The first time I entered the water, I had just crossed the sea, flying from Thailand to Germany. Dipping my feet into the deep indigo tide, I was swept into a hold, lost in the gaze of Zwarte Anna (2021) as she cradled an ambiguous infant up to her bleeding bosom (Fig. 1). This was my introduction to the extensive show entitled Indigo Waves and Other Stories: Re-Navigating the Afrasian Sea and Notions of Diaspora curated by Natasha Ginwala and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung with Michelangelo Corsaro at Gropius Bau in Berlin.1 That summer of 2023 I sat on the lone bench enclosed in a dark room for quite some time. There she was, suspended in a black abyss, myself lulled by the echoing soundscape. For many, the Black figure in contemporary art is overdetermined, perhaps even dead on arrival. Anna is surrounded by historical portraits, abstracted images of family, and even a modern-day tweet from Lebanon.I joined in her company wondering about the lifelines of Kudzanai-Violet Hwami’s collaged and painted figures. My eyes traced the outline of the central figure’s body, waxed over by strokes of acrylic, silkscreen, oil, and intimately reinforced by sharp moments of collage. I was repeatedly drawn to the bright bloodline conceptually evoked by the red color dripping from her right breast against a backdrop of stiff black-and-white photographs of children. I took in the borderline surrounding the composition, frameless and buoyed by Belinda Zhawi’s sonic depths and felt reinforced by the evoked fault lines of memory that seemed to simultaneously execute and resurrect entanglements of power, labor, and migration. The first time I entered the water, I did not know my feet were wet.It was only a matter of days before I was compelled to return. Knee-deep I gave in to that place where boundaries are transgressed. I left Hamburg’s inlets of the North Sea and rushed back to Indigo Waves — an exhibition that challenged the notion of African and Asian art by revealing their shared shores, pushing the boundaries of community and migration. The second time I entered the water, I found I already knew how to swim. My head high, I treaded amongst the photography, book art, tapestries, animations, found and fabricated objects, virtual realities, installations, poems, and songs. Pulled toward and pushed away. The rhythm and pacing of artwork spread throughout the grand art venue suggested an infinite expanse. The water was pure.It was easy to cling to the outstanding scenes in the show, like Shiraz Bayjoo’s room of talismans. Shells, coral, coins, and stones resting beside textile flags, kanga fabric and giclée prints on photo rag (Fig. 2). From Bayjoo’s Boneyard, Three Sisters, Woman by Window (2022), life-size images of Black foremothers protected the sacred shorelines of Mauritius, Madagascar, and South Africa all coalescing at the edge of the exhibition. Safe in that room, I could see the corners of the sea. Oscar Murillo’s grand triptych of abstract paintings surge (social cataracts) (2019-ongoing) served as an anchor. The many varied brushstrokes of oil, oil stick, and graphite, on canvas and linen tethered the layers of the ocean, from its surface to the trenches, and even the sky above (Fig. 3). I drifted in the cumulus overhead. Moving between the spaces of the hydrosphere, I could glimpse into Dr. John Njenga Karugia’s capacious maritime expertise which provided a counter-historical ethnography of the Indian Ocean (Fig. 4). The documentary Afrasian Memories in East Africa (2018) tracked not only historical relics, but also challenged the conventions of academic research. There was no need to study, the knowledge embedded in my bones. I wasn’t seeking the headwaters of correctness, rather I was becoming, submerged in something different. I crossed the waters again and again.Multimedia artist Sondra Perry once described the ocean as a change agent. It is a “modifier to culture, to people, and to movement” (Perry 2018). Nothing passes through it without alteration. A free person becomes enslaved. An oppressed person finds freedom. A material ship becomes a temporal hold. Water bodies become gas before becoming droplets and then wet earth. Like toy bits dunked into a vat of black ink, it covers the shape of you and them and makes us. But who are we? Redrawing the maps of diaspora, this question lingers in the curated space.Thrashing against the current, I found myself channeled to places of subtly. Köken Ergun and Fetra Danu’s animation China, Beijing, I Love You! (2023) (Fig. 5) was an unexpected lure. From the resting cushions to the