{"id":2398,"date":"2019-09-10T17:18:51","date_gmt":"2019-09-10T17:18:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paulmaheke.com\/projets\/?page_id=2398"},"modified":"2024-05-29T21:04:20","modified_gmt":"2024-05-29T21:04:20","slug":"text-by-natasha-marie-llorens-art-agenda","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/paulmaheke.com\/projets\/text-by-natasha-marie-llorens-art-agenda","title":{"rendered":"Text by Natasha Marie Llorens (Art-Agenda)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Triangle-2019-Paul-Maheke-013\"<\/a><\/div>\n

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In Octavia Butler\u2019s classic sci-fi trilogy Xenogenesis <\/em>(1987\u201389), the ooloi are a third-gender alien species of the Oankali. Notorious shape-shifters, they are the bioengineers of their kind and are able to gather genetic material from others and build that of their offspring, therefore embodying the complexity of queer kinship theories and the socio-political potential of a third subjective space. \u201cOOLOI,\u201d Paul Maheke\u2019s exhibition at La Friche de la Belle de Mai, the former tobacco factory where Triangle France is located, borrows its title from Butler\u2019s Oankali aliens.<\/p>\n

In the space, Maheke suspended layer upon layer of diaphanous red fabric in large square panels from the ceiling of the massive open room. The fabrics undulate slightly in the wind created by fans placed on the floor along the length of the exhibition hall. Large theater spotlights click on and off abruptly, or glow slowly into force and then fade. Brass and copper spheres roughly the size of soccer balls are scattered on the floor throughout the space. Though daylight and the shadow of fabric moving are faintly reflected on the sculptures\u2019 semi-polished surfaces, these orbs remain static, acting as anchors for everything \u201cOOLOI\u201d comprises but does not materialize: the unseen characters, the fragmented, invisible narratives, the psychic field of history.<\/p>\n

Maheke uses abstraction strategically in \u201cOOLOI.\u201d The sheer fabric, the orbs\u2019 minimalist geometry, and the near-absence of figuration are all marshalled to think through the possibility of a presence that has an unstable relationship to objectivity and to essentialism\u2014like the queer person, the racialized subject, and the ghost. All beings that embody the ooloi by manifesting a past that is not past, disrupting the illusion of linear continuity in time and space.<\/p>\n

\u201cOOLOI\u201d becomes denser as I move further into the hall, with thicker filters on the windows and less ambient sunlight. The distances between each layer of red gauze grow tighter. I lay down on the concrete floor to allow my body to be level with the fans so that I can watch the fabric move from a different angle and focus on what had, until I reached the back of the hall, been a vague ambient sound. This noise becomes a voice as I approach a speaker suspended from the ceiling. A male voice is re-performing a reading Maheke received in the Dominican Republic by a queer clairvoyant. The psychic sees Maheke \u201cwith big red tufts of energy coming through your ears down into the ground through your spine\u201d and as a tree, \u201cone of these old withered, not withered but thick-barked trees with many branches.\u201d As I watch the colors change across the space, head propped up on an elbow now, I realize that this audio functions as a portrait of the artist as psychic substrate, a materialization of his experience of the immaterial dimension of life. It is the moment of figuration in an otherwise abstract landscape.<\/p>\n

As a whole installation, \u201cOOLOI\u201d provides a space in which something of the queer black experience can be intimated\u2014though never known\u2014but the voice track also functions as key for how viewers might approach the work. \u201cThe sensitivity that you have to the pains of life [\u2026] I\u2019m feeling them around your jaw, but they’re definitely starting in the heart,\u201d the psychic says. \u201cAnd I don\u2019t know,\u201d he goes on, \u201cyou know it’s almost a hysteria, like I don\u2019t know what to do, I don\u2019t know how to react to this.\u201d I read Maheke\u2019s installation as a response to the confusion he provokes in the psychic, which could be an allegory for the anxiety that the ooloi and other non-binary beings provoke. Maheke\u2019s imperative is to watch the places where the world is translucent.<\/p>\n

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About the Author<\/div>\n
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Natasha Marie Llorens<\/strong> is an independent curator and writer based between Maastricht, where she is in residence at the Jan van Eyck Academie, and Rotterdam, where she teaches at Piet Zwart Institute.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Paul Maheke’s OOLOI by Natasha Marie Llorens<\/a>, Art-Agenda, 2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  In Octavia Butler\u2019s classic sci-fi trilogy Xenogenesis (1987\u201389), the ooloi are a third-gender alien species of the Oankali. Notorious shape-shifters, they are the bioengineers of their kind and are able to gather genetic material from others and build that of their offspring, therefore embodying the complexity of queer kinship theories and the socio-political potential […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2398","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P4E7Fe-CG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/paulmaheke.com\/projets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/paulmaheke.com\/projets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/paulmaheke.com\/projets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/paulmaheke.com\/projets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/paulmaheke.com\/projets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2398"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/paulmaheke.com\/projets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3525,"href":"http:\/\/paulmaheke.com\/projets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2398\/revisions\/3525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/paulmaheke.com\/projets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}