In the Black Fantastic at Hayward Gallery is the most exciting show in London this summer

The literary and aesthetic genre of Afrofuturism blends high technology, intergalactic travel, metamorphosis and mysticism into narratives of Africa and its diaspora.

Coined in the 90s, the term was applied to writers, musicians and artists of an earlier generation: Octavia Butler’s sci-fi novels, the mythos constructed by musicians Sun Ra and George Clinton, and the Black Panther comics.

Writer and curator Ekow Eshun’s knockout summer show In the Black Fantastic, at the Hayward Gallery in London, picks up the contemporary legacy of Afrofuturism and ventures further, looking at how artists use speculative fictions to reflect on issues in our own time. Rather than cramming in every black artist of the moment who deploys fantasy and fiction in their work, Eshun keeps his focus tight, giving large displays to 11 international talents.

The soaring opening gallery is taken over in spectacular style by the American sculptor Nick Cave. Crossing the space at a diagonal is a vast “chain-link” curtain – Chain Reaction – each link a double-ended cast of the artist’s forearm, hands extended to haul up and hold the one beneath. It is a clear symbol of solidarity and the effect at this scale is striking. 

In the Black Fantastic Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London Lina Iris Viktor, Eleventh, 2018 Pure 24 karat gold, acrylic, ink, copolymer resin, print on matte canvas 165 x 127 cm ? 2018. Courtesy the Artist Provided by filipa.mendes@southbankcentre.co.uk Important copyright information: These images are copyright cleared for reproduction in all print, broadcast and digital media in the context of publicity for the Hayward Gallery exhibition In the Black Fantastic. The images may not be cropped, bleed off the page, overprinted with text, or altered in any way and may not be passed to any third parties without further permission. All credit information must appear whenever an image is reproduced.
Eleventh (2018), by Lina Iris Viktor (Image: Courtesy the Artist)

Around the margins of the gallery are positioned four otherworldly costumes ­- the Soundsuits – each made in response to moments of collective mourning following episodes of public brutality. Cave made his first Soundsuit in 1992, the year footage of police officers beating Rodney King in Los Angeles was watched around the world. The most recent – Soundsuit 9.29 – was made following the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

The suits look like ceremonial costumes. Covering head and body, they offer flamboyant anonymity, at once a safe, darkened space to hide and a celebratory assertion. 

Cave has covered each in a skin of brightly coloured craft objects – one has a shaggy skirt of crocheted and knitted bonnets, like the deflating breasts of a psychedelic Artemis. Another is encrusted with shining buttons, the head crested with a whirl of fine, coloured wire, like the three-way love child of a pearly king, a bottle brush and a sousaphone. They are costumes for the high priests of new rituals, stitched together from the detritus of an older culture.

Eshun points out that the “Black fantastic” isn’t a genre per se – he’s just interested in the ways in which different artists use fiction and fantasy. Nevertheless, there are strong unifying themes here. 

In the Black Fantastic Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London Wangechi Mutu, The End of eating Everything, 2014 Video animation 8:10 minutes Courtesy of the Artist, Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, and Victoria Miro, London. Commissioned by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC Provided by filipa.mendes@southbankcentre.co.uk Important copyright information: These images are copyright cleared for reproduction in all print, broadcast and digital media in the context of publicity for the Hayward Gallery exhibition In the Black Fantastic. The images may not be cropped, bleed off the page, overprinted with text, or altered in any way and may not be passed to any third parties without further permission. All credit information must appear whenever an image is reproduced.
The End of eating Everything (2014) Wangechi Mutu (Image: Courtesy of Artist, Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, & Victoria Miro, London)

One is collage, in the expanded sense of the term: not only cut paper but, as in Cave’s work, found trimmings and objects of all kinds pieced together. Hew Locke presents a room full of new mounted monuments, black figures on horseback adorned with a cascade of medals, textiles and art historical motifs. Rashaad Newsome has pieced together a troupe of queer performers from images including historic African statuary and flashy jewellery. 

Wangechi Mutu once described magazines as “the faecal matter of culture – if you want to find out what’s really going on in the digestive system, you look at what’s coming out of it”. Her collage paintings make fertile use of this. Porn, fashion and nature magazines are sliced up and pieced together into mythic creatures and fantastical figures: Mutu fashions deities, monsters and dreamscapes from the disposable waste of contemporary culture. As a symbolic gesture, collage is a route to reimagine what is available: it transforms the everyday into the unexpected.

