THIS PARTICULAR MASQUERADE, unmasked
This Particular Masquerade 4, Exerpt of print, 600 centimeters x 24.1 cm.x 24.1cm.Haugar Vestfold Kunstmusuem, Norway 2013.
EXHIBITING particulars: This print can be exhibited as a lambda print or in a lightbox.
EXHIBITED at the exhibition AMNESIA, FORGETFULNESS IN
NORDIC ART, Curated by Grethe Hald, Haugar Vestfold Kunstmuseum, Norway in Sep-Dec 2013.
This Particular Masquerade 1, unmasked, 2013.
THIS PARTICULAR MASQUERADE, unmasked
This Particular Masquerade 1, Exerpt of print, 600 centimeters x 24.1 cm.x 24.1cm.Haugar Vestfold Kunstmusuem, Norway 2013.
EXHIBITING particulars: This print can be exhibited as a lambda print or in a lightbox.
EXHIBITED at the exhibition AMNESIA, FORGETFULNESS IN
NORDIC ART, Curated by Grethe Hald, Haugar Vestfold Kunstmuseum, Norway in Sep-Dec 2013.
THIS PARTICULAR MASQUERADE, unmasked
This Particular Masquerade 2, Exerpt of print, 600 centimeters x 24.1 cm.x 24.1cm.Haugar Vestfold Kunstmusuem, Norway 2013.
EXHIBITING particulars: This print can be exhibited as a lambda print or in a lightbox.
EXHIBITED at the exhibition AMNESIA, FORGETFULNESS IN
NORDIC ART, Curated by Grethe Hald, Haugar Vestfold Kunstmuseum, Norway in Sep-Dec 2013.
THIS PARTICULAR MASQUERADE, unmasked
This Particular Masquerade 3, Exerpt of print, 600 centimeters x 24.1 cm.x 24.1cm.Haugar Vestfold Kunstmusuem, Norway 2013.
EXHIBITING particulars: This print can be exhibited as a lambda print or in a lightbox.
EXHIBITED at the exhibition AMNESIA, FORGETFULNESS IN
NORDIC ART, Curated by Grethe Hald, Haugar Vestfold Kunstmuseum, Norway in Sep-Dec 2013 and POSSESSION, Curated by Dr.Temi Odomosu, New Shelter Plan, Copenhagen, Denmark 2014.
Spiritual Diaspora in Montage By Temi Odumosu
09 November 2016
“It takes time to understand another culture, and to make artwork in relation to it…you really have to trust yourself, your intuition, the connections you make, and the process itself.” Michelle Eistrup
It is May of 2013, along the Senegalese coast in the fishing village of Joal-Fadiouth. Early in the Sahel summertime, the warm beige sands are decorated with shells daily offered by the Atlantic’s rising tide. No cars or traffic, just a biorhythm of survival. Voice and feet, cloth, earth, hands and fire. Bleating goats and strutting cockerels showing off their tulip red crowns, then horses saddled as if from another age. Unusually, there are pigs here. Before dawn fishermen are trawling the waters: an ebb and flow of migrants lending their strong legs and willing spines to this necessary but thankless labour. Brightly coloured plastic crates are filled with possibility and plenty, for now. People honing small trades at markets and in their homes. Palm oil stews and boiling rice redolent vapour at every other door. This landscape hosts an unwitting fashion show, with men and women dressed vibrantly, moving with poised urgency and ease. Graceful. And they too speak creole - a combination of gesture, Serer, French and other inflections of cross-cultural contact. It is all music.
Here in slow time, under history’s long shadow, where colonial memories flicker through the salt wash of ocean on land; white crosses marking the resting place of missionaries and merchants who did not make it back. Here in the birthplace of Léopold Senghor. Here where forgetting is impossible. Here the artist comes to make contact. To find what has been lost, performed and shared, across latitudinal time, by the sons and daughters of the transatlantic.
