Tavares Strachan’s The Return wows at Goodman

The Goodman Gallery in Joburg has had a strong recent run of exhibition programming that gives credence to its commitment to show cutting-edge contemporary art from the Global South. This much-maligned and slippery phrase essentially means exhibiting and critically curating art from areas of the world outside of the socio-political mainstream of the Western hemisphere — in short, Europe and the US.

The intense and conceptually engaging new body of work, The Return, is by Bahamian-born, New York-based polymath Tavares Strachan. He has had a formidable career to date, with work in major museums and institutions, and major public interventions like his You Belong Here/We Belong Here neon installation above New York’s Barclays Centre Plaza in Brooklyn. Strachan’s exhibition at Goodman follows recent work there by Cuban conceptualist Carlos Garaicoa and a remarkable group show of mostly African artists titled A Different Now is Close Enough to Exhale on You, guest-curated by Yaoundé-born, Berlin-based curator and writer Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung.

Strachan’s work can be disarmingly simple and powerful, as in the 2021 Brooklyn installation, but is more often marked by a deep intellectual proliferation, one idea or image leading to many others, tangents and palimpsests piling up and shooting off. Nowhere is this clearer than in the 15-year-long Encyclopedia of Invisibility project, which occupies a central place in this exhibition. It is the foundational outcome of Strachan’s research-intensive practice, drawing broadly on discourses of art, science, history and cultural critique, all in the service of uncovering narratives of invisibility, displacement and loss. Within that broad remit, specific themes and historical figures are recontextualised in his work, such as African-American polar explorer Matthew Henson, about whom Strachan has previously produced a performative installation. In the current show, these themes range over cosmology and paleontological origin stories, decolonial histories and critiques of the Anthropocene and climate destruction.

A series of tapestries and paintings elaborate on the themes emerging from the Encyclopaedia, moving from dense collages of alphabetical entries from the secret histories to large-scale cosmological depictions of space journeys, a favourite theme for the artist, who has previously collaborated with or shown at MIT and SpaceX. These surround a central phalanx of totemic ceramic urns, adorned with the heads of key African-American, Caribbean and Brazilian figures. As with the Encyclopaedia, these offer a set of narratives that have a spiritual significance in addition to their social or historical impact. The use of clay, Strachan muses, brings a consideration of deep time: “I love this idea that the mud is an integral part of human existence and human evolution. And the idea that you can build something from clay, fire it, and create form is something that is very much connected to [many culture’s] creation story, [and] the idea of just being an artist in general. So, clay is a really important motivator and driver for this exhibition.”

The clay theme, and much else besides, continues in a remarkable component of this exhibition, which is the conversion of part of the exhibition space in the gallery to resemble a museum storeroom, full of plundered or resonant colonial and decolonial artefacts. The idea of a museum archive full of objects of this kind — forgotten plaster busts of Steve Biko and meticulously labelled lost objects from colonial histories — raises the urgent contemporary question of the restitution and repatriation of such artefacts in the decolonial moment. But for Strachan, it is also about the major theme of the show, The Return.

“For me, I think our understanding of the human experience is connected to our understanding of our origin story. And the show is about a physiological return, but also a kind of historic return. What does it mean for human beings to return to their place of origin, as Africa is the place where human beings evolved?”

James Sey asked the artist to elaborate:

JS: How does the concept of The Return relate to the types and specificities of knowledge that you are uncovering and pointing to in the Encyclopedia of Invisibility aspect of the project?

TS: Re-visiting anything, a place or an idea, is often not what the brain might imagine it to be; the pre-thought of a thing vs the experience. I wanted to play with this idea of a return to a pre-European conception of the story of humans. Where do we come from, why are we here and why has one group of us dominated the story-telling landscape though the archiving process, instead of another group?

JS: You’re connecting cosmological time scales and motifs in the exhibition with what might be called “non-historical” or anthropological time. Can you elaborate?

TS: What is time after all? A series of temporalities broken into fragments, so that we can make sense of our existence. So perhaps the question is, can the passing of time help human beings to come together to solve problems? I believe it should.

JS: The restitution and redress aspects of your practice are front and centre, but are tied in this exhibition to an idea of origin, of ancestry, of, perhaps, an idea of authenticity. How far should we as viewers take these concepts? Where do they intersect with the objects and animated experience in the exhibition?

TS: It’s been fascinating to me how Eurocentric African history is. It’s almost unfathomable that this is the case, but all of my understanding of Africa is through a European lens. Our species evolved in Africa, and it seems to me that this history is important and perhaps should be told.

JS: I’m very interested in how you have restaged the idea of a museum storeroom and “liminalised” the idea of an archive in this exhibition. Can you speak more about this installation in particular, and how it short-circuits the ideas of appropriation and restitution in the same installatory gesture?

TS: As a child, I would visit my mother at her job as a cleaning woman at one of the hotels in the Bahamas. I was always entering from the side entrance or the back door. I think giving access to the back room was a way for me to share something from my childhood.