“Suffering feels like coals that burn on your skin. That’s what I do with paper. I paste multiple layers of different types of paper onto each other and then I burn holes in it with coals.” Oussou stresses: “Remember, without suffering there is no happiness.”
Fast aims to question the way a recollection can be a construction, rather than a fact. It gives him freedom to embrace complex storytelling, and as he interweaves the fantastical with the mundane his movies become confrontational, they question the humanity, or the lack of it, in today’s global conflicts.
And although ‘Young, Gifted and Black’ remains undoubtedly progressive and beautiful even, it seems apt to recall that white supremacy doesn’t retreat from violence by uncovering its ignorance or even jumpstarting its conscience by colorful cultural promptings. Maybe, this time, we need to stop seeking refuge in an anti-black world and sing about the revolution that seeks to end it, as Nina did. Perhaps that is where it really is at.
“There is a challenge being made about seeing and looking. The seeing is what happens on social media, but the looking is what I’m asking you to do. The looking requires thought, it requires engagement, it requires awareness, it requires inquiry, and it requires presence.”
From June 27 until October 4 2015 Museum De Lakenhal in Leiden, The Netherlands, presented ‘Global Imaginations’.
Leading artists from all continents presented their vision of the globalising world.