In À tes eaux, de nouveau, artist Paul Maheke has created a visual poem that unfolds through the use of text, photography, and drawing. These pages build on the artist’s interest in invisible and nonhuman realms, a subject that is manifested in other works, including his recent project OOLOI (2019), at Triangle France, Marseille, and A fire circle for a public hearing (2018), an exhibition we worked on together at Chisenhale Gallery, London.
Photographs of a flowing river, red with sediment, reoccur throughout. Influenced by feminist scholar Astrida Neimanis’s writing on water’s potential to connect human and nonhuman relations, Maheke’s photographs act as a visual foundation for the texts and characters embedded in this project.1 Hand-drawn portraits of enigmatic humanoids occupy the remaining pages. These partly obscured, not-fully formed figures reference Octavia E. Butler’s ooloi, an alien third-gender in her science-fiction trilogy, Xenogenesis.
Words cut out of each page form a fragmented narrative that moves between past, present, and future and act as a device that provides transparency between the pages’ contents. The phrases are pulled from Audre Lorde’s essay “A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer” (1988) and from Maheke’s script for a three-chaptered performance, which took place during A fire circle for a public hearing. In Maheke’s performance, his collaborators worked with spoken word and movement to challenge marginalized and erased narratives within the Western imaginary.
In the first chapter of A fire circle . . . , Maheke invited performers to reformat Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s seminal performance Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform) (1991). One of the performers enacted the original choreo- graphy from the position of a black, gender-queer womxn performing in drag king. Go-go dancing without a platform, the dancer’s movements explored the complexities of a body that has the potential to be simultaneously erased and hypervisible within dominant modes of representation. For Maheke, the work enacted “the seeming impossibility of escaping this pattern when black and queer in the West.”2
In this project for X-TRA, Maheke develops his on-going use of opacity and transparency to question the cultural value placed on being seen. The last page includes the words “and re-was before, and because I will be and re-be again,” as if to channel the voice of a nebulous being that is present but not always seen. Here, Maheke invites the erased to be visible and offers protection to that which wishes to remain concealed.
–Ellen Greig
Paul Maheke is an artist who lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions include OOLOI, Triangle France, Marseille (2019); A fire circle for a public hearing, Chisenhale Gallery, London, and Vleeshal Middelburg, Netherlands (2018–19); and I Lost Track of the Swarm, South London Gallery (2016). Selected group exhibitions include Le centre ne peut tenir, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2018); Ten Days Six Nights, Tate Modern, London (2017); and the Diaspora Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale (2017). He has recently performed at Performa 19, New York City; Völksbuhne, as part of Assemble Performance Programme, Berlin; Meetings on Art, 58th Venice Biennale (all 2019); and Block Universe, London (2018).
Ellen Greig is a curator based in London. She holds the position of Curator: Commissions at Chisenhale Gallery, where she has curated solo exhibitions by Yuri Pattison, Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Paul Maheke, Banu Cennetoğlu, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Mandy El-Sayegh, and Ima-Aasi Okon, among others. Previously, she was curator at Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea, where she commissioned works by artists Hannah Black and Christian Nyampeta. In 2015, she was Curator in Residence at LUX Artists’ Moving Image and Cinenova Collection. She was Assistant Curator of Liverpool Biennial 2014, where she worked closely with artists Bonnie Camplin, Aaron Flint Jamison, Hassan Khan, and Peter Wächtler, among others. She holds an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London.