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.

Stuart Hall Library Research Network: Call for proposals

Would you like to present your research at one of our upcoming events?

Image © Christa Holka

We are now programming for our summer and autumn library talks season and are looking for relevant proposals. The Stuart Hall Library Research Network is a forum for researchers, artists, academics, curators, students and activists to introduce an aspect of their work. It is a meeting place for the discussion of practice-based or more conventional forms of research that may include: visual arts; film and media; curatorial practice; cultural studies; cultural activism; postcolonial studies; literary studies, including criticism and theory.

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.

If you are interested in presenting at a future Research Network session, send a 200 word proposal outlining your topic to the Library Manager. The meetings will take place in the Stuart Hall Library from 6.30 -8.30pm. Each presentation will be 20 minutes long (2 presenters per session). Previous themes have included

• The cultural construction of identity
• Diasporic art and culture
• Issues of race, diversity and colonialism in art education and practice
• Migration, post-colonialism and globalisation
• The politics and philosophy of race, gender and identity in society and culture
• The intellectual legacy of Stuart Hall and cultural studies

This is not intended as an exhaustive list and all presentations on practice or research that in some way resonates with the activities of Iniva are welcomed. We also welcome proposals which are suitable for our Clothes, Cloth and Culture Group which looks at textiles and dress as part of wider visual culture from a decidedly cross-cultural perspective.

There is no fixed deadline but proposals are sought as soon as possible. 

More information

Nicholas Brown Library and Information Manager library@iniva.org

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.

Audio recordings of on 30 April. Althea McNish in conversation with John Weiss

John Weiss and Althea McNish, Stuart Hall Library

We are very grateful to Althea and John for an insightful and interesting evening at the April Clothes Cloth and Culture Group. Althea is an internationally successful textile designer who came to Britain from Trinidad and Tobago in the 1950s. She studied as an architect, at the London College of Printing and at the Royal College of Art. Althea's vibrant textile designs were sold by Liberty's, Hull Traders and other textile companies throughout Europe.

Fabric by Althea McNish

Althea's husband, John Weiss, is an architect and jewellery designer. John and Althea talked entertainingly about their lives together and the inspiration sources for Althea's textile designs. They touched topics as diverse as the origins of their surnames, the royal family, Althea's experience as a migrant to Britain and how she worked with technicians in the textile industry. Read more 

some of the audience and a sample of Althea's fabric

Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group. Dr. Althea McNish in conversation with John Weiss.

Join us for this free talk Thursday 30 April 2015 6:30 - 8:30 pm at Stuart Hall Library

Dr. Althea McNish is a painter and textile designer, she came to Britain from Trinidad and Tobago in the 1950s to study at the London College of Printing and the Royal College of Art.

Best known for her innovative and successful textile and surface pattern designs, Althea worked with Liberty & Co., Hull Traders and international companies. Examples of the range of fabrics designed by Althea can be seen on her website

Althea and was associated with the Caribbean Artists Movement. Her art work draws on diverse cultural influences.

In 2011 Althea was featured in the exhibition RCA Black organised by The Royal College of Art in collaboration with the African and African Caribbean Design Diaspora (AACDD). The exhibition celebrated art and design by African and African-Caribbean graduates and students; a group who are often marginalised within the creative industries.

Althea describes her experiences as an artist and designer in her interview with John Weiss in Building Britannia: Life Experience With Britain, 2009. She talks about how she worked with the major international textile companies, her use of colour and 'tropicalisation' of English flowers.

"In the context of the unacknowledged contribution and influence of the Black artist, Althea McNish had a visible effect on British textiles and thus on, and in, British culture" John Weiss 1998

Dr. McNish works in partnership with her husband, designer John Weiss, who will interview her for this Clothes, Cloth and Culture Group event

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.

Talking about The Troubles,Textiles and Northern Ireland

The March 26 2015 Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group meeting here at Stuart Hall Library proved so interesting to our audience that we had trouble persuading them to leave on time. If you missed the event, audio recordings of the talks are available to stream: see below.

Dr Karen Nickell talked about her doctoral research 'Embroidery in the Expanded Field: Textile
Narratives in Irish Art Post-1968’ with a response from Professor Catherine Harper.

Karen talked about how textiles are embedded in Irish social, cultural and political life. Her research examines textile practices by individual artists and communities in response to the conflict in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles. Read more about the research and presenters.

The evening started on an informal note; following the group's custom, the presenters showed the audience textile artefacts as 'conversationals'. Karen and Catherine brought with them carefully chosen textile pieces invested with both personal meaning and with cultural significance.

