Chris Ofili’s taunting blue men, and his Napoleonic-era horsemen who morph into uniformed cops populate a threatening, saturated blue world. Zak Ové’s carnivalesque faces and figures, constructed from beached rope, mops and antique masks, play on the transgressive figures of Junkanoo carnival, as do Hew Locke’s decorated busts – one has the head of King Edward VII festooned in masonic regalia, almost to the point of smothering the monarch entirely in his decorations. Curry’s row of airline seats soiled with spews of beach sand and shells, the fanciful headrests adorned with braided synthetic hair, is a giddy transport to a fantasy destination. Photograph: Guy Bell/Rex/Shutterstockīlue Curry plays on the stereotypes of the Caribbean as a dumbed-down “site for leisure and consumption”. It looks painful either way.īlue Curry’s art work in Life Between Islands at Tate Britain. In another work, they pose as a sea urchin, or possibly an echidna. This public masquerade is a taunt, in a deeply conservative society where colonial-era, anti-LGBTQ+ laws are still in place. In Lookalook, queer Barbadian artist Ada M Patterson stalks the streets of Bridgetown, dressed as a kind of mythological creature draped in black, their head-dress decorated with shells, inviting stares and comments, insults and laughter.
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Tremors and violences are present throughout, although the exhibition is not without humour. Blue Curry plays on the stereotypes of the Caribbean with a row of airline seats soiled with spews of sand and shells Here, even the abstractions are deceptive – the maps of Guyana and South America barely surface in Frank Bowling’s paintings, and an entirely black, impassive painting by Donald Locke turns out to be an abstracted view of regular gridded fields in Guyana, part of the plantation structure imposed by Dutch and then British colonial rule. The paintings by Aubrey Williams are filled with broken things, dismembered vertebrae and burned-out nature.
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Protest and resilience, anger and pleasure come together throughout the exhibition. With its scenes of the heavilypoliced Notting Hill carnivals of 1976 and 84, of riot and surveillance, with its voiceover and heavily mixed sound-system dub, Julien’s earlier Territories, made in 1984 while he was still a student, is still haunting and filled with memorable images, more than 35 years since I first saw it. Photograph: Courtesy Vanley Burke ArchivesĪnother young man is beaten on a bed by his father, for speaking Creole rather than English, during a wonderfully evoked 1960s London house party, in a vertiginous scene from Isaac Julien’s three-screen 2002 Paradise Omeros.
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Young Men on a Seesaw in Handsworth Park, 1984. Joseph’s The Sky at Night is as much reportage as history painting, an event seen and grasped, as redolent as any documentary film or photography. In Tam Joseph’s painting of the night following the death of Cynthia Jarrett during a police raid on her flat in 1985, we see figures at the lighted windows, and protesters silhouetted against a fire beneath the buildings. In a painting by Denzil Forrester, Winston Rose is dragged and half-carried through the street by uniformed police, hurried to his death in custody in 1981. Ové’s photographs of the rise of the black power movement, as well as Neil Kenlock’s images of riot shields and racist graffiti, and Vron Ware’s photographs for the anti-fascist Searchlight magazine, documenting the Black People’s Day of Action in 1981, following the New Cross arson attack, which left 13 young people dead, are sobering reminders of a period of casual racism, bleak prospects of resistance and defiance and pleasures taken against the odds.