The exhibition ‘Helix / Idyl' brings together two series of paintings by Kimathi Donkor, both of which continue his investigations into new forms of resistance from the perspective of a black subjectivity. Whilst earlier work by Donkor addressed state repression of the black subject as well as the erasure of the black presence through history and art history, these new series evoke blackness in more optimistic spaces and potentialities. In this way, they build on the important moment of making oppression and injustice visible towards a nascent set of thinking offering alternatives where black subjects are present, central and in control of their own possibilities and destinies.
'Helix' begins with the shape of natural Black African hair which is pictured entangled together over shimmering dark gold backgrounds. The imagery references the political history of Afro hair in the Black Power movement and beyond as a symbol of diasporic resistance but there is simultaneously references to a wider set of speculative and symbolic ideas. The helix shape is found in a range of natural phenomena from the structure of DNA, the pathways of molecules through to galaxy spirals. The helix shape then points not only to the black experience but to something more mystical and universal.
The link between black subjectivity and wider natural phenomena is something that was seen in the Afrofuturism movement that became popular in the 1970s and more recently in an idea such as the Black Fantastic. The curator and writer Ekow Eshun has characterised the latter as being works of speculative fiction that draw on history and myth to make new visions of African diasporic culture and identity. Eshun articulates a constant productive tension between everyday realities and the extraordinary, and Donkor’s Helix paintings constantly move backwards and forwards between the specificities of the personal and the political to abstract ideas of wonder.
‘Idyl’ is a series of work that might be approached through the idea of Black Joy, a movement that has grown in importance in recent years. This thinking is rooted in the idea that resistance can take the form of black people enjoying everyday pleasures which in their simplicity articulate a resistance to being silenced, sidelined or being perpetually cast as victims. Control of the black body was key to slavery through the restriction of slaves’ movements in plantations and the white policing of the black body since then underpins a range of repressive regimes mechanisms from state brutality through to Apartheid. Black Joy refuses such fixed spatial formations of repression, from refusing to only exist in restricted locations to Carnival through to revelling in simply being present. In ‘Idyl’ Donkor depicts scenes of black subjects free to be themselves within nature. These serene countryside locations have often been implicitly reserved for a white presence and the simple assertion of a black presence is subtly rebellious. There is an easy freedom in these figures, to simply be there in the landscape and not subject to any controlling gaze or set of restrictions.
Both series of works might also be understood in relation to Donkor’s project of actively differencing the canon from within. This process began in the early 2000s with Donkor’s adoption of the language of the canonical art historical idiom of history painting, thought once to be the highest form of painting in the western tradition. ‘Idyl’ might be seen in relation to landscape painting and ‘Helix’ to abstraction, and the oscillation between them interrogates the canonical idea of progress through specific genres (as most infamously seen in Alfred H. Barr’s chart of the evolution of modern art). Together the two series suggest new ways of seeing a black presence in the world that moves beyond being the subject of control, violence or repression. In this constant movement there is the recognition of an everyday that is still too full of racialised oppression and bigotry but also a move beyond that towards a recognition of potentialities and new ways of being and articulating presence.
