Venus – The anti-hero Hero

Venus - performance registration from Framer Framed on Vimeo.

Venus – The anti-hero Hero was an interactive programme that explores the historically violent imageries surrounding Venus. Who is Venus? Nikki Minaj? Kim Kardashian? This event is part of the series of public and discursive events that are curated alongside to the exhibition 'Embodied Spaces' (2015) by curator Christine Eyene at Framer Framed in Amsterdam. With contributions by Amal Alhaag, Rehema Chachage, Quinsy Gario, Carolin Kamya, Shertise Selano, Hodan Warsame and Milone Reigman.
This event concluded the three exploratory reading sessions that were loosely based on three chapters from Suzan-Lori Park’s play Venus and connected to the themes of imagination, language and the body. Park’s play is based on the journey of Saartjie Baartman, a Khoi-San woman taken from South Africa in 1810 and exhibited in London and Paris. The reading of the exoticized body of Saartjie Baartman has influenced the iconography of the black female body in western visual cultures. Venus connects to current conversations on race, gender, sexuality, and voyeurism in the media. From Hottentot Venus to bootylicious – the female body, specifically, the black female body belongs to the spectators. How can we re-interpret and reclaim Venus despite the exploitation?

Venus – The anti-hero Hero was developed in collaboration with theater director Amal Alhaag, Milone Reigman. Shertise Solano and Ronald de Graaff created a series of beautiful masks especially for the Venus performance directed by Milone Reigman. In addition to the exhibition the masks will be on show in the public spaces of the Tolhuistuin. Rehema Chachage is based in Tanzania, we had a chance to aks her for a contribution thanks to the Thami Mnyele Foundation.

Charles Cordier African Venus France (1851)

Charles Cordier : African Venus , France (1851) . Bronze, 39.5 cm.
The Walters Museum:
Cordier submitted a plaster cast of the bust of an African visitor to Paris to the Salon of 1848, and two years later he again entered it as a bronze (Walters 54.2664). A young African woman served as the model for this companion piece in 1851. Regarded as powerful expressions of nobility and dignity, these sculptures proved to be highly popular: casts were acquired by the Museum of National History in Paris and also by Queen Victoria. The Walters’ pair were cast by the Paris foundry Eck and Durand in 1852. These bronzes were esteemed by 19th-century viewers as expressions of human pride and dignity in the face of grave injustice. One of the things I love most about this piece is that you get something new from almost every single angle.
It is stunning, I wonder who the woman was, where she was from, what did she think of the world?
I’ve learned since that the woman who posed for this amazing work was named Seïd Enkess. She was a Frenchwoman originally from southern Sudan, who had been enslaved as a child, but worked as model in Paris as an adult.
According to Cordier: A superb Sudanese appeared in the studio. Within a fortnight, I made this bust. With a comrade, I carried it into my room, by my bed […] I coveted the artwork […] I had it cast and sent it to the Salon […]. It was a revelation for the whole artistic world. […] My genre had the novelty of a new subject, the revolt against slavery, anthropology at its birth…

Black Venus Project (Stereotyping) by Maxim Vakhovskiy

 

Maxim Vakhovskiy

The Sable Venus on the Middle Passage: Images of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

The Sable Venus on the Middle Passage: Images of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

by Bilal Mahmud المكافح المخلص

Aug 2, 2010

The following article by Michael Vannoy Adams is a presentation delivered at the congress of the International

Association for Analytical Psychology in Cape Town, August 15, 2007.

Among all archetypes, the journey is perhaps the most universal. Of course, there are always variations on themes. There is the external journey, and there is the internal journey. There are personal journeys, and there are collective journeys. There is the journey as quest, but there is also the journey as conquest. There are journeys of heroes, journeys of villains, journeys of victims, and journeys of survivors. There are journeys of exploration and journeys of exploitation. Not every journey is a journey of individuation.
There is the journey to Africa — for example, the journeys of Jung to North Africa in 1920 and to East Africa in 1925-26, as well as the journey of Jungians to South Africa in 2007. There is also the journey from Africa. Of journeys from Africa, the most universal is the journey of all humanity from Africa, as the evidence of mitochondrial DNA has conclusively proved, but there is also another journey from Africa, not of all humanity, but the journey of Africans in the transatlantic slave trade — the "night sea journey" of the Middle Passage to the Americas.