Abdulwasiu Salimat and Simone Chnarakis | Dialectics of Fugitivity

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Abdulwasiu Salimat and Simone Chnarakis, "Dialectics of Fugitivity"

Courtesy of Abdulwasiu Salimat.

Emerging from a conceptual framework that centres bell hook's postulations of the oppositional gaze and Tina Campt's hypothesis on the registers of refusal in the image, artists Abdulwasiu Salimat and Simone Chnarakis invoke dialogue on the current and future state of Blackness from the perspectives of bodies living in a world haunted by the effects of colonization.

In Dialectics of Fugitivity, Salimat's and Chnarakis' images visualize divergent tactics of refusal utilized by colonized bodies in the construction of post-colonial identities. Salimat's surreal photographs envision a reality for Nigerian women suspended in time and history; these images pose the Nigerian women in the frame as liberated and mystical beings free to roam and shape the world around them without the presence of an ever-pervasive white gaze.

Alternatively, Chnarakis' work features everyday images of the people and the landscape of postcolonial Jamaica. These quotidian images of Jamaican subjects and landscapes speak to the realities of present-day Jamaica and the strong communal spirit and individual agency that exists amongst the Jamaican people despite their turbulent history.

Combined, Salimat's and Chnarakis' individual practices invoke the themes of the Black female gaze, perspectivism, world-building, queerness, Black futurity outside our current reality, communal bonds, individual identity vs communal identity, nationhood, refusal and longing. These images ask viewers to discern the registers of refusal in the frame and contemplate the effects of colonization on the minds, bodies and lands dispossessed by European colonists.

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