LETTER FROM ABROAD: Encountering Jozi Style

Dr Christine Checinska

Associate Researcher, VIAD, University of Johannesburg

Founder and Convener of the Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group, Iniva, London

Exhibition Installation View, Hypersampling Identities, Jozi Style, FADA Gallery (Ground Floor), University of Johannesburg. Photograph by Thys Dullaart, Image Courtesy of VIAD Research Centre

Groundbreaking, energetic, innovative, vibrant, robust, boisterous, vital…

All words that could be used to describe the University of Johannesburg, Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre’s, (VIAD), recent series of ‘Encounters’ designed to examine the refashioning of masculinities within contemporary black cultural movements in Johannesburg.

Under the title (Re)-Fashioning Masculinities: Identity, Difference, Resistance, the ‘Encounters’ took as their departure point the concurrent exhibition ‘Hypersampling Identities: Jozi Style.’[1] The exhibition showcased the work of young homegrown male designers and design collectives as well as that of photographers, sartorial groups and ‘trend setters’. The Isikothane were amongst the featured groups, whilst the Sartists and the Khumbula were amongst the prominent design collectives on show. The cultural practitioners included Jamal Nxedlana. Many of the contributors referenced the Pantsulas and the Swenkas; more established black cultural movements. I was invited to deliver key lectures and a performative response. Since the work that I have been engaged in over the past fifteen years, including the setting up of the Clothes, Cloth and Culture Group here in the Stuart Hall Library, has been concerned with the relationship between fashion, textiles, culture and race, I was only to happy to do this.

Exhibition Installation View, Hypersampling Identities, Jozi Style, FADA Gallery (Ground Floor), University of Johannesburg. Photograph by Thys Dullaart, Image Courtesy of VIAD Research Centre

Our three-day debate wrestled with the concept of ‘hypersampling’ itself, the performance of masculine identities through the intermeshing of music, dance, gesture and dress, the ever-present hierarchies of power and value based primarily on race and culture, self-representation by referencing the past and by referencing an imagined future, the consumption of (global) African styles, critical ‘whiteness’/critical ‘blackness’, i.e. positionality and mindful analysis, and the notion of the Black Dandy. As expected, and indeed as I had hoped, we raised far more questions than we were able to answer.

The astute facilitation of the VIAD team – Leora Farber, Claire Jorgensen, Maria Fidel Rigueros – ensured that the tensions between voices, that at times clearly sat on the opposite sides of a given argument, were held and used to creative effect, generating un-familiarly rich intellectual discussions. Particularly refreshing was the insistence on the foregrounding of the work produced by the practitioners. This calls to mind the artist Sonia Boyce’s recent critique of the confounding brushing aside of certain artists’ work in order to solely focus on issues connected to race. The two must be addressed; the work itself and the political debates emanating from the work.

Ó Christine Checinska, October 4^th 2015

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[1] ‘Hypersampling Identities: Jozi Style’ was produced by VIAD in association with VIAD post-doctoral fellow Daniela Goeller and Lifestyle and Pop Culture Trend Analyst, Nicola Cooper. 

At Home with Vanley Burke at IKON Gallery, Birmingham

22 July – 27 September 2015  

A reflection by Dr Christine Checinska, VIAD, University of Johannesburg

At Home with Vanley Burke, Ikon Gallery 2015
Photo: Stuart Whipps 

Referred to as the ‘Godfather of Black British photography’, Burke (born Jamaica, 1951) is also a dedicated archivist and collector of objects relating to black culture in Britain. Ikon presents At Home with Vanley Burke, an exhibition of the entire contents of Burke’s flat in Nechells, north-east Birmingham.[1]

Indeed the entire first floor of the gallery is given over to almost the entire contents of Mr Burke’s flat; everything save his bed, his computer (a MAC) and his desk I believe.

What follows is a reflection on what is a totally enthralling show - one that gives the viewer not only a unique insight into the artist’s world but also a glimpse into the everyday worlds of Britain’s African and Caribbean communities.

Entering the space, via a white-walled corridor in which paintings, photographs, posters and ‘African’ busts have been hung, the viewer immediately becomes part of what is essentially a living archive. This living archive shifts and changes in emphasis and energy, depending on who inhabits it. A large mirror at the entrance ensures that we are all included in the show as accidental exhibits,[2] just as Burke himself becomes the subject of his own enquiry. As one moves through the space, the overriding feeling is one of being 'wrapped in domesticity'; a particular kind of domesticity that is African Caribbean at it’s root but is connected to the basic human need for a sense of home, for a sense of belonging. But it is not only the distinctive décor that places this space within our community; the near constant soul, ska and reggae soundtrack emanating from the stereo in Burke’s living room provides an unmistakably Caribbean diaspora pulse.

