in community and life. The work she has displayed in the lightboxes in her exhibition are a nod to this real work of being responsible for our dreams, as well as the real rest that is needed while labouring in late-stage capitalism. Both are taken seriously, as they should be. The pose is referential, as it has been seen and theorized by Edouard Glissant’s “Right to Opacity,” a right to “not have to be understood on others’ terms, and to be misunderstood if one so chooses.” It is a defiant position – posing both in front of the camera and in society writ large. It is a lingua franca that connects gnosis and praxis of “captured” Blackness, both showing and exposing interiority in relation to the external world. The image creates both intimacy and rebellion while positioning itself as ultimately exposed, vulnerable, and nonetheless agentive.

During our interview I interrogate the word ‘excavation; to make a hole or channel by digging.’ We are taught to dig, to look, to find, that our modes of being have been lost and burned and buried – and they have been – but in the process of their death they also float, they haunt, become specters, phoenix, permanent. In this way, Black spirituality has been martyred. Can you say more about how your work doesn’t seek to ‘revive’ what has been lost but instead creates a way of seeing what remains (in its wake)?” Anique challenges me and we discuss the question further before we agree: Black spirituality is not martyred because it was never murdered. Colonization is an ongoing murder that does not end and does not win, an ongoing attempt at annihilation that does not end and does not win. We discuss how this work is rooted in hauntology and ontological death. It is from this talk that I more fully understand “the fugitive” and rhizomatic nature of modern Blackness.

We briefly talk about “Underbelly’s” relationship to Three Thirty, an exhibition curated by Anique Jordan that I reviewed for Rungh in 2020. Anique says about all the work that she does that at her core, she is “finding ways to acknowledge what we are told is not there.”

I end the interview the way it began, with me lovingly relishing in the rebellion of Black radical traditions that exist and persist against at odds. I feel my Blackness is at once battle-tested and primed for the afro-bubblegum that is made possible by artists such as Anique Jordan.