Still Life and Responsible Tourism

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Grace Ndiritu at Chisenhale Gallery, London
31 January - 18 March 2007

Grace Ndiritu
Still Life and Responsible Tourism (installation shot), 2005 - 2007

'Still Life' (2006), a four-screen video installation, arranged in a square, follows in form and theme from Grace Ndiritu's earlier works such as 'The Nightingale' (2003) and 'Desert Storm' (2004). Like these, 'Still Life' is studio-based and uses the artist's body, African fabric and music to explore global appropriation, the representation of the female body and the power and control of the gaze. As with Ndiritu's previous work, the spectator quickly experiences the discomfort of where to look, and how long and how hard. 'Still Life' plays on some of the provocation of 'Desert Storm', in which Ndiritu, naked under a pale chiffon-like cloth lay across a large world map. As she moved, part-seducer, part-victim, her gaze holding the camera's, this white, female spectator vacillated between admiration and anger. A Reuter-like stream of text ran along the bottom of the screen: 'Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Bosnia etc...' and it's not until later (not from the credits) that I discover that all of these countries condone rape as a weapon of war.

It's this gap between showing and telling that is key to Ndiritu's practice. She invites you to enter it, experience your own projections based on ignorance, presumptions and cultural/gender positioning and invariably feel that you are missing something. Something about being white and/or Western inhabits this gap but it's never presented in a didactic or judgmental way. She creates a confusing state of ambivalence, empowerment, guilt and/or self-questioning.

Grace Ndiritu
Still Life, 2005 - 2007

'Still Life' uses a similar strategy of concealment and revelation of her nude (a word that speaks so resoundingly of the Western art tradition!) body between two layers of African cloth. In one section, the fabric seems to breathe as she pulls it into a V between her thighs, three gourd designs highlighting her breasts and genitalia underneath. I want to stare, I want to look away, I want to sneak a peek at another screen to check I'm not missing something. Again, the missing something - the anxiety of not catching it all. In this unreadability, Ndiritu cleverly situates herself between two or more realities: herself as an artist living and working in the West, and the tensions created by the anthropological, ethnographical, colonialising gaze.

Grace Ndiritu
Still Life, 2005 - 2007

In another still image, Ndiritu adopts the classic reclining nude pose, one bare arm draped along her side, the rest of her body and head wrapped in West African fabric as if the textiles from the surrounding ground once used by painters like Matisse, have spilled onto the body itself. She can place herself in the frame, as subject and object, but cannot become 'the nude'. Here is the self-portrait that cannot be one. As Claudette Johnson wrote: 'The price of our survival has been the loss of ownership of land and body... The horrors of slavery and racism have left us with the knowledge that every aspect of our existence is open to abuse... This is reinforced by a kind of social and cultural invisibility... As women, our sexuality has been the focus of grotesque myths and imaginings.' ¹

Ndiritu teases us, both denying and invoking the colonialising gaze, cheating it of power, manipulating its codes to her benefit. She reinstates the African in Western art as subject, the woman as artist rather than model. The authority of the pose lies in the languid arm.

Grace Ndiritu
Responsible Tourism, 2005 - 2007

In 'Responsible Tourism' (2006), Ndiritu uses ellipsis to a different end. Filmed in Mali, possibly during the Festival of the Desert, an annual celebration of Tuareg music, Ndriritu asks how she can use a camera without reinscribing the west's view of Africa. Again, four screens face one another. Only one video plays at a time, the others rest on freeze frame. The first, like many Orientalist Victorian paintings, features the camel riders of Kidal, circling their white thoroughbred camels and wearing their distinctive royal blue turbans, known as cheches. Mid-movement, after about five seconds, the video loops, frustrating the desire for narrative. It takes a few loops to notice the huddle of three women, sat in the swirling sand, their heads covered in black burkas. Are they the audience, the prize? I don't know how to read the scene. I scour the scrubby hill, the SUV parked in the distance, for clues. I'm looking for the spatial norms of home to counter the impulse to exoticise. I try to understand it as a gendered space. I look to the other screens for context. In the next screen, a man cooks a stew and flat bread on an open fire. It's inviting, shot with a handheld camera with cookery-programme close-ups. I know where I am. I can admire his skill, his independence, his willingness to share a meal with a stranger. The video freezes and another begins. Shot closer than the camel riders, a group of Tuareg women sit in a tight circle filmed from behind and above, most of their faces shielded from the camera. They sing a chorus of ululation, one holding a microphone. The polyrhythms of the audio invite me in where the visual withholds.

Grace Ndiritu
Responsible Tourism, 2005 - 2007

The fourth screen is the hardest to watch: a close-up of a young African boy, starving or very sick, who plays feebly with an empty processed cheese carton while two white reporters on either side are glimpsed doing their business. Am I meant to wonder how the artist/tourist held her camera on the boy's old, joyless eyes, his dusty face? This is the only close-up in the exhibition. Is he an AIDS orphan, a candidate for Western adoption? It's rare to see this kind of footage without the explanatory voiceover. The camera zooms out. The white cameraman's head is wrapped in a blue cheche. No resistance, no alternative authority, are offered. It closes on the future of Africa. Bleakly.

Grace Ndiritu
Still Life and Responsible Toursim (installation shot), 2005 - 2007

Notes

¹ Claudette Johnson, 1991, 'Issues Surrounding the Representation of the Naked Body of a Woman', Feminist Art News, vol. 3, no.8, pp.12-14

Further information
More information on Grace Ndiritu

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