Features
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Oscar Murillo Central Pavilion by Adrienne Edwards, Curator at Performa
As I entered the Giardini on the afternoon of May 5, I immediately encountered Oscar Murillo and Glenn Ligon’s duet on the facade of the Central Pavilion, a staged proposition of autonomous yet interdependent works. Murillo’s twenty or so un-stretched, fraying, patchwork, monochromatic black paintings—some with flourishes of indigo—dance on their diagonal lines just beneath Ligon’s neon text piece, which read: “blues blood bruise.” It is an astonishing curatorial gesture. Two black men from different generations and parts of the African diaspora opened the show in a way akin to Muhammad Ali’s trash-talking provocation: “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. The hands can’t hit what the eyes can’t see.” The installation’s undeniable beauty gives levity to an otherwise pointed proposition that brings to mind cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s reflection on the immigration crisis in 1970s Britain: Blacks become the bearers, the signifiers . . . . This is not a crisis of race. But race punctuates and periodizes the crisis. Race is the lens through which people come to perceive that a crisis is developing.1 How uncanny, then, to have the overwhelming visibility (Murillo) and the affective annunciation (Ligon) of blackness veil and envelope the pavilion—in a country whose shores are confronted daily with flows of Africans in flight, and during a time of prominent extra-judicial killings of black men in the United States. Murillo’s canvases, precariously tilted and dangling, are like masts holding out hope for wind; as we wade through them the zephyrs we stir proffer some sense of mutual complicity.
Okwui Enwezor’s placement of these two artists on the facade, as one can say of his choices throughout the exhibition, harkens back to a comment he made as artistic director of the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale in 1997: “we . . . have other priorities.” Murillo’s sails visibly signify such priorities, and the fact that they are necessary and tough— not in the sense of being difficult—but rather because those commitments are strong enough to withstand adversity and careless interpretations. 1.
Stuart Hall, “Racism and Reaction,” in Five Views of Multiracial Britain (London: Commission for Racial Equality, 1978).