ART CITIES:Basel-Matthew Angelo Harrison

Matthew Angelo Harrison’s sculptures are haunted by the legacy of colonialism and transatlantic slavery even as they explore modern technology and contemporary African American culture. Small wooden figurinesare bisected at the waist or neck, or split horizontally and splayed open, before being encased in ash- or violet-colored resin blocks. Other artifacts and animal skeletons are left whole but protrude slightly from their resin tombs, as if still slowly being subsumed.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Kunsthalle Basel Archive

Featuring  all new work and his most ambitious project  to date Matthew Angelo Harrison in “Proto”, in his first solo exhibition at a European institution, Matthew Angelo Harrison creates a monumental installation of 3-D machine technologies, African artifacts, and workers’ labor union paraphernalia to merge the cruel history of colonialism with the formalist legacy of Minimalism. Luminous prisms of varying opacity (some tinted, some clear) encase wooden African effigies, ceremonial masks, long-handled spears, or, in a single spectacular case, a nearly five-meter- high totem with a head at its base. Hailing from the cultures of Bambara, Dogon, Makonde, Senufo, and others, most are attributed to un- known makers and were bought by the  artist from European secondary market dealers selling on the internet. The digital trade  routes that these objects traveled, contemporary versions of those that once carried  enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean, interest Harrison, just like the transnational transactions, dispossession, and violence  that the circulation of these objects chronicles. The exhibition opens with a clear resin block containing a mid-twentieth-century mask from the Dan tribe, its gouged eyeholes and tendrils of hair floating amongst air bubbles, appearing to be submerged in water but  miraculously breathing. Entitled “Bated Breath”, the sculpture summons another time and place, traditions and rituals far  from the US where the artist made it or Europe,  where it now stands. “Reservoir Master” presented at some distance behind “Bated Breath” and containing a Dogon Nommo figure with its hands up that recalls the gesture signaling submission to the police, now also doubling as an iconic protest gesture in the struggle against continued police killings of un- armed people of color. Like any time capsule, Harrison’s objects speak not only of the past but also to the present. Scattered among these are blocks that envelop workers’ protective gear or labor union paraphernalia, some dating from the last major US United Auto Workers (UAW) strikes of the 1990s. These may not be the spoils of conquest and colonial rule, but they are Black relics  of another sort, born from African-American labor and collected by the artist’s own mother and her union colleagues. Among his prismatic forms are those cut into stacked segments or etched using a CNC router (computer-controlled milling machine) to create surfaces and cavities with no less complexity than a car’s engine block.  In his newest pieces, Detroit and labor have come ever more explicitly to the fore as the artist exposes relations between contemporary, low-wage, precarious labor and the  slavery that the US supposedly abolished over  a century and a half ago. At the very heart of the exhibition’s largest space sits a polished aluminum 3-D printer, “Proto-fountain”, constructed by the artist through the modification and hybridization of existing technologies. The clean, gleaming machine is at once a monumental sculptural installation and a tool, which stands in for  a performance planned for the closing week of his exhibition. There, he will live-print clay sculptures based on 3-D scans of the artifacts used within his sculptures on display.

Photo: Matthew Angelo Harrison, installation view, Proto, Kunsthalle Basel, 2021. Photo: Philipp Hänger / Kunsthalle Basel

Info: Kunsthalle Basel, Steinenberg 7, Basel, Switzerland, Duration: 4/6-26/9/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri 11;00-18:00, Thu 11:00-20:30, Sat-Sun 11:00-17:00, www.kunsthallebasel.ch