At Home with Vanley Burke, Ikon Gallery 2015
Photo: Stuart Whipps 

Walking from Burke’s reconstructed office, to the front room, to the kitchen and back, I was reminded of Walter Benjamin’s meditation on the packing and unpacking of his library. In his essay Benjamin considers the relationship that a book collector has to his books. He suggests that the act of collecting is of equal importance to the collector as the collection itself; the act of acquiring possessions linked as it is, according to Benjamin, to memory. The ‘poles of order and disorder’ that the collector attempts to straddle by creating order out of the chaos of books, in Benjamin’s case, parallel our attempts as Caribbean migrants to hold the tension between attempting to settle in a new homeland and the longing to return to the old one, whilst all the while navigating a ‘Mother Country’ that did not always welcome us as a good mother should. The fastidious tidiness of the piles of VHS videos, the towers of newspapers, the books, souvenirs, trinkets, golliwogs, shackles and other ironmongery relating to enslavement, not to mention the many photographs, carvings, collages and paintings, seem to create a precarious order out of such disorderly emotions.

At Home with Vanley Burke, Ikon Gallery 2015
Photo: Stuart Whipps 

Just as Benjamin’s relationship to his numerous volumes is not based on an emphasis on function and ‘utilitarian value’, the unused objects in Burke’s front room, for example, metamorphose into symbols, able to unlock memories – the artist’s and our own. Benjamin observes that the personal memories of the archivist stem from the intimate relationship between collector and object. It is as though the objects bare a trace of the owner: ‘not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.’ The things inside Burke’s home, through their initial acquisition and handling, bare traces of their life journeys, at once personal history and, in my opinion, an underrepresented aspect of British social history. The reconstructed bedroom is home to a 1950s prom-dress belonging to Burke’s mother, for example, and the dressing table is the resting place for a tablecloth hand-stitched by her mapping different points in her life by capturing the signatures, and therefore memories of certain people that she has met. There are also the now familiar gaudy porcelain figurines nestling inside brightly colored, starched crochet doilies - once highly fashionable, but now highly kitsch. In a sense, over time these unused objects increase in perceived value and become ‘sacrelized’, to cite Igor Kopytoff. This is especially the case for the objects destined to be re-housed in the Library of Birmingham archives. This is precisely the sort of transformation that intrigues Burke. He states: ‘I collect these things but they are not mine.’ And ‘there is a sense in which the collection has gone beyond me.’

At Home with Vanley Burke, Ikon Gallery 2015
Photo: Stuart Whipps 

Perhaps the most surprising discovery about Burke is the way in which he has brought his creativity to bare across so many genres beyond photography. There are barbed wire sculptures, costumes including a man’s suit jacket fashioned out of the pages from the book of Genesis, collages such as the painstakingly constructed Council of Voices (a nine year project), large-scale naïve paintings and carvings. He freely admits that his home is not about preciousness. It is about the expression of a remarkable creative energy – the artworks are nailed to the walls. One is left with the impression that Burke’s creative practices and collecting are unbounded and unceasing.

As curator Watkins concludes; Vanley Burke’s home truly is a ‘cabinet of wonderful curiosities’!

Christine Checinska, 26th August 2015 All rights reserved. Images courtesy IKON Gallery
 More details on the Ikon Gallery website 

[1] Text from IKON exhibition guide

[2] Furthermore, on the day of my visit I was served tea in the ‘kitchen’ and challenged to a game of dominoes by the artist.

Blackamoors, Noble Savages and Mungo Macaronis: the Black Male Body in Fashion Media

The Stuart Hall Library Animateur, Dr Christine Checinska  will be speaking at the Black Portraitures Conference in Florence. Christine will use Stuart Hall’s work as a departure point from which to discuss the image of the black man in fashion media. Christine has kindly provided the summary of her conference paper for readers of our blog (see below).

"Stuart Hall, commenting on the recurring (mis)-representations of the black male body, noted that for each depiction of the savage and the slave there exists a less threatening image of the black as a docile servant and ever-merry minstrel or clown. This paper argues that the Blackamoors, noble savages and Mungo Macaronis present in contemporary fashion media are little more than manifestations of the savage, the slave, the servant and the clown, revealing traces of the ambivalent colonial fantasies embedded in the field. How do these images shape our ideals and identities? How do they relate to self-representation and the everyday performance of black masculinities?

Since the slave trade, images of the black male body have not only adorned advertisements for ‘exotic’ colonial produce like tea, coffee, sugar and tobacco but also the surfaces of objects employed in the ritual of dressing such as boxes of bleaching agent, tins of shoe polish, hair pins, snuff boxes and trinkets. As early as the sixteenth century fashionable members of the English aristocracy donned black masks at courtly functions and, in some instances, painted themselves black as Mores. By the eighteenth century, the image of the black male body, partly through its association with expensive products, had become a marker of status, wealth and style. But could the (mis)-represented black male body, now an ‘object’ of desire, ever be deemed beautiful? How does today’s vernacular black male dress trouble certain Western notions of beauty? How does it challenge Western notions of black masculinities?