Michelle Eistrup arrived in Joal-Fadiouth in 2013, to make connections with artists Muhsana Ali and Amadou Kane Sy, who run the Portes et Passages du Retour centre for art and holistic development. This was a creative homecoming, an opportunity to explore how art, spirit and memory were being infused into cultural practice as it focussed on local community development. But the village also presented itself as a muse, a place with a mystic language made known when observed from another perspective. Up close, from below, without words. This was the space Eistrup occupied, calling on local knowledge (as she always does) to facilitate her conspicuous invisibility, allowing her to bear witness. To them she was the oddity outsider just taking lots of photos. And she was, but also something more. Magnifying eyes that noticed patterns and expressions in the spaces between. Elegant gestures and dynamic choreographies connecting bodies with the environment. People being extraordinary, without even knowing it: giving new life to discarded matter, and thus being bigger than themselves. This was a masquerade. Not a ceremonial veiling, or, necessarily a carnival for collective subversion. Not even a ritual for communing with the other world, although this potential was there. Latent. No, this was a masquerade of another kind; a holy dance of breath-taking resilience, overflowing with textures, energy and light.
* * * * *
This Particular Masquerade, Unmasked (2014) is a photographic installation composed in multiple parts (or scenes) that were inspired by Joal-Fadiouth, and it incorporates the material and intuitive methodologies central to Michelle Eistrup’s practice. Foremost it is a work of montage, of re-visioning, in which diverse visual elements are organised into long and seamless landscapes: Reimagined realities where bodies, textiles, transatlantic sites, natural motifs, and ghostly historical elements are rearranged and then merged. Disjointed, but somehow harmonious. Like jazz it is a chaordic artwork - of structure, improvisation and flow - featuring the village’s residents as performers fixed between layers of space and time. One scene, for example, calls our attention to the beach, with men holding crates on their heads, walking towards and away from the shoreline. Statuesque and held in the snapshot of movement, they are going somewhere and nowhere at the same time. Behind them remade palm trees mark the landscape with rhythmic symmetry. Through combined handmade and digital process of mirroring, the artist has turned the trees into fanned doorways. Organic and ornate. And where might these doorways lead? All dimensions are possible. Yet in the background, fading and then again coming into focus, is the outline of another cityscape, another site of Diasporic memory.
Cut and paste is action, experience, identity, and solution. As a visual practice it offers Eistrup ways to bridge gaps between communities, to signal how spiritual expressions travel, and in doing so to create new portals (maps) for communion. It is a method for innovation but also suspending those inherited borders and boundaries that are the permanent scars of history. In the artist’s worldview Benin is in Senegal, Senegal in Trinidad, Trinidad in Denmark. They can be a single site in her work, and thus no country is entirely unique or at least without record of a postcolonial struggle for cultural survival. Like Isis in the ancient Egyptian creation myth, gathering and putting the pieces of her husband Osiris back together (restoring him to life), Eistrup re-members identity through images captured by her camera during encounters with places of personal and spiritual significance. She maintains: “A photograph is also about what you do not capture, which still lives there beneath the surface of the image. I know what is in and out of the frame, and I encourage people to think about this too.”
The aesthetic performances crafted by Eistrup are decolonial acts. They challenge the past and present concurrently. They also attend to subjectivities that are so often marginalised or go unnoticed. Another scene in this work makes poetry out of quiet moments: tailors making garments, shot in black and white, are accented by starchy colourful fabrics hanging on a shelf. One man wears a T-shirt with the British flag. We can also see photographs of people; magazine cuts outs, a pair of spectacles. These subtle signs of life show how the world and its histories are invoked in private spaces. Highlighted in colour, the mundane is made relevant. And this attention to detail - a duty of care - is further reflected in the way these artworks are mounted by Eistrup for exhibitions, adding another layer of meaning. Framed inside wooden Wenge light boxes that evoke the experience of visiting a traditional museum, the people represented in the piece become artefacts, unique treasures, not simply to be witnessed but more importantly to be venerated and looked after. Such an ethics of representation, making the absent present, acknowledges that each photographed subject appears as a gift, offering themselves as vessels of innate knowledge. In this way the artwork expresses itself in several ways: as landscape, performance and archive.
Generous SUPPORT and FUNDING comes from:
The National Danish Arts Council and the International Danish Arts Counci http://www.kunst.dk/english/ towards the production of This Particular Masquerade, Unmasked and towards residency at Alice Yard in Trinidad.