Another crucial theme here is the sharing and retelling of stories. Chris Ofili gives Homer’s Odyssey a Trinidadian makeover, picturing Odysseus and the sea nymph Calypso embracing in a warm tropical sea. 

The word “calypso” has other associations in Trinidad – this nymph has lent her name to storytelling in song. Who tells a story and how they tell it matters: it has an impact on who feels ownership of those roots, that cultural heritage. Ofili’s paintings of his Black Odysseus are more straightforwardly lush and illustrative than his earlier works, but perhaps that’s the point: to make a new spin on the story feel like it has always been there.

In the Black Fantastic Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London Nick Cave, Soundsuit, 2014 Mixed media including fabric, buttons, antique sifter, and wire 211 x 60.5 x 67.5 cm ? Nick Cave. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Mandrake Hotel Collection Provided by filipa.mendes@southbankcentre.co.uk Important copyright information: These images are copyright cleared for reproduction in all print, broadcast and digital media in the context of publicity for the Hayward Gallery exhibition In the Black Fantastic. The images may not be cropped, bleed off the page, overprinted with text, or altered in any way and may not be passed to any third parties without further permission. All credit information must appear whenever an image is reproduced.
Soundsuit, 2014, Nick Cave (Photo:James Prinz Photography/Image: Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Mandrake Hotel Collection)

Medusa, Narcissus and Dionysus all stroll into Sedrick Chisom’s magnificent, hazy, woozy paintings, which blend episodes of the American “creation” story with foundation myths and glorifications plucked from across cultures and across time. 

Chisom’s palette is fizzingly toxic – his landscapes pulsate in burnt orange, antacid pink and flashes of pale arsenic green. Those interwoven references call into question where fiction ends and history begins, and whether you can ever definitively divide the two.

Kara Walker’s Prince McVeigh and the Turner Blasphemies (2021) is an outlier here, exploring fiction and storytelling as powerful forces for ill. As with Chisom, Walker blends characters and narrative threads from down the ages. 

Using shadow puppetry, she animates figures associated with white supremacist violence in the US – among them the terrorist Timothy McVeigh, and James Byrd Jr, who was horrifically murdered in Texas in 1998. The “Turner Blasphemies” of the title refer to a fantasy novel about race war in the US that inspired McVeigh.

Walker weaves together historic murders and acts of terrorism with elements of recent history: marchers wielding tiki torches and other iconography relating to the alt-right.

In the Black Fantastic Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London Chris Ofili, Annunciation, 2006 Bronze 200.7 x 213.4 x 119.4 cm ? Chris Ofili. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Provided by filipa.mendes@southbankcentre.co.uk Important copyright information: These images are copyright cleared for reproduction in all print, broadcast and digital media in the context of publicity for the Hayward Gallery exhibition In the Black Fantastic. The images may not be cropped, bleed off the page, overprinted with text, or altered in any way and may not be passed to any third parties without further permission. All credit information must appear whenever an image is reproduced.
Annunciation (2006) by Chris Ofili (Image: Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner)

Under examination here is the toxic persistence of myths and fantasies. The beautiful execution of Walker’s work, together with a genre-spinning soundtrack by Lady Midnight, acts as a seductive foil for the darkest, most troubling work in the show.

Ellen Gallagher, too, brings a razor-sharp edge. Her paintings here evoke a subaquatic civilisation populated by the offspring of enslaved West African women thrown into the Atlantic while pregnant. Gallagher’s grand, richly textured paintings pulse with lobed seaweedy, coral forms and figures derived from sacred African sculptures. 

They echo the scale and grandeur of a 17th-century “portrait” of an enslaved man in a sugar cane-producing colony in north-east Brazil, which Gallagher has positioned looking out over her own works. In this painting, the black figure is just one element in a display of colonial riches.

There are some less compelling works on show. Tabita Rezaire’s projections onto a pyramid in a mirrored room look spectacular, and the exploration of gender in early cultures a promising theme, but the platitudes offered by the artist while she dances for the camera are frustratingly superficial.

Where it hits, though, this show is thrilling. Mutu’s sentinel sculptures in twisted wood and horn are hauntingly brilliant. Lina Iris Viktor performs as various ancient deities: her photographs painted over in indigo and rose, then encrusted with real gold, offer icons for a new age.

In the Black Fantastic can fairly claim to be the most exciting exhibition in London right now.

In the Black Fantastic is at the Hayward Gallery until 18 September

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