Through close readings of historical and contemporary imagery, this paper traces the origins and continued presence of Blackamoors, noble savages and Mungo Macaronis – each one a form of ‘black face’ that renders the individual invisible. It considers the tension between (mis)-representation and self-representation. Vernacular black male dress is seen as a form of counter-gaze able to temporarily overturn invisibility, as masculine identities that break free of the stereotypes noted by Hall are refashioned via the strategic tilt of a hat, or the glint of a bracelet, or the flash of a neon coloured lining on an otherwise sombre outfit."

Dr Christine Checinska Biography

Dr Christine Checinska is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of East London, a Research Associate at VIAD, University of Johannesburg and the 2nd Stuart Hall Library Animateur at Iniva, Rivington Place, London. Christine’s work as a writer and curator is situated at the meeting point between fashion, textiles and contemporary art. A primary concern is the relationship between cloth, culture and race from the perspective of the African Diasporas. Her recent publications include Reconfiguring Diasporic Identities in Beyond Borders, John Hutnyk (ed.), Pavement Books, (2012) and Crafting Difference: Art, Cloth and the African Diasporas in Cultural Threads: Transnational Textiles, Jessica Hemmings (ed.), Bloomsbury Publications, (2014). She combines all this with her work as a design consultant in the fashion industry.

Talk: researching a parasol from Goldsmiths Textile Collection

Christine Checinska and Ruby Hoette's recent talk at Goldsmiths is now available online.

It is part of Goldsmiths Objects (In)Sight project which "aims to develop object-based research skills and foster cross-disciplinary thinking".

Christine and Rubys' session focused on a parasol from the Goldsmiths Textile Collection. Their talk is part of a series delivered by academics or practitioners from different disciplines. In each session the speakers chose an object from Goldsmiths Special Collections & Archives, or Textile Collection and shared their ideas on research methods into the artefact.

Christine Checinska is the 2nd Stuart Hall Library Animateur and founder of our Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group.

Yinka Shonibare and the William Morris Family Album

William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow

Exhibition review by Dr Christine Checinska

Yinka Shonibare MBE, 'The William Morris Family Album', 2015, Copyright the artist, Courtesy the artist, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, Commissioned by William Morris Gallery

Yinka Shonibare has recently said about his work …

I am very interested in identity, in history and understanding why things are the way that they are today, and there is always a reason for that… For example how do you begin to understand multicultural Britain now, what brought that about, why all these people are here – what is the history of that? That is the history of colonialism. There is no getting away from the past, unfortunately, because the past is always present.[1]

This notion of the past being ever present – cutting into, interrupting and informing the everyday – is explored further in the current William Morris Gallery (WMG) exhibition: the William Morris Family Album. This show is in fact the gallery’s first major commission. Shonibare characteristically examines the legacy of Empire and the global textile trade by restaging photographs from the Morris family album using local Walthamstow residents as his sitters. In this context Shonibare’s use of Dutch wax cotton takes on intriguing new meanings.

The Dutch wax print cloth that features in much of Shonibare’s work is a metaphor for the interrelationship between Britain and Africa and voices the complexity of black British identity. As with much of Shonibare’s work, there is something very seductive about these works. The heady use of colour and pattern and the sensual use of texture are almost hypnotic. The viewer is immediately drawn into Shonibare’s make believe world, but it is only then, on closer inspection of each, that his sophisticated use of semiotics and layers of suggested meaning gradually becomes more apparent. The mixture of and tension between an aesthetic quality that is pleasurable and seductive to the eye, and the layer upon layer of hidden meaning is arresting. Entering into his world, the viewer is forced to inhabit the space between repulsion and desire that is the colonial gaze; the work troubles the “colonised mind” and in so doing, Shonibare’s central themes and questions come artfully into play. I am deliberately inserting the term “artfully”, since, for me, there is always a level of wit and mischief making in Shonibare’s work. There is an aura of irony and satire, together with the obvious mastery of his art. At first reading these works seem playful and harmless, but then, when read more closely carries troubling messages and uneasy questions.

Shonibare’s use of metaphors of African textiles against metaphors of quintessential Englishness, i.e. the Victorian family album with its references to home, to the Victorian parlour with its associations of Empire, the Victorian era itself often viewed through nostalgic eyes as a time when Britain was truly “great”, gives rise to a characteristic level of complexity. The Victorian era was also the era of the anthropological ethnographic museum, e.g. Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum opened in 1883, adding a further layer of questions and possible meanings; Shonibare takes the idea of the “cabinet of curiosities”, stretching and subverting it, reversing it, almost as if to suggest that anthropology itself is about invention rather than discovery – he questions the “writing” of one culture by another. The recurring themes of the fusion of the diametrically opposed, questions of authenticity and perception, identity and difference/self and other, Empire and the resulting interconnecting histories are all alive in this new work. Yet read against what we know of William Morris’ socialist politics, new questions about equality today arise; class, culture and race collide. Equally when we consider the current gentrification of Walthamstow in London, it’s morphing into trendy ‘Awesomestow’, additional questions around these issues come to the fore. But what is also of interest to me is the way in which the politics of Morris and Shonibare at times overlap:

The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make. William Morris

Similarly, Shonibare himself in an in-conversation at the WMG spoke of his respect for Morris’ politics. He also made reference to their mutual love of the decorative.

