Catalogue > At random

"In her first film, the artist brings together elements of science fiction and rap with discourses on emancipation and colonialism in an installation that pushes against the boundaries of its space. A film that depicts the before and during of a performance in Memphis, Tennessee. On a shell-shaped concrete stage a woman recites excerpts from a socialist-feminist manifesto while four local stand-up-comedians improvise alongside her. This chorus of voices is further accompanied by a noise-musician. Reynaud Dewar chose the place of the performance for its particularly controversial and diverse background. The metropolis, situated on the Mississippi delta, is on the border between the affluent Midwest and the poorer South of the United States. This city was the epicenter of the American slave trade and the later Civil Rights Movement. The latter culminated in the Sanitation Strike of 1968, which was further intensified by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. after he took an active role in these demonstrations. Memphis is also an iconic location in the history of American music in the United States. It is widely known for its Blues music and as the final resting place of Elvis Presley. In more recent years, the city has evolved into a vital center of rap culture in the US. Working alongside the local comedians, Reynaud Dewar uses this specific historical and socio-political backdrop to negotiate the appropriation of a certain cult object. A central element of the film is the so-called grill—a jewelry worn over the teeth, which is typically made of precious metals. In Black music, especially in rap and hip-hop, the grill functions as a sort of relic and status symbol. Through her adoption of these objects as a white, European artist, Reynaud Dewar knowingly raises provocative questions of cultural appropriation, impression, and transformation, as well as the legitimization of these acts. The connective link in this work is Donna Haraway’s 1985 text, A Cyborg Manifesto. This treatise—a feminist essay that employs, albeit in a partly ironical sense, a cyborg as a metaphor for the dissolution of conservative borders between humans, machines, and animals—propagandizes a state of chimerical fusion in which normative categories like class, gender, or race are discarded.