Paul Maheke's work 'The River Asked for a Kiss', featured in Get Up, Stand Up Now, is a memorial to Gambian refugee Pateh Sebally who drowned in Venice’s Grand Central. Kemi Alemoru interviews Maheke on his complex creative process, and the racial politics of the art world.
Paul MahekeSomerset House
"He is stupid. He wants to die," one person says in the grainy video that surfaced online in 2017. At just 22, Pateh Sebally, a Gambian refugee, struggled in Venice’s Grand Central canal, failing to tread water while onlookers and tourists filmed and jeered telling him to “go home”. There were many present for his death, but what eventually overpowered him was the romanticised water of the floating city. The same waters drew the tourists who failed to act with compassion, and water is what carries large number of migrants from Gambia and beyond to Italy and its neighbouring European countries. It is all at once a life source, a lifeline, and a threat.
While Paul Maheke’s work tells the stories of Pateh, the diaspora, and nature as a whole, it does so through water, an entity he believes connects everything. “It's something that a lot of us can relate to, we all have a relationship with water even if it has played a different role in your culture,” he explains. “We need it to live, we're surrounded by it. Yet there's still such a mystery to it. That's quite beautiful.”
Hailing from France, and hopping from Canada to the UK, Maheke has learnt that there are innumerable ways to look at a subject and that informs his multi-layered and deliberately abstract art. He adds: “I like responding to a given situation that may appear obvious, and then I try to complicate the narrative around it.”
The River Asked for a Kiss (2017/2017) by Paul MahekeSomerset House
Talk me through the thought process behind this piece?
At the time I was researching a lot into theories and texts that were looking at water as a feminist matter. I was fascinated with the idea of water as memory, this text Hydrofeminism by Matsaru Emoto, a Japanese author — whose work researcher, artist and activist Fannie Sosa introduced me to — who conducted tests on buckets of water and exposed them to different emotions through images and song. (The latter) believed that water was responding and changing its molecular structure according to what it was exposed to. So when I was invited to the diaspora pavilion I was questioning the role of water as a metaphor to discuss political issues - everything including how it's used to form political borders. It's a way for us to dismantle the binaries between culture and nature. The human and non-human. I think it aids understanding between what is social, cultural and political.
Why did you choose something that is quite abstract and open to interpretation as a tribute for such a publicly explicit and evocative tragedy?
Images were just as violent as what happened, the images were like a second killing. He died a few metres away from the venue where I first showed the work at the Biennale. It was impossible to not pay tribute to that. But, I wanted to acknowledge that drama without re-enacting the violence of it. The videos were already all over the internet where people were shouting racist things while he is drowning. That's when I found this poem by Langston Hughes called the Suicide’s Note, I extended this poem with my own words and decided to create a set of curtains that would be presented on the bay window of the pavilion. I asked them to leave the window open so the curtains could be blown by the wind, the fabric is light and fluid, and the movement and colour could be connected to water.
How much is accessibility of your more conceptual and abstract art a concern of yours?
I rarely use the words of accessibility because it assumes that the audience is a homogenous group of people. I think about the people who will encounter my work, I want to produce an experience through movement, a sound, or vibration, and produce a feeling. I am interested in pushing the limits. What's produced isn't entirely mine, it also belongs to the people who experience it. When I graduated 8 years ago I realised I was always trying to translate my thinking into forms that would be understandable but then I realised what made it more interesting is work that shows that my thinking is not really straightforward, it is layered, there's aesthetic clashes, and I've allowed myself to be complex. Art offers us a space for speculation and reinvention. You can escape the framework, the context, that can be oppressive.
What are the politics of putting on a so-called black show that gathers artists based on race rather than theme or discipline?
It can be tricky and dodgy actually. When it's done well then it's more about a historical context, and a present that has only been partially acknowledged. This show is a group of practises rather than individuals and it shows overlaps and crossover. Importantly there are conflicting point of views.
Do you feel this exhibit is reflective of the diverse range of black artistry in the UK?
They've gathered together very different logics, which is good because sometimes there are a lot of assumptions made around what blackness is. Or, what citizenship, and nationality is. This demonstrates there are plenty of ways of addressing similar subjects and topics, sometimes from a place of hope, sometimes despair. It's intergenerational too so it acknowledges the legacies.
Interview by Kemi Alemoru
Kemi Alemoru is the Features Editor at gal-dem, an online magazine and media platform run by women and non-binary people of colour. She has a penchant for youth and pop culture and seeks to analyse the deeper meanings in the media we consume. She worked for several years at Dazed magazine and since then her byline has appeared in The Guardian, Time Magazine, BBC, Riposte, and Vice. Additionally, in the last year she was contributed written essays to two published books, Mother Country: Mother Country: Real Stories of the Windrush Children, and gal-dem's anthology, "I will not be erased": Our stories growing up as people of colour. Besides writing she's fulfilled her passion for talking via her current affairs show on Balamii, interviewing for documentaries for Dazed and NTS, hosting a show on Somerset House Studios, and appearing in a video for BBC 3.
Paul Maheke's 'The River Asked for a Kiss' is featured in Get Up, Stand Up Now at Somerset House, 12 June - 15 September 2019