The use of so-called African textiles is the lynchpin of Shonibare’s sophisticated use of signs and symbols … but these textiles, these brightly coloured easy to spot cloths are not African at all and even if they were how could they possibly represent an entire continent? These vibrant prints are often referred to as Dutch wax cottons or Dutch wax-resist prints. As Jessica Hemmings writes:

The transnational identity of wax-resist textiles emerges from the numerous cultures that have in the past, and continue today, to identify with wax-resist…During Dutch colonization of [Indonesia] batik production was taken up in the Netherlands … but the market proved unsuccessful… Instead the textiles found a welcome reception in West Africa, becoming symbols of national pride associated with independence gained by a number of nations in the late 1950s and 1960s.[2]

Rooted in meticulous historical research, Shonibare’s ‘principled clash of colour and pattern’, rather than celebrating identities framed by cultural and racial difference, celebrates hybrid cultural identities that are continually in flux. He uses familiar signifiers of African-ness and Englishness, subverting them in order to deconstruct our understanding and acceptance of them. The Dutch wax print cloth is a metaphor for the interrelationship between Britain and Africa: the complexity of so-called black British identity. In this instance Shonibare’s choice of colour on the prints is reminiscent of the Pre-Raphaelite colour palette; a subtle reference to a certain notions of Englishness.

Shonibare’s William Morris Family Album, though difficult to summarize in a few words, highlights questions about authenticity and purity, whilst the rending of metaphorical borders between the self and the other/us and them/colonizer and colonized, through the use of “African” cloth, and a post-structuralist concern with the polysemic nature of non-verbal signs, through playing havoc and making mischief with seemingly recognisable visual codes.

Copyright Dr Christine Checinska 9/3/15

[1] Shonibare, Museums Journal, June 2013, p. 41.

[2] Hemmings, Cultural Threads (Bloomsbury Publications)

Audio recordings of Raju Rage and Raisa Kabir at February Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group

 'Cloth on the Queer Brown Body' Raisa Kabir photo. of Raju Rage

Our Clothes, Cloth and Culture Group meeting in February featured a collaboration between two young artists, Raisa Kabir and Raju Rage. They described how they use their art and textile practices to address gendered South Asian queer identity and the meanings of cotton cloth on the brown queer body. Raisa Kabir brought along examples of her woven textiles and Raju Rage dressed in a sari printed with archival photographs.

The artists worked together on the project "There is More at Stake Than Just 3 Metres of Cloth" which represents the migrations of South Asians from North India/ Panjab to East Africa to Britain and the symbolism encoded within the turban. Sociologist Nirmal Puwar offered her thoughts and questions followed by comments from the intrigued audience.

Read more about the participants on the webpage and an audio recording of the event is available below.

'Cultural Threads' listen to the panel discussion at the Clothes Cloth & Culture Group

Jasleen Kaur

Dr. Jessica Hemmings, editor of
'Cultural Threads: transnational textiles today'

The November 2014 Clothes Cloth & Culture Group meeting was a panel discussion to mark the publication of  'Cultural Threads: transnational textiles today'. The panel consisted of the editor Dr. Jessica Hemmings, contributors to the book and the featured artists and designers : Dr. Christine Checinska, Sarah Rhodes and Jasleen Kaur. Curator Dr. Jenny Doussan responded to the publication as an external voice.

Audio recordings of the of event are available to stream at the bottom of the page.

Cultural Threads considers contemporary artists and designers who work at the intersection of cultures and use textiles as their vehicle. Ideas about belonging to multiple cultures, which can result in a sense of connection to everywhere and nowhere, are more pertinent to society today than ever. So too are the layers of history - often overlooked - behind the objects that make up our material world.

The publication closely mirrors many of the aims and interests of the Clothes, Cloth and Culture Group. For example, in seeking to demystify postcolonial theory and show how it is embodied and articulated through textiles. The emphasis on textiles as a record of lived experience also recalls the ‘conversationals' or items of clothing or cloth that our presenters have used to introduce themselves and which exemplify their interest in and human connection to the subject.

Sarah Rhodes

Dr Jenny Doussan  & Dr Christine Checinska

Disobedient Objects at the V&A: 'Express Yourself' event with Christine Checinska

The second Stuart Hall Library Animateur, Christine Checinska, will be speaking at the Victoria & Albert Museum this Friday evening, 21 November in response to the Disobedient Objects exhibition. 

Christine's talk will be part of the free, drop-in 'Express Yourself' event which starts at 6:30pm.

