Black must be one of the most loaded words in the English language, as indeed it is in many other languages; the problem of having so many meanings as points of association makes this very simple word common in its usage yet with an intriguing ability to variation. With its inherent values, it allows the speaker or writer the possibility to comment on a specific context and usually provides access to a substantial amount of prejudice and non-ethical perspectives. Unlike any other word in any language, no other word can cause so much harm or uncertainty to an individual or a group. It thus merits visual comprehension from artists and art commentators’ observations as to how this one term can echo societies’ recurring images.
In celebration of this term, this concept and this enigmatic signifier, TAKE is proud to have worked with contemporary artists and writers to evaluate its place in their thinking and making for the inaugural issue.
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The Americans is a series of photographs of the Indian community in North America that Gauri Gill began in 2000 and completed in 2007, five years after her graduate years at Stanford University. The work that began as a portrait of her family in 1993-94 later grew into an investigation into a community that was seldom represented in the museums and galleries of the continent.
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There they stand, in black and white – we say, omitting grey – in colour, in the light, exposed, but withdrawn behind their eyelids, into their own personal, elected blackness
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Part journey, part memoir, at once hallucinatory and monumental, few works of art explore the immersive and transformative properties of blackness and night with more intensity and imagination than Chittrovanu Mazumdar’s Nightskin.
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An icy, spectral light hovers above the sleeping roofs of factory sheds in Dayanita Singh’s Blue Book (2008/2009). It bestows, on the details it touches, a specificity that they lack as anonymous elements in the scaffolding of industrial modernity.
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To talk about the work of Iona Brown under the aegis of blackness presents one with the quandary that is the fact that her art is so black that to ponder it under the position of blackness is difficult, to say the least. It is so black that it at times, coincidental to her artistic endeavor and at other times, so prominent that it becomes the focal point of a work.
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