Sylvia Wynter's Anticolonial Legacy Guides the Hammer Museum's “No Humans Involved"
Installation view of "No Humans Involved" at the Hammer Museum. “No Humans Involved,” the latest group exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, is rooted in the post-Anthropocene. Curated by Erin Christovale and Vanessa Arizmendi, it presents a topography beyond “humanness,” dismantling the value and notion of the categorization as it has been used in colonialist utopias. By taking the position that humanness, as an engineering of Western thought, is neither esteemed nor desirable, the “No Humans Involved” artists build worlds onto themselves, charting something anew.
The show is an extension of Sylvia Wynter’s 1992 open letter of the same name wherein the theorist and writer addressed the LAPD designation of “no humans involved” for cases that involved Black and Latinx people and sex workers. Both an indictment of the white supremacist epistemology that produced such an abjection and an explanation as to how the premise of the human itself has fueled that abjection, the letter compelled institutions and individuals to uphold the idea that the human is inherent, restricted and true. Christovale and Arizmendi utilize this critique to frame a scope that looks towards the “non-western…spiritual…and the antihuman.”
“No Humans Involved” features Eddie Aparicio, Tau Lewis, Las Nietas de Nonó, Sondra Perry, SANGREE, WangShui and Wilmer Wilson IV. The curation reveals a myriad of textures and materials, but the use of amber amongst three artists is a particularly compelling thread. Here, amber becomes a heterogenous refuge, guiding the exhibition through its tenets of collapsed time and speculative wonders. Perry’s Flesh on Flesh (2021) is the latest in their lenticular panel works. A rendering of their skin, Perry situates optical structures within their engineering properties, morphing flesh to print and print to a dimensional structure that lives between 3D and motion. The effect is a dense, near melting amber-hued form, coursing and collecting substance of a firmer body. — Essence Harden, Nov. 4, 2021
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Cultured website.
HEADER IMAGE: Tau Lewis, The Space Congregation (No Surprise to Find the Angels Come Here), 2019. Recycled leathers and fabrics, acrylic paint, rawhide, found photographs, found objects, bone, seashells, stones. 120 × 156 in. (304.8 × 396.2 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles
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