The talks will focus on how today's protesters initiate their campaigns or change the world using social media, film, "flash mobs, hashtags, selfies, up-cycling, masquerade, TEDtalks, PechaKuchas, films and freedom songs"

Christine will speak about the African diaspora's material culture in Britain as a vehicle for quiet and overt activism; making a statement about oneself, and oneself in the world, from both an individual and collective level.

Listen to Clothes Cloth & Culture talks by Sue Jones & Michael McMillan

If you missed the event 'Saga Bwoys and Bedouin Women’on 25 September; audio recordings of the speakers are available at the bottom of this post. The photographs are of the 'conversational artefacts' chosen by the speakers. The cardigan and embroidery are now on display in the library with accompanying texts by Sue and Michael.

Michael McMillan - Garbicci cardigan or ‘yardie cardie' 

Sue Jones - embroidery by her mother

Podcasts from 'The Subversive Stitch Revisited: the Politics of Cloth'

Hey Paul Studios, Uterus Embroidery (CC BY 2.0)

Members of our Clothes Cloth and Culture Group will be excited to see that Goldsmiths have made available audio recordings of the speakers at The Subversive Stitch Revisited: the Politics of Cloth event as podcasts on their website.

Amongst the other recordings, you will be able to listen to the presentation by Dr. Christine Checinska, the Second Stuart Hall Library Animateur. Christine was a speaker at the Goldsmiths event which was held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in November 2013. Her presentation was entitled Second Skins: cloth, difference and the art of transformation. Both Christine and Iniva contributed to the planning of the event.

The event was dedicated to the memory of  Rozsika Parker, the author of  The Subversive Stitch: embroidery and the making of the feminine (1984). The keynote speaker was Professor  Griselda Pollock, who collaborated work with Parker during the 1980s to produce key feminist art texts.

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Pan on the road! Pan on the road! [1]

Late August bank holiday Monday in London is synonymous with two things: the end of the summer and Carnival. Carnival is the vernacular and official shorthand for the Notting Hill Carnival.

As the recent BBC documentaries on Carnival note, the date of the first event is anything from 1962 to ’64 to ’65. Similarly there are a number of theories on precisely how it started and by whom. So, according to some calculations, 2014 marked its fiftieth anniversary. To coincide with this Tate Modern staged the event Up Hill Down Hall: an indoor carnival.

Up Hill Down Hall showcased Give and Take a new performance piece by Hew Locke with Batala Samba-Reggae band and Marlon Griffiths’ piece No Black in the Union Jack – the title of which was not only a reminder of Paul Gilroy’s great early work but of course the Rock Against Racism era of protest marches populated by youth. These works were presented against a backdrop of cut ‘n’ mix improvised sounds created Dubmorphology, (Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison), and an architectural design by Gia Wolff. An intervention orchestrated by Sonia Boyce in conjunction with students and recent graduates from Central Saint Martins completed the afternoon’s events.

Sadly I arrived at the tail end of the day. But there were still streamers on the ground and a thumping beat in the air, still crowds moving through the Turbine Hall and congregating in chattering groups up on the mezzanine; a reminder of the temporary nature of the freedom that carnival affords in London, in the Caribbean, now and back then, way back then, prior to the 1960’s moment that sparked the Notting Hill original.

Carnival in the Caribbean  - as physical space, theoretical trope, as metaphor - has always represented a site in which cultures, ideas and concepts collide. It represents the destabalisation of everyday boundaries, be they rooted in class, gender, wealth, sexuality, race and, to use Kobena Mercer’s term, the ‘pigmentocracy’ that grew from the hierarchies based on skin tone prevalent in Caribbean plantation slave society. Carnival is in a sense a ‘borderlands space’. It is a place of possibility and newness. And it is also the place where the spiritual and the secular meet. In my paper Reconstruction Work, presented at the July Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group meeting, I discussed the creolised aesthetics of the enslaved on the Jamaican plantations, arguing that individualised clothing became a means of articulating something of the self that broke free of the then societal constraints. I suggested that that which could not be articulated verbally was articulated through the dressing and styling the body, through the performance of identity. Carnivals such as the Jamaican Jonkannu festival, provided a space in which these refashioned creolised identities could be experienced and displayed; in a sense, the boundary between the inner and outer self could be transgressed. Both performers’ and spectators’ presentation of self could, in my view, be regarded as forms of vernacular street theatre. I touched on the rude bwai fastidious self-styling – the clothing, the accessory, the walk, the pose – suggesting that this too might be seen as a form of strategic resistance. Each example reflects the transformation that is characteristic of Carnival. But these transformations, these creolised cultural expressions, come out of contention not blending. Creativity here emerges from the friction that occurs as differing and hierarchical cultures, ideas and concepts clash and rub against one another, generating something new that is unfamiliar yet familiar. Within this Carnival space there is freedom, albeit a temporary one.

