PHOTO:Deana Lawson-Centropy
Deana Lawson’s practice borrows from traditional aesthetics, ranging from photographic and figurative portraiture, social documentary aesthetics, and family album photographs. Lawson received the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013, which was the turning point in her career from when she expanded her practice to international territories and cultures. She has since then photographed in DR Congo, Haiti, Jamaica, and Ethiopia, and Brazil, among others.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Kunsthalle Basel Archive
As part of Deana Lawsons’ participation in the 34th Bienal de São Paulo, the US photographer was invited to travel to the northeastern state of Bahia, in Brazil. There she produced a set of photographs that portray people and places marked by the strong presence of cultures deriving from the African diaspora. These photographs are included in her exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel, “Centropy”, an exhibition co-produced with Fundação Bienal de São Paulo as part of the 34th Bienal. Sensitive to the stereotypes in Western, African and afro-descendant portraiture, Lawson predominantly explores topics such as physicality, identity, gender and family in a practice that is grounded in thorough research on blackness and representativeness. Even though they reveal a profound degree of intimacy with their subjects, Lawson’s photographs are meticulously staged and often based on drawings and sketches she makes before the session, and include theatrical objects carefully chosen by the artist. Mostly produced in domestic indoor spaces, these photographs are endowed with an ambiguous atmosphere, between the voyeuristic, the theatrical, the ethnographic and the activist, without being completely subsumed by one of these possible interpretations. Lawson’s new series was developed in the city of Salvador, in Bahia, one of the Brazilian regions where the rites, gastronomy, religions and music of African origin are most present. The exhibition in Basel will present a selection of around twenty large-scale photographs, as well as a series of smaller pieces and videos, most of them never exhibited before. As part of the 34th Bienal de São Paulo’s original curatorial project, “Centropy” would be presented at the Bienal Pavilion, in São Paulo, in July 2020. With the changes enforced by the Covid-19 pandemic, this show and other events preceding the major group exhibition had to be cancelled.
Each of the large-scale photographic works is set in an opulent frame built from mirrored glass. That typically extraneous, negligible element—the picture frame—here takes on particular importance. Extravagant and elegant at once, Lawson’s frames (one example even accompanied by the verdant spectral glow of a hologram that is set into the image itself) further elevate the pictured sitters in a play of reflections and the sort of ricocheting light that connects her sub-jects to something mystical and magnificent, despite their modest life situations. In “Axis” (2018), three nudes lock eyes with you (somehow, strangely, even the one whose eyes are closed) as they lie on their sides, each pressed against the other on a rug inside someone’s home. The striking photograph recalls an art historical image you think you might have seen (but, in fact, never have), all while the lustrous skin and variegated beauty of the trio, resembling synchronized swimmers on dry land, fans out like a gradient of brown. Then there is “Chief” (2019), in which mismatched curtains billow in a living room where a man solemnly sits on the edge of a velveteen couch, bedecked in golden jewelry and a makeshift crown, his gaze unperturbed. Though resolute in his com-manding poise, his kingdom is perhaps not of this world or time. Lining the stained walls behind him are an icon depicting Jesus and a tapestry of his Last Supper… depicting this king as white. It is a detail distilling the tensions that so much of Lawson’s work exposes. The figure in “Chief” reappears in Lawson’s video, which incorporates historic and contemporary material, splicing found footage from the 1930s of Ethiopian military troops with contemporary African-American youth displaying coded gestures signifying gang affiliation or a celebration of the historic roots of the Ashanti and its golden bedecked rituals with the ostentatious bling of African-American hip-hop culture—these and other juxtapositions reveal disparate African cultures as connected by an invisible but indelible tether that binds them across time and space. It is the present embodiment of a past majesty that acts like a through line in the exhibition. Yet there is an acute sense that even the majestic (or perhaps especially the majestic) is under threat: Lawson admits that with so many having been separated through the transatlantic slave trade of previous eras, a history inextricable from the fact of so many Black lives being taken in our present, she chose to line the exhibition’s main room with photographs of her family of strangers hung relatively “close together,” as she says, “for [their own] safety”.
Info: Kunsthalle Basel, Steinenberg 7, Basel, Duration: 9/6-11/10/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-20:30, Sat-Sun 11:00-17:00, www.kunsthallebasel.ch
