Arms stretched wide, a man in a white tank top throws his head back, grooving with the music in an easy joyful rhythm. The picture captures only a moment, and in this moment the father is kept still in a wide posture of open generosity and playfulness. The young toddler, whose back is to the home video recorder, faces the father by tilting their head up and stretching out their significantly shorter arms. Though they are not nearly as tall nor as wide as the man, in this moment, they expand into the space with full openness, following and learning from their dad in the memory of this shared moment.
This scene is the first image visitors saw when walking into Salimatu Amabebe’s solo exhibition SON. The picture is a still from an archival home video that depicts the artist and his father dancing together in the living room. Knots of corrugated pewter frame the photo, adding a sense of gravitas, and yet also chromatically alluding to a mercurial element of change which suggests that time has superseded this memory with renewed perspective. The title of the exhibition, SON, indicates that this moment shared between father and child is one of teaching and masculine socialization. At the same time, however, the exhibition opens space for interrogating the assumed facticity of filial inheritance and the iterative rehearsal of one’s performed masculinity in the process of becoming.
In the exhibition, Amabebe explored these questions with curiosity in a material archive of motifs. Chief among these is the white tank top, which appears repeatedly throughout the exhibition. Colloquially known as the “wife-beater,” the ribbed, sleeveless shirt is notorious for its association with domestic violence. But it is also the same type of shirt worn by Amabebe’s father in the archival family video. Within the object, contradictions collide. On the one hand, it points to a cultural inheritance of masculinity that is toxic. But in the photograph, we see it kinetically activated in a moment that is undeniably tender and loving.
In the present, Amabebe offers Son I & II. The sculptures are animated by a cast mold of Amabebe’s body. 1 From there the shirts are constructed and stabilized, gesturing to the effort involved in reifying social constructions. Further, we are invited to consider the process, photographic-like, in which the language of positive and negative orientations is swirled in with representations of identity. What does it mean to render a negative trace of a construct? These unresolved tensions seem to animate the shirts, filling them with disembodied mythology which swirls in the negative space so fervently as to almost bring them to life.
I make myself hesitate for a moment as my imagination runs away, attempting to conjure something in the unstable space of absence. Looking at the shirt sculptures, I am transfixed on the space between – the negative space between the shirts; between the static and the kinetic; between father and son; the squared shoulders and the slightly askew; between the lessons of masculinity and its actualization in flesh. I am reminded, however, that there is no concrete object of gender performativity. 2 Like ether, it swirls around and in between the spaces of the body, making us think it indexes material fact. In reality, as Amabebe reminds me, the term “‘Son’ does not register a statement of identity, but rather the possibility of what could be contained in that. It describes the self in relation to a parent or guardian. A son is not a person, but a relationship.” 3 SON recognizes the instability of identity, yes, but beyond that, it invites an open exploration of expansive subjectivity under the auspices of relationality.
Zooming out for a moment, Son I & II are just two sculptures in an exhibition that is more of an immersive experience than a mere presentation of objects. The walls of the salon are flushed a deep red, which as the introductory text contextualizes it, is “reminiscent of blood” chromatically and metaphorically, which “invites reflections on the domestic space as one of close kinship ties, yet subject to dynamic change.” 4 Red is the color of change; it announces energy to the eye. Our heart beats faster, and perhaps we wonder what will happen next. For some, change is uncomfortable. But it is inevitable. Vest I & II stand alone as replications of Son I & II that have been cast in pewter, thus creating an afterimage of an idea. In the pewter, I see the haunting of the shirts from which they are cast. Now, in metallic form, they have been crafted into something that is from yet not of. The metal is brittle, flaking in some places and denser in others. The various accumulations indicate gradients of intensity in the cooling process.
The difference between the Vest series and the Son series represents the inevitable change in the replication process. In the context of the exhibition, we are reminded of the inevitable change between a father and son, two relational positions constantly in formation. Change, inevitable as it is, can also be a beautiful thing. 5
The sculptures carry the trace of the original, and Amabebe prompts us to think about the process of becoming and the significance of being in relation to one another. How is one to become – to move towards the self-actualization of one’s own imagination? For Fanon, the process was one of overcoming dehumanizing frameworks that foreclosed the true potential of Man. 6 But Édouard Glissant reminds us that we are beings in Relation, constantly trying to find ourselves between “solidary and the solitary” positions. 7 Taking these two adjacent impulses in tandem generates a question that Amabebe channels into SON: “How do you become something to someone when you are still becoming something to yourself?” 8 The painful reminder of these sculptures is that we come into the lives of others only partially formed, always. We learn and grow, changing constantly in our relationships. I am primed to wonder if change, as a constant, renders even our most intimate relationships as ephemeral sparks arcing in the flows of becoming.
SON explores the transitory and constant change of being through clustered dance improvisation.
Look at ghostdance (2023), the 26-minute projected video whose sounds of jazz, synths, and archival sound creates a frenetic cacophony much like memories erupting to the surface. 9 In the video, we see dancers NIC Kay, Gabriele Christian, Naike Swai, and Amabebe fade on and off screen as illusory ghosts dancing at times together and at times apart from one another. As if in their own worlds, they dance internally, meticulously, as if trying to recall steps to a dance they once remembered. Though they do not acknowledge one another or dance together, it seems they are connected, but only by the proximity of on-screen juxtaposition and the texture of their movements. In the negative space between them, worlds of meaning collide, collapse, and evolve. They move within it, becoming dynamic and mercurial, channeling the flow of change and embodying the unknown together.
Click here to view artist bio film: Salimatu Amabebe - SON
Citations
1 Amabebe creates the shirts from a plaster cast made after his top surgery, further destabilizing the idea of an “original” mold.
2 See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York; London: Routledge, 2006).
3 Interview with the artist January 24, 2024.
4 Salimatu Amabebe, SON. Co-curated by Salimatu Amabebe & Key Jo Lee, Chief of Curatorial Affairs & Public Programs at MoAD. Wall text by Luke Williams at the Museum of the African Diaspora. October 2023.
5 See Octavia E. Butler’s dystopian novel Parable of the Sower, whose narrator Lauren Olamina prophesies God as change. Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993).
6 See Frantz Fanon Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1952).
7 See Édouard Glissant Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
8 Interview with the artist January 24, 2024.
9 The audio for ghostdance was created by Zekarias Musele Thompson. They made the track by sampling audio from the original video. The sound score resonates with themes of the exhibition through aural mixing, distortion, and repetition, overlaid with original saxophone.
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