The first section of the two-gallery exhibition begins with Tagny\u2019s exquisite, earth-toned wall works, which are thoughtfully paired with Henry\u2019s captivating suspended bronze sculptures. In Mythologies de la valeur<\/em> (2023), a diptych of near-identical black images with two vertical rows of stitched brown thread, Tagny generates a process of wounding and repair that evokes the scarring of dermis or soil. In another piece, Partition scores <\/em>(2023), she presents a series of framed photographs\u2014a collection of performance documentation and landscapes\u2014with dried seeds affixed to their surface or delicately resting on the frame\u2019s edge. Here, her skilful use of performance activates the land and her subjects. The gestural vocabulary of the Black actors in her photographs harmoniously communes with nature, reclaiming traditions of Western portraiture that might otherwise depict them as subjects of violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Eve Tagny<\/strong>
Partition scores<\/em>, 2023, installation views, Optica, Montr\u00e9al, 2024.
Photos: Paul Litherland<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Across the room is Henry\u2019s installation Soi-m\u00eame comme un autre<\/em> (2023), a series of six bronze sculptures that merge boxing speed bags with the hybridized anatomies of Jamaica (hibiscus) and banana flowers. Hanging from the ceiling on galvanized stainless-steel chains, which give a sense of both industrial manufacturing and shackles, the actual bronze objects feel warm and weighty, almost alive, as their appearance changes depending on the angle they are observed from. Henry\u2019s stunning organic castings resemble bursting seedlings, with the dynamic, exploding boxing bags underlining how Black pugilists have historically moulded emancipatory narratives of liberation and self-determination in the Americas and abroad\u2014see George Dixon, Alfonso Teofilo Brown, and Muhammad Ali. Adeptly paired with Tagny\u2019s choreographic prints, Henry\u2019s sculptures take on a kinetic quality that makes them dance like a skilled boxer, or seedlings resisting commodification.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Patrick Henry<\/strong>
Soi-m\u00eame comme un autre<\/em>, 2023, installation views, Optica, Montr\u00e9al, 2024.
Photos: Paul Litherland<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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It is the strong, wafting odours of Kapwani Kiwanga\u2019s Flowers for Africa<\/em> (2013\u2013ongoing) series that are most striking upon entering the second gallery. In the work, Kiwanga re-creates bouquets found in archival photographs of the independence proceedings of African nation-states. Here, Nigeria, Uganda, and the Ivory Coast are featured. In their full splendour during the opening reception for Undoing Earthwriting<\/em>, these bouquets will gradually wilt and rot over the duration of the show, leaving behind their carcasses. Kiwanga\u2019s contribution brings to the fore a central tenet of the exhibition: a focus on the cycles of life\u2014from seedling to sapling, to fully formed plant, then death and beginning again. These natural rhythms relate to ongoing battles by Black and Indigenous populations alike to resist settler-colonial legacies of land abuse and extraction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"Kapwani-Kiwanga\"$
Kapwani Kiwanga<\/strong>
Flowers for Africa<\/em>, 2013-ongoing, installation view, Optica, Montr\u00e9al, 2024.
\u00a9 Kapwani Kiwanga, ADAGP, Paris \/ CARCC, Ottawa (2024)
Photo: Paul Litherland<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Placed toward the back of the space, Kiwanga\u2019s stunning bouquets are not what the viewer physically encounters first. Instead, Kosisochukwu Nnebe\u2019s series of three, altar-like structures inspired by Haitian libation bottles, the seeds we carry<\/em> (bury this where the one you want to trick walks) <\/em>(2023), welcomes us. Drawing from the ways plants were used in Jamaica, Haiti, and the southern United States as a form of medicine or poison, the decorated glass-blown vessels are placed, respectively, upon a wooden side table, a nightstand, and a secretary desk. Gorgeously fabricated and imbued with a clear sense of embodied, trans-generational energy, these vessels commune with ancestors whose life story is connected to the healing and spiritual power of roots and seeds. In a makandal for Marie-Th\u00e9r\u00e8se<\/em> (2023), Nnebe draws on local history and calls upon the figure of Marie-Th\u00e9r\u00e8se Z\u00e9mire, who was brought from Africa to Haiti and then to so-called Montr\u00e9al where she lived as a slave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Kosisochukwu Nnebe<\/strong>
the seeds we carry (bury this where the one you want to trick walks)<\/em><\/em>, 2023, installation views, Optica, Montr\u00e9al, 2024.
Photos: Paul Litherland<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Honouring ancestors while maintaining a sense of secrecy and hiddenness, Nnebe\u2019s the seeds we carry <\/em>speaks to generations of knowledge production and transference embedded in the earth and the individuals who carried them defiantly. As den Elzen thoughtfully states in the handout that accompanies the exhibition, \u201cTo undo earthwriting<\/em> is to unravel or contest the conceptual underpinnings of modern capitalism which are predicated on accumulation through extraction, positing an understanding of plants and land as life.\u201d This strong conceptual throughline clearly reverberates in Undoing Earthwriting<\/em>. Despite constant threats of uprooting, erasure, and other forms of containment or removal, these artists are a testament to the underlying seed-carrying and rooting systems that have anchored Afro-diasporic communities across geographies and through the centuries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History at Concordia University, Montr\u00e9al, Didier Morelli holds a PhD in performance studies from Northwestern University, and his writing has been published in Art Journal<\/em>, Canadian Theatre Review<\/em>, C Magazine<\/em>, RACAR<\/em>, Theatre Research in Canada<\/em>, and The Drama Review<\/em>, among others.<\/p>\n\n\n
Didier Morelli, Eve Tagny, Kapwani Kiwanga, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, Patrick Henry<\/div>
Didier Morelli, Eve Tagny, Kapwani Kiwanga, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, Patrick Henry<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Optica,<\/strong> Montr\u00e9al
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