ART-PRESENTATION: Hugo Boss Prize 2018-Simone Leigh
Simone Leigh’s practice is an object-based exploration of vernacular visual traditions from throughout the black diaspora and their intersection with constructions of black female subjectivity, black feminist discourse, histories of radical resistance, and ethnographic research. Through her principal medium of ceramics, she relates quotidian objects to bodies, and labor to performance, exploring tropes of beauty, utility, agency, desire, and possession.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Guggenheim Museum Archive
The Hugo Boss Prize, which was established in 1996 to recognize significant achievement in contemporary art. In October 2018 Simone Leigh was selected as the winner of the Hugo Boss Prize from a short list of six finalists that also included Bouchra Khalili, Teresa Margolles, Emeka Ogboh, Frances Stark, and Wu Tsang. The exhibition “Hugo Boss Prize 2018: Simone Leigh, Loophole of Retreat” includes new sculptures and a sound installation, as well as a printed broadsheet by cultural historian Saidiya Hartman and a film program featuring works by the artist and by director Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich. “Loophole of Retreat” the title of the project and related public program, is a phrase drawn from the writings of Harriet Jacobs, a formerly enslaved abolitionist who in 1861 pseudonymously published an account of her struggle to achieve freedom, including the 7 years she spent hiding from her master in a tiny crawl space beneath the rafters of her grandmother’s home. This act of defiant fortitude, which forged a “loophole of retreat” from an unjust reality, serves as a touchstone for Leigh’s long-standing commitment to honoring the agency of black women and their power to inhabit worlds of their own creation. In a suite of new sculptures, Leigh merges the human body with domestic vessels or architectural elements that evoke unacknowledged acts of female labor and care. These works summon the ancient archetype of the nude statue and inflect it with folk traditions from across the African diaspora as well as with historical references ranging from the Benin bronzes to the portraiture of 17th Century Spanish painter Diego Velázquez. As such, they emerge from what the artist refers to as a process of “formal creolization”, channeling the cultural fluidity that is a legacy of colonialism. The faces of Leigh’s bronze sculptures are depicted without eyes, while another work features an abstracted torso assembled from a clay pipe. This refusal of a reciprocal gaze endows each figure with a resolute autonomy. Leigh’s prevailing themes of self-determination and communal caretaking are expanded upon in a sound installation that emanates from the back of the gallery. A concrete structure, composed of breeze-block walls characteristic of vernacular buildings throughout the Global South, recalls both a prison cell and a shrine. A sound montage echoes through the space, layering musical samples with other elements, including recordings of a recent protest at a Brooklyn prison and news coverage of the 1985 fatal police bombing of the residence of MOVE*. Created in collaboration with experimental musician Moor Mother, this work of “sonic protection” as Leigh terms it, pays homage to a member of MOVE* who was incarcerated in 1978 while eight-months pregnant. After she secretly delivered her son, her fellow prisoners sang and made distracting sounds to conceal his arrival from the guards, ultimately granting the new mother a few precious days with her baby. Within Leigh’s installation sits a ceramic sculpture, a medium that has been central to the artist since the outset of her career. Echoing the expansive skirts seen in the central gallery, this bell-like form is adorned with a woven motif that resembles braided hair or sutures in skin.
The film program features the premieres of a new iteration of Leigh’s video work “Untitled (M*A*S*H)” (201819) and two shorts directed by Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich. Depicting a mobile medical theater amid a wartime environment that the artist equates with the lived experience of black women, “Untitled (M*A*S*H)” renders a space of healing and care in reference to the United Order of Tents, a secretive organization of black female nurses founded in the 1840s by individuals involved in the Underground Railroad. The film amplifies Leigh’s frequent theme of communal protection, capturing quiet moments of reprieve and restoration as women perform acupuncture, recite blessings, make music, and keep watch. “A Quality of Light” (2018) is the first part of Hunt-Ehrlich’s “Black Composer Trilogy” which draws on her family’s history to shed light on untold stories of black women artists. This film weaves together archival footage and quotes by writer and political revolutionary Aimé Césaire with scenes that foreground the effects of aging on the director’s grandmother, who was a prolific composer. Inspired by Hunt-Ehrlich’s working trips with Leigh to visit with the women of the United Order of Tents, “Spit on the Broom” (2019) is a surreal documentary that moves between re-creations of recorded events and lyrical evocations of latent aspects of African American women’s history. At the heart of the film are encounters with the women of the United Order of Tents, who express the group’s core value of self-determination for its members and constituents.
*MOVE: is a black liberation group founded in 1972 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania by John Africa (Vincent Leaphart) and Donald Glassey, a social worker from the University of Pennsylvania. The group lived in a communal setting in West Philadelphia, abiding by philosophies of anarcho-primitivism. The group combined revolutionary ideology, similar to that of the Black Panthers, with work for animal rights. The group is particularly known for two major conflicts with the Philadelphia Police Department. In 1978, a standoff resulted in the death of one police officer, injuries to several other people, and life sentences for nine members who were convicted of killing the officer. In 1985, another confrontation ended when a police helicopter dropped a bomb on the MOVE compound, a row house in the middle of the 6200 block of Osage Avenue. The resulting fire killed eleven MOVE members, including five children, and destroyed 65 houses in the neighborhood. The survivors later filed a civil suit against the city and the police department, and were awarded $1.5 million in a 1996 settlement.
Info: Curators: Katherine Brinson and Susan Thompson, Assistant Curator: Amara Antilla, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, Duration: 19/4-27/10/19, Days & Hours: Mon, Wed-Fri & Sun 10:00-17:30, Tue 10:00-21:00, Sat 10:00-20:00, www.guggenheim.org