Shango and ZeZe Harpp performing. Photo: Christine Checinska

This week my creative practice as a design consultant took me to Munich to search for cloth for the new collection. Serpentining my way through the exhibition hall, I found myself in a tin structure at the centre of the denim forum, having been drawn there by a hypnotic drumming that had more than an echo of a steel pan, but with a more muffled ‘dirty’ sound, a spare sporadic beat bouncing up against the rhythmic strumming of an acoustic Latin guitar; familiar yet unfamiliar… certainly unexpected in a fashion environment. I was in the midst of an accidental ‘up hill/down hall’ carnival in miniature! This wonderfully creolised soundscape was the result of a creative collaboration between Emoriô Faô, Brazilian guitarist and leader Shango and the German percussion artist ZeZe Harpp. (Shango, of course, is the god of thunder, lightning and fire in the Caribbean… and a character often present in carnival masquerades and certain religious ceremonies) The artists themselves describe their unique sound as a coming together of African and Indian influences – perhaps because of my own cultural background, I heard traces of the Caribbean: vintage Afro-Creole mento, cumbia, jazz. After all, remembering Edouard Glissant, the Caribbean could be regarded as the home of syncretism.

 Ju Mu at work. Photo: Christine Checinska

Whilst Shango and ZeZe Harpp played, the contemporary artist Ju Mu scribbled intricate drawings of mythical creatures directly onto the walls of the structure; white chalk onto black surfaces. Again, to see this is remarkable in a rag trade setting. Further, a small team of designers printed and stitched together oversized t-shirts right there in the space. Unusual. The invisible boundaries between visual art, music, fashion and textile design were momentarily blurred within this tin room within a room. The invisible boundaries between my own compartmentalised creative practices collapsed.

One of Ju Mu's drawings. Photo: Christine Checinska

Coming back to the title of this article, there is an affinity between the essence of carnival highlighted above and our approach to the Clothes Cloth & Culture Group. Our aim is to bring together voices from across the spectrum of artists, designers, writers and ‘thinkers’ working with cloth. We actively seek out cross-cultural perspectives and the viewpoints of those who are seldom heard. We are continually inspired by the new debates that emerge from globalisation’s multi-layered yet still at times hierarchical entanglements. So as the summer closes and we gear up to launch our programme of autumn events …

Pan on the road! Pan on the road!

© Christine Checinska September 2014

[1] ‘Pan on the road!’ traditionally shouted at the start of a carnival procession.

Links:

www.tate.org.uk/file/hill-down-hall-2014

www.shango-music.de.vu

www.zezeharpp.de.vu

ju.mu.monster.tumbler.com

Clothes Cloth and Culture Group, July 2014

The African-Caribbean presence in Britain

A full house and a fascinating evening at the last CCC Group meeting before the summer break.

The presenters were Dr Christine Checinska and Dr. Denise Noble.

Family artefacts from Christine Checinska
displayed as 'conversation pieces'  for the Group

Dr. Christine Checinska is the Second Stuart Hall Library Animateur. Christine's ideas and enthusiasm were hugely important to the foundation of the group. The title of her presentation, Reconstruction Work refers to the lack of representation of African-Caribbean creative output in fashion and textiles. Christine talked about the influence of Stuart Hall's writings on her research into cloth, culture and race. She brought along some family objects which are both powerful personal mementos and tangible records of a time, place and culture.
Read more about both presentations on the webpage.

Dr. Denise Noble of Ohio State University. Denise was brought up nearby in Shoreditch. It was strangely appropriate for her to return to the area to talk about the home-making of her mother and friends who came to Britain from the Caribbean in the 1950s and 60s immigrant women. She talked in particular about the colourful doilies handcrafted by the women, now almost impossible to find. Denise offered her thoughts on the wider societal associations of these bright artefacts. You can listen to her presentation below.

Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group
Call for presenters

Iniva, Rivington Place,
London EC2A 3BA

The Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group is a monthly forum for creative practitioners and thinkers across the spectrum of artists, designers, curators, writers and activists working with cloth. Setting cloth into the wider contexts of material and visual culture, the Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group provides a space for conversations about the politics of cloth from a distinctively cross-cultural viewpoint. We are looking for exciting and engaging ways of uncovering your research. This might include individual presentations, presentations in pairs, in conversation/dialogue, or presenting a group project.

The meetings will take place in the Stuart Hall Library from 6.30 -9.00pm. Each presentation will be 20 minutes long (2 presenters per session). Suggested themes include;

-cultural translation and difference
-post-coloniality and globalisation
-movement and migration
-Diaspora; social and cultural perspectives
-cultural, racial and gendered identities
-social action and ethical concerns

We welcome contributions on these and other under-represented views and issues within textile cultures and fashion theory. If you are interested in presenting at a future Clothes, Cloth & Culture session, please send a 200 word proposal outlining your topic to the Library Manager.

All contributors will also be invited to contribute a reflection on a cloth based object, image or text that is both meaningful at a personal level and responds to the core themes of the group. These conversations or ‘textile narratives’ will be disseminated via the Iniva website. Where possible artefacts will be displayed in the library vitrines, alongside accompanying texts.

