Within The Mould, Against the Grain establishes itself as a case study on the genealogies and emergence of Black culture from within the Continent ( Africa) and across the diaspora.
Utilizing Deforrest Brown Jr’s seminal text (Assembling A Black Counter-Culture) and Stuart Halls’s assertions on Black popular culture and identity as conceptual points of departure, this exhibition investigates the similarities, differences and connections that exist between instances of Black cultural production that have emerged from the Western Black diaspora as well as the Continent. Though united under the shared identity marker of “Black”, each one holds nuance based on separate histories, traditions, material conditions and varying stakes.
Through an intimate coalescing of lens-based works, schematics and sonic installations works, exhibiting artists Tati Au Miel, Odartey Aryee, Deforrest Brown jr, and Isabel Okoro expand on existing theoretical and conceptual frameworks that consider Black artists as knowledge keepers and producers, insisting that Black cultural identity, like Black cultural production, is a robust and complex process of both becoming and being that is ongoing.
Exploring themes like traditional spirituality, embodied knowledge, the limits of representation, global Black identity, and the tensions between appropriation, commercialization, and Black cultural production, this exhibition exemplifies the politics of style and oppositionality that position Black cultural production as existing against the grain, despite the hegemonic forces that attempt to dilute and subvert its potential.