laminated thrice-over translated transcript, I was surprised to find such a potent message in a kid-like presentation. It was accessibly elementary and elemental. But maybe that’s the import, that before the ocean, we are all children. The video reveals the ecological impact and shared sense of struggle between seemingly disparate communities using the personification of dust clouds who are lost and anguished by their displacement. Ratna Mufia’s Indonesian voice resonates as a fire-orange dust cloud of nickel excavated from Sulawesi Island and as an ocean-blue dust cloud of cobalt stripped from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Both rise into the air. Here I am, I was there before … I belong to the Earth. Less about water, and more about minerals separated from land, the roughly 35-minute clip follows the transport of metals on China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Through the voice of these vibrant dust clouds, the powers that traverse the ocean to enact harm are called out. I am broken into parts. Some stay behind, some taken faaaar away, to distant lands for profit. Raped from the ground, by the “ministry of extraction,” like people of the past and perhaps some today, these minerals are shipped to be violently compressed into servants of global capitalist needs. Careless humans driving their battery powered electric vehicles while using battery powered cell phones. Nickel and cobalt join in unison, they dance and collide in affliction, estranged from their homelands. This is at the heart of the Afrasian Sea. I am no different than the dust, changed by water, and angry for having been disturbed. And at the same time, I am the cell phone user, who participates in a world wherein it is okay to be disconnected from the blurred boundaries of my roots. An epitome of the exhibition, this video pitted and pitied me all the while looking like something reminiscent of a children’s coloring book.In another space Adama Delphine Fawundu’s dual-screen video installation took a much more mature and abstract tone. Mama Adama Hymns and Parables (2022) (Fig. 6) was hypnotizing. Using few words and few faces, the imagery evoked the depths of an ocean’s power through visual juxtaposition. Screens along with tapestries comprised of various materials, archival inkjet, and fabric, hung in the air like floating souls. Like two coasts trying to see each other, each screen displaying multiple video clips at a time, split horizontally, sometimes three ways, they reflected one another even as they projected at a different pace and with different imagery. The cinematography utilizing a complex lexicon. Images of interior spaces sidelined to look prismatic, water moving in reverse, close ups of people in water, baptized in azures and lavenders. Glamorous overlays, cuts, and stills. With the video clips alternating spatio-temporalities, it was hard to track direction. Levitation the only orientation, I could not decipher what was up from what was down. Surrounding were the woven figures—painted and patched onto patterned fabric, with plastic, twine, and bits of metal. They looked like abstracted bodies, with heads, hands, and something at the center be it a womb, a heart, an essence. But were they ascending or descending? Almost like a geologic record of the human, it was hard to distinguish which of these souls were sedimented and which were effervescent. The installation was not quiet, but it instilled a sense of quiet within me. The long hair and yonic bodies spoke a form of hieroglyphics.Following a viewing of MFON Women Photographers of the African Diaspora (2020), emerging curator BrittNEY Frantece questioned, “if the body of the ocean was a metaphor for anything that I could recognize, how might I allow myself to liberate my body and transcend into the air before falling into its depth” (Frantece 2020: 69). Indigo Waves suggests that our own bodies, in the act of viewing art, are that recognizable metaphor. As are the bodies of those that appear to be unlike us. We do not have to go to the ocean for it to evoke such change. The ocean changes within us. It comes to us in the most unseeming ways such as in the landlocked city of Berlin and in the unpigmented walls of the kuntshalle. It comes to us through the sandy shore, through polluted air, through childlike wonder, and through desires for liberation. More importantly, the water connects us all, for good or bad. When it touches me, I am touching you. When I cross it, I am crossing us. When we dive in, they are there waiting and wading.
Meshell L. Sturgis (Thu,) studied this question.