Co-convened by Dr. Christine Checinska, Iniva's second Stuart Hall Library Animateur.

More information                 Library@iniva.org

Grayson Perry, the Vanity of Small Differences and the weaving of a community tapestry …

The last Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group meeting focussed on the theme of ‘Cloth and Social Action’. Françoise Dupré spoke of her work during the 1980s in collaboration with the Brixton Art Gallery, in particular the Patchwork of Our Lives banners created with a group of Soweto women at the height of the anti-Apartheid campaigns in 1986. She also spoke about Women’s Work, an arts organisation that she co-founded. She recalled the annual banners that they made, drawing on earlier political banner making traditions, for example, those worked by the Socialist Movement and by the Suffragettes. This stitching, piecing and embroidering was of course happening around the time of Rozsika Parker’s Subversive Stitch and the subsequent show at the Cornerhouse and Whitworth Art Galleries. This was the era during which the barriers between craft and art began to be torn down and the domestic space was shown to be the political space that perhaps it always was, particularly for working class women. Dupré went on to discuss her current work concerned with cosmopolitanism, with the plasticity and the sociability of textile crafts, with the use of textiles as a ‘portal’, and with the crafting of space through collaborative participatory social practice, that binds the haptic to the making of socially meaningful art objects. She reminded us of Stuart Hall’s notion of  ‘home’ as process; a concept that rests on ongoing engagement, i.e. something that needs to be ‘worked’.

The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine
Rozsika Parker. Cover Image © I.B. Tauris

These points were brought to life by Victoria Khur, Ruth-Marie Tunkara, the QSA ‘Knees Up’ knitting and crochet club ladies and Derek (currently the only male member of the club). Through a ‘vox-pop’ style film, Khur and Tunkara relayed tales of newly formed relationships that cross generational, economic, racial and cultural divides, stories of the sharing of knowledge and expertise, and accounts of the empowerment of the residents that attend the club. A project of Quaker Social Action, situated in London’s, Bethnal Green, ‘Knees Up’ uniquely promotes a belief in the possible by focusing on what is strong in communities, rather than what is wrong with communities. The title of their presentation, ‘Weaving a Community Tapestry’, neatly sums up the common ground between the two presentations and the content of the discussions that followed. At a certain level, Dupré, Khur and Tunkara’s talks were underlined by this notion of possibility, which is aligned to the idea of unity through difference.

Earlier on that Thursday, I had visited PROGESS at the Foundling Museum, Brunswick Square, London. Set out over three floors, the exhibition marks the 250^th anniversary of William Hogarth’s death by showcasing the responses of four contemporary artists - Yinka Shonibare MBE, Grayson Perry, David Hockney and Jessie Brennan – to his infamous series of etchings A Rake’s Progress, (1735). Grayson Perry’s the Vanity of Small Differences occupies the basement.

Grayson Perry, The Vanity of Small Differences, The Adoration of the Cage Fighters, 2012. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, London © The artist

Perry’s the Vanity of Small Differences consists of six tapestries charting the progress of Tim Rakewell. These densely woven and richly coloured tapestries provide Perry with a means through which to explore issues around class and taste as the exhibition catalogue tells us. But, in my view, these intricate hangings also speak about today’s rapidly changing urban landscapes, or ‘social fabric’, to reference a previous Iniva project. Rakewell’s progress tells the story of not only the demise of a man but also the breakdown of communities that we all too often witness in this contemporary moment. Today’s fast-paced social upheaval could be said to parallel that of the 1980’s noted above: the unstable economic climate, the gentrification of former working class areas coupled with a dearth of affordable housing, the rise of far right political movements, the growing fragmentation of society. Biblical references, compositional strategies reminiscent of religious paintings and narrative structures based on Hogarth’s original Rake collide with recognisable symbols of wealth and lack of wealth in Perry’s series: a cafetiére, an allotment, a young ‘baby mother’, a smart phone, a copy of Hello magazine. The viewer is taken through the various stages of Rakewell’s journey from his working class roots to his rise to the upper classes. The last tapestry #Lamentation depicts our protagonist’s violent passing at the wheels of his Ferrari. His body, pulled from the wreckage and surrounded by capitalist markers of success, lies motionless at the centre of the scene. The whole is tweeted by onlookers positioned in the background of the piece, hence the Twitter hashtag in the title. Might this final act represent the ultimate rending of a community tapestry?

 

Grayson Perry, The Vanity of Small Differences, The Annunciation of the Virgin Deal, 2012. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, London © The artist

Progress: William Hogarth, Yinka Shonibare MBE, Grayson Perry, David Hockney, Jessie Brennan

The Foundling Museum

6^th June – 7^th September 2014

Christine Checinska

Clothes Cloth and Culture Group, Stuart Hall Library 26 June 2014  Cloth and Social Action

Françoise Dupré, blouses de travail

Many thanks to our presenters Françoise Dupré, Victoria Kuhr,  Ruth Marie Tunkaraand  Knees Up members and to convenor Dr.Chistine Checinska for a very enjoyable and informative meeting last week. There was a lively question and answer session and the audience seemed reluctant to leave! Audio recordings are available at the bottom of this post.

