Xaviera Simmons, Nectar - Konsthall C
After a presentation at KADIST Paris in Spring 2022, Xaviera Simmons’ solo exhibition “Nectar” travels to Konsthall C, Stockholm, Sweden. In her first exhibition in Sweden, the artist digs deep into the image archive belonging to the 130-year-old newspaper AFRO American. AFRO has been writing about world history from a Black perspective since it was founded in 1892. Afro Charities director Savannah Wood is opening up the newspaper’s image archive to artists in an effort to make its history more accessible through art projects. The exhibition consists of photography and video that contextualizes a historical and contemporary engagement with systems, ideas, people, and architecture that subvert American empire-building as a seemingly never-ending process of expansion. According to the artist, the historical material from the newspaper AFRO offers life-sustaining nuances and glimpses of possible ways forward. In the exhibition, we encounter works in which damage, pleasure, abstinence, spiritual commitment, resistance and repair are central. However, Simmons never loses sight of the fact that the United States and its European models built their empires on the premise of white supremacy. In Simmons’ new work, the tonal qualities of the black and white archival material emerge, while the artist’s own additions of layers upon layers of human figures, the presence of the camera and gaze, text, and physical and virtual landscapes connect with AFRO’s photographers and illustrators who in many cases enhanced the images for the magazine by hand adding detail and contrast to their documentation of everyday life.