Exhibit B exhibition shows its true colours
Shut down on the Southbank and requiring the protection of 300 riot police when they performed in Paris, one of the most controversial shows in recent times sets up shop in the Blackbox Theatre in Galway as part of the cities International Arts Festival.
Exhibit B, an instillation by Brett Bailey, a white South African, sets out to show how ‘the other’ is represented through ‘the Western Gaze’ in order to legitimise the plundering and annexing of their territories, by quite literally putting people of African or Afro- Caribbean descent on display.
A common practice during the first half of the 20th century, for the viewing pleasure of white audiences, who then came to view colonial subjects as sub-human and less civilised because of the manner they were exhibited, Exhibit B moves its audiences through 13 tableaux, set in the past and present, where the sickening racial violence — castration, mutilation, rape — of colonial and present times, is contrasted with period-specific artistic styles.
All the while, choral lamentations sung by a live Namibian choir haunt the space, referring to another German genocide that occurred to the start of the 20th century and the struggle of the Namibian people for liberation in the 1980s.
But Exhibit B, as Bailey told one of his performers during rehearsals, is not in itself, a human zoo. “You are performers who are conscious of what you are doing. It’s nothing like where the people exhibited have no power at all and were presented as barbarians or savages. You are watching them. You are the audience. They- the spectators, are the performers trapped in this role of looking at people as if they are in someway objects.” A piece that ran in the Guardian during the Edinburgh Festival in 2014, however, falsely implied the exhibition, itself, as a human zoo, which Brett felt ignited the controversy.
“The work is about how ‘the other’ has been framed to legitimise racist policies. The way certain races have been portrayed in art and as curiosity’s in ethnographic museums; theories of evolution and their perversion by anthropologists and scientists; the eugenics of the early 20th century which lead to the Holocaust; the current policies of the EU countries towards African immigrants and how artists, activists, and representatives of asylum seekers have responded to these policies, it is all of these things that the work is about.” Does he find it interesting that people who haven’t seen the instillation, but are conscious of his skin colour and nationality, are slandering his work as racist, forcing the Barbican in London to close down the exhibit, due to health and safety fears?
“When they realised the images of the exhibition printed in the media had been made by a white South African artist, the alarm bells rang and they couldn’t see beyond that. They couldn’t get beyond their own narrow ideological path. Art explores paradoxes. It embraces contradictions. Artists are not activists, activists are not artists. We’re two different animals. I respect where they are coming from. I just wish they would give us the same respect.”
Have people perhaps lost sight of the power of art to change the world? “I don’t believe art changes the world,” says Brett. “It gets us to respond to it, to think for a while, about our place in it. How we perceive and treat other people.
Some of my detractors say, ‘why are you showing black people as victims? Why aren’t you showing them as heroes? But I am exploding this idea of the barbarian, the contained savage, by showing what horrendous things were done to people and are still done to people to condition society to think of them in a certain way.
The way a black person is shown as a threat, a terrorist, a domestic worker, how ‘the other’ is represented in order to legitimise systems of subordination, of racism…well I know that from the history of my own country.”
Third World Bunfight’s Exhibit B will run at the Black Box Theatre from 14-19 July with performances running in 40 minute cycles from 4pm to 8pm on 14 and 17 July, and from 1pm to 8pm on 15, 16, 18 and 19 July. Tickets are €20 from www.giaf.ie
