An ass, stuck high in the air, jiggles inside fishnets. Then, it multiples threefold, repeating across a projection screen trifecta. Cut to a thong peeking out between the top and bottom of a patterned, vibrant set flecked with yellow and blue. People flash their best moves as dancehall music vibrates through the space, the soundtrack to a portrait of Black joy, the camera mostly capturing derrieres.
Akeem Smith gathered this footage as part of his experimental archive of all things dancehall-related. It includes a party that took place on September 10, 2001, then extended into the morning. About 20 minutes into his edit, the sun rises, and twin images of towers clouded in smoke flank the dancers. The attacks have begun, but news hasn’t yet reached the partyers.
The work, titled Social Cohesiveness (2020), is on view in an exhibition at the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Berlin. Here, for the first time in decades, footage of September 11 feels shocking again.
Smith’s work is part of an exhibition titled “Unbound: Performance as Rupture” that surveys performances, from the late 1960s to the present, that are meant for (or completed by) the camera rather than a live audience. There are no live performances, no dry documentation of works once staged before audiences. What we get instead is a grouping of works in which cameras serve as choreographic collaborators, or live pieces that are fully realized only after a visit to the editing suite.
Sanja Iveković’s Personal Cuts (1982) is on view next to Smith’s Social Cohesiveness, and uses a similar editing technique. Wearing black pantyhose over her head, Iveković cuts holes in the dark membrane, then intercuts that footage with scenes sampled from Yugoslav television. As with Smith’s work, the piece resonates for the way it oscillates between the personal and the political: subjects experience their own bodies and, simultaneously, larger sociopolitical contexts. Cutting from establishing shots to close-ups and back again, Smith and Iveković emphasize and obliterate the gulf between them.
It’s one of several intergenerational pairings on view here. Another strong one is the opener, which pairs peter campus’s iconic Three Transitions (1973) with Sondra Perry’s Double Quadruple Etcetera Etcetera I & II (2013). The former shows the artist painting his face chroma-key blue before a video camera, which causes it to disappear. Forty years later, Perry filmed two Black performers dancing frenetically in front of a white background. The blurring of the figures in this two-channel piece owes not only to the speed of their movement, but also to the use of an editing tool something like an AI eraser. The result explores the twinned hyper-surveillance and invisibility of Black people in white spaces, Perry’s gesture of opacity serving as counterpoint to Smith’s voyeuristic view.
