“The pressure is for you to make yourself available/visible but in that process you become static…fixed… it means you stand in one place in a way that is so tangible that you can easily be bypassed or placed … as opposed to being as mobile as you always have been. It’s a tricky thing. People are saying to you – I want to see you, but this is the lens I have. And then you say: that’s your lens, I don’t know what I have to be to be seen… but I think I want to go there.”
“In order to find her reflection, culture and history Iris Kensmil followed the footsteps of fellow Dutchmen from Holland to Suriname to America to Ghana and Indonesia and back. She has given us a tangible trail of not only her but our own reflection, culture and history.”
The conclusion of Sasha Dees in her article on the Dutch/Surinamese artist Iris Kensmil.
“Contemporary Art even today is still an activity for the elite in Brazil. The elite are a small group of people that descents from and still owns former plantation properties and/or the fruits of that today. Brazil is a class system, 80% poor people, the “one per centers” and a very small middle class. That with a very poor education system makes that only a few can afford to have good private education in and outside of Brazil. The descendents of the enslaved Africans are still the poor people of today in Brazil. This is even more the case if you talk about the 7% black (preto) people”.
Sasha Dees is looking for black artists in Rio de Janeiro.
History shows that villages, cities, as well as countries need a diverse population with varied talents and abilities in order to thrive. The work of artists like Griffith and Locke reflect that concept and remind us of the important role that an engaged citizen can play in their community.
Sasha Dees reports from the Tate Modern performances of Marlon Griffith and Hew Locke.
“In my early teens, my mother didn’t allow me to wear makeup. Her way of negotiating that was to allow me to wear nail polish. The nail polish was more than an accessory, it was a creative outlet and it became an expression of my identity. In 2002 when I realized that I was still in possession of a bottle of nail polish that I had since I was 15 years old, I started to think about the ways in which women use cosmetics as a means of personal codification. I originally made paintings in which I used and arranged the nail polish colors into a map legend of sorts and called it ‘The Sensation Code’. The code would imply further possible narrative directions in the work. I was plaing with language, with the viewer’s expectation for familiar canons – Awai spreads her fingers wide open looking at her transparent flesh/pinky colored polished nails – and sometimes a nail polish name would start off an idea for a work or, when seeing a name on a bottle, one of the ideas that I am working on would come to mind and it would become part of it.”
Sasha Dees in conversation with Trini-American Nicole Awai.