Exhibition Review: Black Venus
Efea Rutlin takes us through reflecting on Somerset's House exhibition Black Venus: Reclaiming Black Women in Visual Culture
A review of the exploration of Saartjie Baartman’s legacy which will span across three contemporary examples of artists and exhibitions who engage in a multitude of ways with her story: Black Venus at Somerset House in London, the permanent collection at Black Archives in Amsterdam, and Coco Fusco at KW Institute in Berlin.
By Efea Rutlin
(When) Can Sara rest in peace?
Content warning: racist imagery, discussion of racism
The images to accompany this piece are all at the end.
The exploration of Saartjie Baartman’s legacy will span across three contemporary examples of artists and exhibitions who engage in a multitude of ways with her story: Black Venus at Somerset House in London, the permanent collection at Black Archives in Amsterdam, and Coco Fusco at KW Institute in Berlin. I will not be reiterating or detailing the atrocities and painful past of her life. For those unfamiliar with her story, Google exists. Instead, I will focus on what it means to honour someone and their story; what does it mean to recognise their pain? Can a balance be found between acknowledging the violence she endured without reproducing it and reducing Baartman’s identity to it? Can this be achieved without undermining or hiding away from the depths of violence?
I acknowledge certain hypocrisy in writing an article that will ultimately resurrect her name and story, reintroducing the spectre of violence into the world once more.
Reproducing
Black Venus at Somerset House, London, curated by Aindrea Emelife, ended in late September. It brought together the works of 18 black women and non-binary artists to explore the ‘othering’ and reclaim narratives around Black femininity. The first room examined historical representations of Black women, showcasing images of Baartman alongside a newspaper article and a political caricature. Additionally, images of Josephine Baker and a self-portrait by Florestine Perrault Collins (refer to image 1a). The illustration of Baartman is a hand-coloured engraving by Frederich Christian Lewis dating back to 1810. With an image like this, it feels impossible to avoid perpetuating the colonial gaze when viewing it. As an audience, we cannot escape the brutalist context in which the image was created and the attitude of the creator.
Older images stand in contrast to a piece by Renee Cox from 1994, where she assumes the role of Baartman and adopts a similar pose to her widely known portrait (refer to image 1b). Cox utilises props not only to conceal her breasts and buttocks but also as tools to exaggerate them into proportions that match those of Baartman. Unlike in the original image, however, she turns her head, directing her gaze straight to the camera, engaging the viewer. As an audience, we were trapped between two roles. One of the oppressors and the other oppressed. Does the intentional intimacy of eye contact by the artist offer a way to grasp her humanity even in this setting? Does this reveal the complexity of reproducing stereotypical objectification whilst also being subject to it?
I worry about recreating the violence that was inflicted on her. I feel confined between two choices: torn between replicating the colonial white gaze and one of the oppressed. In a way, the artists break these boundaries by continually switching between these two classifications. They occupy both by embodying the person subjected to degradation and the person responsible for placing another in such a situation. Is the way out of the binary to be both? Being both the oppressor and the oppressed?
Censoring
The same archival image of Baartman was on display at the Black Archives in Amsterdam. The Black Archives have a permanent collection, and in 2022 had a show called ‘Facing Blackness: A Visual Representation of Black people and their history of resistance’. This time it was censored with strategically placed black boxes masking the steatopygic parts of her body (see image 2a). This is an approach I had not encountered before, and I think it is an interesting way to subvert the violent imagery associated with her body. By obscuring the bodily features that she was known for, it simultaneously prevents violent gazes from being reproduced and potentially protects the audience. Is this type of censorship only effective when the viewer of the censored image has previously seen the uncensored image?
Re-staging
Finally, I want to introduce work by Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, titled “Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West" from 1993. In this piece, the artists exhibited themselves as indigenous people, from an imaginary island, confined within a cage. Many of the viewers believed they were genuinely being exhibited, and their interactions were recorded. Featured in the KW Retrospective on Fusco's art, this piece was displayed with a vinyl on the wall, video interactions with the artists and visitors, and paper ephemera around the gallery (see images 3a). This is intriguing as it tells the audience the story of Baartman, invoking the same horror of fetishization and exoticism, but it does so without showing her image. The humanity of Fusco and Gómez-Peña is affirmed by their reflection on the experience, presented through comments made by them and illustrated caricatures (see image 3b).
Repatriation
Even after her death, Baartman's body was still subjected to layered tragedies. Today, her bones and the casts made from her body have been repatriated and buried in South Africa. It's noteworthy that even though the plaster casts weren't a part of her physical body, they were representative of her physique and of the violation she endured and were resultantly repatriated. It raises questions over the images of Baartman; should they be placed in a similar category? While the images cannot be repatriated, as a form of restorative justice as they originated elsewhere, should the images stop being shown? Or does the resolution of the story lie in allowing her bones to rest in peace, accepting that her story has a duty to be retold so it never happens again?
Conclusion
What does it mean to honour someone's legacy of trauma? Part of the reason artists continue to use her as a reference is because it is still relevant to the lives of racialised people's everyday experiences. Perhaps living in a world where people are still racialised, commodified, eroticised, and stereotyped, people will always relate to Baartman's story.
For those still reading, I invite contemplation on what happens next. Should Saartjie Baartman ever be forgotten? No. But instead question how she is being remembered. Are we only recalling the violence she suffered? Perhaps, instead, we should remember the more recent versions of this same violence so Baartman can stop being recalled. I wish we knew more about her life. Her thoughts and feelings. We could then give her voice more power in her own story.
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Photographs taken by Efea Rutlin
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