Françoise Dupré

Françoise Dupré makes textiles-based sculptures and temporary installations for art and non-art spaces including shops, hospitals and libraries. Françoise talked about how her cross-disciplinary approaches to making and her multicultural and social art practice. She described how crafting practice can be transformative for people in the contexts of migration, post-conflict and health. Françoise brought along her mother's worn the blouses de travail apron/dresses. They were associated with the working-class and Françoise found similar aprons worn by women in Russia.

Françoise Dupré

Edna from Knees Up

Knees Up: Victoria Kuhr and Ruth Marie Tunkara are part of a team of staff and residents from Knees Up a community-building project in Bethnal Green, London. Victoria and Ruth explained how the project had been instrumental in bringing neighbours together. 

Ruth Marie Tunkara from Knees Up

Leyla from Knees Up

Victoria Khur from Knees Up

Communal space and activities have given residents the opportunity to exchange their skills in knitting and crochet and to make new friendships. In a film made by the project organisers, the residents shared their memories, and described how Knees Up has made a difference to their lives. 

Three audio recordings of the event 

PAUSE: Selected drawings by Barbara Walker

12  June – 13 July 2014 Curated by C&C Gallery, London

Reviewed by Dr. Christine Checinska

Barbara Walker, Pause, exhibition installation view, 2014,
 C&C Gallery. Photo. Liz Evans

Artist Barbara Walker makes drawings of people. She makes drawings of people using charcoal and a soft pencil. She makes drawings of men; huge, larger than life, floor to ceiling drawings rendered directly onto the wall. Each fold, crease, line and blemish of her sitters’ bodies and the clothes that enfold them are sensitively transcribed in the smallest of detail. But we never see her sitters’ faces. And each wall is wiped clean at the end of every show.

Barbara Walker,  Show and Tell : Subject G and Subject H, 2008
charcoal on paper. Photo. Liz Evans

Pause presents selected portraits from Show and Tell, the Dichotomy of Kenny, the Dichotomy of Sean and one new wall piece. It is impossible to view Walker’s work without first being astonished by the sheer scale and by the craftsmanship, by the quality of lines seemingly etched into the wall, or the paper, or the canvas, creating a three-dimensional, almost sculptural effect. It comes as no surprise that she sites Giacometti and Rodin as amongst her influences. Yet these soft charcoal drawings are deeply political. In Walker’s hand the methodical making of lines on a wall and the erasing of them is a form of quiet activism.

The untitled C&C wall piece – a portrait of Izzy, a dancer – heralds a turning point in Walker’s work. It is as though Walker’s voice is manifest with an unmistakeable boldness in the tension between the palm of Izzy’s outstretched hand and the silent snarling mouth of his printed t-shirt. The viewer is allowed a glimpse of the artist’s inner thoughts. Izzy’s hand is outstretched with the palm face up, but his fingers are not flexed in a manner one might expect if being signalled to ‘stop’. Instead his hand reaches out in an act of near supplication, yet read against the dog’s glistening teeth the viewer is forced to pause, to do a double take, to listen to what Walker is saying. Izzy’s gesture is not about pleading to be heard. It is about demanding to be heard. This metaphorical drawing in the sand shouts ‘enough’!

Walker elegantly explores issues around identity, voice, personhood, power and visibility through her practice. She understands the importance of clothes and cloth; the way in which each has the potential to bind and separate us to and from one another; the way in which clothes and cloth have the potential to speak and to signify, to reference Henry Louis Gates Jn. The aesthetic and the political gloriously meet in her soft pencil portraits.

Characteristically, since process is of equal importance as the finished piece, Walker will be removing the portrait of Izzy at the close of the C&C show.  See more drawings on Barbara Walker's website

Barbara Walker, Untitled, 2014, wall drawing.
Photo. Liz Evans

Thanks to all at the Clothes, Cloth and Culture Group

The Chinese Dress : Dr. Wessie Ling

Many thanks to convenor Dr Christine Checinska, presenters Dr. Bharti Parmar and Dr. Wessie Ling for sharing their research, original thinking and artworks at our Clothes Cloth and Culture meeting on 27th May.
Bharti and Wessie addressed the theme of the first meeting; 'Cloth and the Archive', from different but equally fascinating viewpoints.

Some members of the audience were kind enough to send us their enthusiastic comments:

'The ... group was great tonight. Real Inspiration.'

'A great first meeting! Onwards and upwards, looking forward to the next one.'

'Amazing event! ... Really enjoyed the talks, can't wait till the next one.'

The audio recordings of the event should be available later this week

The next Clothes, Cloth & Culture meeting will be on Thursday 26th June 2014.

Watch this space!