Timothy Yanick Hunter in Public Parking

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Timothy Yanick Hunter in Public Parking

May 30, 2022

News Volcanic Spine

Timothy Yanick Hunter

In our very own hands

By Luther Konadu

[…]

II.

My curiosity around the 1902 eruption of Mt. Pelée, my subsequent commitment to inquire further in detail, then re-narrate it and by extension, re-emphasize its significance and innocent lives lost, was prompted by an art exhibition. Toronto-based artist Timothy Yanick Hunter’s recently presented, Volcanic Spin at Cooper Cole Gallery. Showing from November 27, 2021 to January 8, 2022, the exhibition departs from found archival fragments on this very event, which the artist came across during a research residency. In an invitation to learn and contemplate the tragic event, Hunter assembles vestigial images that trickled out of Mt. Pelée in 1902. Included in the mix of the exhibition, Hunter reaches beyond the particularities of the event to include stray archival snippets that suggest the social and cultural sentience of the generation that came after this marked moment in Martinique’s history. Moreover, Hunter goes a step further, juxtaposing video and sound elements that broadly huddle together the Caribbean diaspora and by extension, affirms the broader Black diaspora in something of a warm and intimate solidarity. The result of this assemblage that encompasses the exhibition is a sparse, unassuming, and unembellished installation in an evenly lit room. Nevertheless, it is carefully sedimented by the immensity of histories it engages with.

Although the event at St. Pierre was over a century ago, Hunter doesn’t allow it to fade into the distant and expanding past. Instead he diverts our attention right at it and localizes it in the present. Volcanic Spin continues Hunter’s ongoing dedication to uncovering publicly under-acknowledged historical moments within the Black diaspora and through this process, enlivening and honouring the humanity, occasions, and places they point to. This ongoing work can also be understood as a process of claiming agency over how the myopic Western imagination of history, and how its attendant narrativization, is determined, interpreted, and naturalized. In several instances, these events are deemed as “unthinkable,” as Haitian scholar and historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot suggests—making them unworthy of being accounted for and subsequently written off and suppressed.

Trouillot elaborated on these “unthinkable” omissions of history in his seminal book, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Trouillot takes this up by using the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) as a case study. The Haitian Revolution, which was a prominent insurrection that let to the first country to be established by former slaves, came to symbolize the fragility of slavery as an institution. It also ended the French’s incursions and conquest in the Western Hemisphere. The Haitian Revolution became an aspirational symbol of freedom for Black Americans and an influence on anti-slavery movements and campaigns in Europe and the rest of the Americas. This extraordinary event, and its subsequent reverberations, was seen as a non-event by the French, as Trouillot illustrates. It was as if it never happened. The French saw their slaves as obedient, tranquil, and without a desire for freedom. Because of the prevailing view that the Black race was inferior and genetically speaking, was without an intellect of their own, it was completely inconceivable that slaves could band together, revolt, overturn their masters, and take back their lives.

To extend Trouillot’s point here through Aimé Cesaire’s Discourse of Colonialism, being colonized is to be “thingified.” Thingification is the act of considering one’s humanity as less than and drained of meaning. In this way, one’s personhood was a thing to be preyed upon, or in the false benevolence of colonizers, a way to spread their surplus enlightenment, rationality, and civilization to natives who needed it. In this way, freedom, and its aspiration thereof, wasn’t for the Black population—an intrinsic quality to their being—as it was for those from the Western civilization. For this, as Trouillot helps us to understand, the vision for a revolt from the perspective of the enslaved was deemed impossible. As such, this “unthinkablity” supports the silencing of facts in the production of public records and the history that endures as truth.

It seems rather apt, that a predator will distance themselves from defeat, or deny the whole instance of predation altogether, especially when their prey rises above subordination to upend said predator. History is prescribed by those wielding power, but many Black artists/thinkers like Hunter, in their own modest means through their creativity, continue to find their freedom in the crevices within the powers that are exercised upon them. They critically sidestep and circumvent gatekeepers and in doing so, affirm and bolster the richness of Black aesthetics and imagination.

[…]

To read the full essay visit Public Parking

For more information about Timothy Yanick Hunter please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com

+1.416.531.8000

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