In her book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), Christina Sharpe suggests that “thinking needs care (‘all thought is Black thought’) and that thinking and care need to stay in the wake.” By conceptualising “Black being in the wake as a form of consciousness,” Sharpe engages the concrete materialities of Black lives, including social exclusion and abjection, as the departure point “toward inhabiting a blackened consciousness.”
The Black-British artist Ima-Abasi Okon develops a lexicon of revised conceptualism that weaves together material and immaterial practices, addressing the seeming contradictions between thinking and embodiment. In doing so, Okon turns to language challenging the conventions of grammar with artworks featuring long, rhythmic, and syntactically disjointed titles such as: (Unbounded [sic]-Vibrational [sic] Always [sic]-on-the-Move [sic]) Praising Flesh (An _Extra aSubjective p,n,e,u,m,a-mode of Being T,o,g,e,t,h,e,r), 2019; or alongside-ness with-out identification1+ excess over the original value1< (A-------d--------o---------r--------n), 2019. Her idiosyncratic forms of punctuation are a form of “en-fleshing” language by emphasising the particularities of speech: how someone pronounces words or stutters and pauses. By accommodating these “defaults ways of speaking or being,” her work seeks to re-orient a system that is antagonistic to so-called minorities, including diasporic communities, their material particularities and diverse experiences.
Okon, moreover, declares that she is “not interested in cohesiveness at all.” Instead, she invites a level of difficulty in the interpretation of her work: “you have to work for it and you have to work hard.” Rather than presenting a “readymade” coherent proposition or an easily digestible, totalising vision of the world, the artist employs strategies of fragmentation and obfuscation that require sharp, critical thinking. While resisting figuration, and other practices that fetishize Blackness, Okon’s often invisible substances (i.e. transparent liquids, air, sound etc) operate instead in linguistic terms as a metonymy for the body -- they signify by association, “without allowing [the body] to be a spectacle, without allowing it to be consumed in a particular way.”
Okon, who is also an educator, is familiar with the mechanisms of knowledge production, both in the academia and in the artworld. This paper examines the claims she makes to difficulty, thinking through materials and how they disrupt the visual field; how her strategies of fragmentation, incoherence and obfuscation resist the ownership of knowledge; and how they contribute to recent debates about inclusion and diversity. This paper argues that rather than privileging thought over materiality or vice-versa, Okon’s practice of “en-fleshing language” introduces instead the materialities of Blackness as thought; or blackness as consciousness, as Sharpe suggested.
Keywords: conceptualism, materiality, race
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Dr Natasha Adamou
Senior Lecturer in Art History & Stage Leader
BA (Hons) Culture, Criticism and Curation
Central Saint Martins | University of the Arts London
EDUCATION
Ph.D., 2015, Art History & Theory, School of Philosophy and Art History, University of Essex, United Kingdom / Awarded with no corrections
MA, 2009, Art History & Theory (Distinction), School of Philosophy and Art History, University of Essex, United Kingdom
MA, 2007, Museum Studies, University of Leicester, United Kingdom
ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS
Senior Lecturer in Art History & Stage Leader, BA Culture, Criticism and Curation, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, since August 2018
Lecturer in Exhibition Histories, MA Curating Art and Public Programmes, Whitechapel Gallery and SouthBank University, since 2021
Early Career Research Fellow, 2016-18, Critical and Historical Studies, Kingston School of Art, Kingston University London
Henry Moore Foundation - British School at Rome Research Fellow in Sculpture, British School at Rome, 2015-16
https://www.arts.ac.uk/colleges/central-saint-martins/people/dr-natasha-adamou
The Black British artist Ima-Abasi Okon develops a lexicon of revised conceptualism that weaves together material and immaterial practices. In doing so, Okon challenges the conventions of grammar with artworks featuring long, syntactically disjointed titles. Her idiosyncratic forms of punctuation are a form of “en-fleshing” the written text by emphasising the particularities of speech: how someone pronounces words or stutters and pauses. By accommodating these “defaults ways of speaking or being,” her work seeks to re-orient a system that is antagonistic to so-called minorities, including diasporic communities, their material particularities and diverse experiences.