Photography and the violence of images as a colonial weapon is astonishing. Photographs of Ibo Kings by British colonisers (themselves subjects of a kingdom) inflicted a particular kind of violence. Powerful people became unkinged.
Standing here in the UK now, what can I, as a Black British Citizen, do?
Disrupting the colonial perspective, holding the camera is it enough?
Transforming the camera into a mask breaks the cultural tool of the camera. In this breakage we can make space for the mask a pre-colonial cultural tool. We can make space for contemporary performances by those most affected during that break.
I do not understand my practice as a breaking practice, but my work has been resisted and is situated as such. In this series, I am running with that label. As with all my work, the thing that breaks in making these is me. The materials are unbound and can speak of their part in a larger break. How can I be accused of smashing things when I stand in the shards of my own society? These tools are reborn into a broken world.
I selected the Butcher camera because this brand relates photography to an act of killing and taking what is fleshy apart in a certain way to make it easy to cook and consume for certain groups of people.
Obi is a reversal of Ibo. The head bears the characteristic groves of bronze sculpture. In the UK today, I can create heads with less symmetry in cloth, recognising that they have been through something made soft and damageable.
The camera used to kill the mystery of Ibo Kingship becomes the lens through which to channel a story from here by a performer who had a history of being unkinged.