Hand-knitted dishcloth: conversational
 brought by Catherine Harper

Irish crochet: conversational
brought by Karen Nickell

Artist Corrina Eastwood reflects on her talk at the Stuart Hall Library Research Network meeting - February 2015

Corrina Eastwood and fellow artist Delaine Le Bas kindly agreed to talk about their art practices in relation to British identities at the Stuart Hall Library Research Network meeting in February. The meeting is a forum for researchers, artists, academics, curators, students and activists to introduce an aspect of their art practice, research, cultural activism. 

Corrina brought her experience of bridging two worlds. She has a Romany Gypsy father yet was raised in a house and sought different educational paths than is usual within the community. Corrina has just started to explore this through the making of a documentary film with Gavin Round.

Both Corrina and Delaine have offered their reflections on what it meant to them to share their thoughts with the group. Recordings of the event are available here and a project bibliography based on the Library's holdings can be downloaded here  (Delaine's thoughts on her talk in this blog)

Still from The Baby and The Snake (2015) by Corrina Eastwood and Gavin Round. ©

Corrina Eastwood on her talk at the Stuart Hall Library Research Network

I was honoured to be asked by Iniva's Stuart Hall Library to team up with artist Delaine Le Bas to present some of my artistic practice with reference to issues surrounding English Romani Gypsy identity.

In retrospect the evening has been an important catalyst in a specific kind of development in my creative process and thinking. This in terms of an exploration and negotiation of proximity of the self and subject when creating a narrative that is both personal and potentially political.

I feel in many ways that the work that Delaine and I both presented created an interesting and challenging contrast as a departure point for discussion.

The work in progress that I presented was 9 minutes of a documentary film that I am directing and collaborating on with my husband Gavin Round. My father is a Romani Gypsy and we started filming my family with a view to focusing on archetypal story telling in Romani Gypsy culture. For me the presentation and following Q & A really clarified my thinking behind this chosen focus. Addressing the issue of this part of my identity is something I have not approached as of yet in my practice and the personal nature of this exploration was something I had in many ways avoided.

Working with Delaine and thinking with others as part of the evening created for me what felt like a tension in my creative process mirrored in the group discussion. Where do I locate myself in this story, what about this story is mine and what parts of the multi faceted nature of identity and the archiving of history do I wish to consider?

The use of documentary film chosen as a medium for this exploration has also been an aspect of my practice that I have been able to consider in greater detail since the evening at Iniva. The explicit nature of film lends to a sense of moving beyond the anecdotal in terms of archiving, yet a use of metaphor and a particular aesthetic has proven to expose the subject to interpretation I had yet to consider before this being highlighted in group discussion.

Still from The Baby and The Snake (2015) by Corrina Eastwood and Gavin Round. ©

In conclusion, I have found the tensions and deliberation evident between the conveying of the stories of individuals through artistic means, and this being with in a context of culture, interesting and surprising.

Finding a balance within my practice so that the stories of individuals are not lost but are privileged within a wider political context has become a focus for further consideration.  

I have also been inspired by Delaine and other artists met through the evening and look forward to future collaborations further exploring personal stories of identity. 

Corrina Eastwood 2015
 

Artist Delaine Le Bas on SAY NO TO IDENTITY THEFT presentation at the Stuart Hall Library 12 February 2015

The artist Delaine Le Bas is an English Romani Gypsy. Delaine has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, she was an advisor and one of the sixteen artists who were part of The First Roma Pavilion Paradise Lost, 52nd Venice Biennale 2007. 

Delaine and fellow artist Corrina Eastwood kindly agreed to talk about their art practices in relation to their identities at the Stuart Hall Library Research Network meeting in February. The meeting is a forum for researchers, artists, academics, curators, students and activists to introduce an aspect of their art practice, research, cultural activism.

Both Delaine and Corrina have offered their reflections on what it meant to them to share their thoughts with the group. Recordings of the event are available here and a project bibliography based on the Library's holdings can be downloaded here  (Corrina's thoughts on her talk in this blog )

Delaine Le Bas on her presentation at Stuart Hall Library Research Network

Archive material donated by Delaine Le Bas to the Stuart Hall Library

Stuart Hall has been a major figure in my life so to be able to present Say No To Identity Theft at Iniva’s Stuart Hall library was I feel personally a great privilege made even more poignant by the fact that it was exactly a year since his death, this held particular resonance for me.

The Stuart Hall Project has been influential in its impact upon how I feel about who I am, how to question the ideas put forward by institutional and academic 'othering' as to who and what I should be.

Archive material donated by Delaine Le Bas to the Stuart Hall Library

I hope that the presentation that I made had some sense of the impact and power that I feel the work of Stuart Hall has had upon myself and many others in claiming our own identity and not being afraid to question the history and identities that have for generations been forced upon us.
Delaine Le Bas 2015

Archive material donated by Delaine Le Bas to the Stuart Hall Library

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)