Where We're At – No. 39
Allan deSouza: The Farthest Point
Krannert Art Museum, 26 August – 30 December 2010
Allyson Purpura, exhibition curator
Divine #2894, digital c-print, 16 x 24"Image courtesy of Talwar Gallery and the artist
This exhibition brings together new and recent photo-conceptual works by the internationally acclaimed artist Allan deSouza. Born in Nairobi in 1958 and of south Asian descent, deSouza moved to England with his family while still a child. He studied at the Bath Academy of Art and at Goldsmith’s College in London and was a key figure in the British Black arts movement in the 1980s. In 1992 he migrated to New York to study criticism at the Whitney Museum of American Art and then to Los Angeles, where he earned an MFA in photography at UCLA. Best known for creating images of elusive sensuality, much of deSouza’s work explores the conditions and consequences of being “placed” in racialized, gendered, and temporal frames. Using his body and landscape as points of departure, his mixed-media photographic works combine illusion and pseudo-biographical narrative to explore the instability of memory, dislocation, and the pull between things familiar and foreign. In doing so, the artist probes our attachments to the idea of “authentic” places, histories, and identities.
Polar Sky (fghtbtwntgrndbffl), detail, digital c-print, 55 x 40"Image courtesy of Talwar Gallery and the artist
An artist of extraordinary range, deSouza’s practice moves between photography, performance, sculpture, installation, criticism, and fiction. deSouza’s recent exhibitions include the Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; the 3rd Guangzhou Triennale, China; ev+a Festival, Ireland; and the Pompidou Centre, Paris. Upcoming exhibitions include Loyola University, New Orleans; Fowler Museum, Los Angeles; the Phillips Collection, DC; and Talwar Gallery, NY. His fiction and critical writing has been published in numerous artist catalogues, journals and anthologies, including Third Text, Amerasia Journal, Camerawork, and Shades of Black: Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain (Duke University Press). deSouza lives and works in San Francisco, where he is studio faculty and Chair of New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute.
Imperial (wmnwthflwr), detail, digital c-print, 55 x 40"
Image courtesy of Talwar Gallery and the artist
The winter issue of Ninth Letter will feature a text-work by deSouza entitled Bombay. Designed originally for installation on the expanse of a gallery wall, the artist adapted the work for the print page. Resembling a work of concrete poetry, Bombay conflates fictional and historical narratives that move between a slave’s voyage to Bombay and return to Africa, deSouza’s father’s departure from Goa to Nairobi, and his own from Nairobi to London. Interweaving the epic with the ordinary, this work explores the contingencies of language, place, race, and memory that, in the end, “undo” imperial tropes of discovery and return.
-Allyson Purpura, KAM curator
I had a story
with no beginning and no end.
No past, no future, only the possibility
of coming into being. A story, not
so much recitation, but re-siting.
Having changed places,
stopped and restarted,
this story is of the becoming,
not just of the places
––the changed from and the changed to––but of the changing;
not just of the leaving and arriving,
but of the passage
itself.
(2 issues)
