The world‘’s eyes have turned to the night sky with keen interest this week, tracking the celestial trifecta of a blue moon (two full moons in one month), a super moon (the moon’s elliptical orbit bringing it thousands of kilometres closer to Earth) and the planet Saturn appearing much more brightly than usual.
It’s an auspicious time to visit the Goodman Gallery Johannesburg, where Tavares Strachan’s The Return pursues an astronomical line of inquiry.
The exhibition title might lure one into expecting a somewhat sentimental indulgence in the notion of “coming home to Africa” for the Bahamian-born and US-based Strachan. But Strachan has long been interested in questions of migration and displacement, particularly as applied to black people who identify as part of an African diaspora. There are many different diasporic points of reference here, within the broad geographical and historical scope that extends from the trans-Atlantic slave trade to present-day border crossings, sea passages and xenophobic threats.
This sense of the contemporaneity of the past — the recognition that lives in the present echo those in the past, and that our present moment is shaped by historical forces known and unknown — is partly what makes astronomy so appealing to Strachan. It only takes about a second for the light reflecting off the moon to travel to Earth; from Saturn, light takes just over an hour to reach human eyes. But when we look at the stars, Strachan reminds us, they are so incomprehensibly far away that (despite the speed of light) we are basically “looking into the past”. Present and past thus merge in the night sky.
Space is also, of course, associated with the future. Our ancient ancestors wandered from south and central Africa, humanity’s “place of origin”, all around the world. Our descendants are likely to travel to distant planets. Little wonder, then, that the Afrofuturistic imagination incorporates various kinds of migration — and these are alluded to in Strachan’s Afronaut series.
The form and substance of these ceramic sculptures are multivalent. First, the material is significant. “Clay is a really important motivator and driver for this exhibition,” notes Strachan, not only because “mud is an integral part of human existence and human evolution” (and common to creation stories across many cultures), but also because “the idea that you can build something from clay”, fire it and create an object of lasting value is an affirmation of artistic practice.
Second, there is the totemic shape of these works. Emerging from the clay pots are busts of “African American, Caribbean and Brazilian” icons whose lives carry “spiritual significance in addition to their social impact”. The heads are variously covered in animal-print patterns or partially masked by helmets. Some are well-known historical figures, like Harriet Tubman and Marcus Garvey. Others make explicit the resonance between oceanic and galactic journeys: Andrea Crabtree (the first female deep-sea diver in the US Army) and Robert Henry Lawrence Jr (the first black American astronaut) wear a diving and space helmet, respectively.
Matthew Henson bares the “helmet” of a polar bear head — an allusion to his role in the Arctic voyages of exploration for which Robert Peary is generally acclaimed. The marginalisation of black people in popular histories that foreground white achievement is a familiar pattern, and one that Strachan seeks to rectify through his ongoing Encyclopaedia of Invisibility project. The Encyclopaedia is simultaneously a physical object (a book), an archive and a moving installation; over the past 15 years, Strachan has collected “hidden stories” for this growing anthology of black-centred narratives.
Some of Strachan’s previous endeavours have drawn attention for their ambition and spectacle. These include the extraction of a four-tonne block of Arctic ice that was then shipped to his birthplace in the Bahamas and exhibited in a solar-powered freezer chamber (an ostensibly environmentally oriented work that must nonetheless have a substantial carbon footprint).
The Return operates on a different scale but encourages the viewer to think expansively: across geographies, via deep historical time, through the vast stretches of the cosmos. His Afronauts come from the past to inform, inspire, encourage — and perhaps also warn — present and future travellers.
• The Return is at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg (163 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood) until October 7.
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