“Portraits in Perpetual Motion”
Danielle Bowler

Reflections: on Black girlhood draws its inspiration from Sighting Black Girlhood, a hybrid postgraduate course taught across the universities of Johannesburg and Pennsylvania. The transnational project explores what it means to sight, cite and site experiences of Black girlhood across South Africa, the USA and the Caribbean – and in specific locales. Considering “the ways in which discourses around race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and youth intersect, the course explores the personal, psychic, spiritual, and economic costs and benefits associated with Black girls fully exercising their humanity”(1), particularly through engaging art and portraiture.

Using Sighting Black Girlhood as a point of departure, this group exhibition(2) brings together reflections on Black girlhood from five contemporary South African artists across multiple generations. Exploring themes that include memory and reflection, care and community, “being in public”, the everyday, performance and the body, biography, play, joy, and more, their works collectively “sing a black girl’s song”(3).

In Sisters of the Yam, bell hooks writes that: “In a revolutionary manner black women have utilised mass media (writing, film, videos, art, etc.) to offer radically different images of ourselves. These actions have been interventions”(4). These artworks, too, are interventions of different kinds – challenging ways of seeing and lensing through the artists’ archives, alongside new commissions. Working against the portrait as capture, or figurative representation as the sole definition of portraiture – they turn to the abstract, the out of focus and absent, too, in their poetic, tender, embodied, and life-filled offerings. These works dwell in “the beauty and possibility cultivated in the lives of ordinary black girls and young women that [stoke] dreams of what might be possible”(5). They live in the “ordinary extraordinary”(6).

Whether throwing light, giving serious consideration, as consequence or commentary, the meaning of “reflection” is amplified here. There are images of return to place, person and moment, of seeking and seeing, of reflection as memory, re-collection and re-memory(7), and of engaging the refracted mirror – whether person or object.

Universal and particular, the artworks in this show reflect Black girlhood in ways that are conscious of the past and its reaches into the present, where “so much time accumulates on her small figure, the girl might well be centuries old, bearing the weight of [history]”(8). In acts of being and becoming, there are echoes of the litany of requirements Jamaica Kincaid lays out in her short story “Girl”(9), a portrait of Black girlhood in Antigua that finds resonance across the ocean. These works transcends chronological time, too, thinking “Black Girlhood as being an experience of multi-locality as it negotiates space within the identities of race, class, gender, and development (from birth to adolescence to adulthood)”(10). For, “Black women artists have consistently found ways to restore themselves, often through a return to their youth.”(11)

This becoming is also a site where “beauty is not a luxury” but “a method”(12): “a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical act of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much”(13). Beauty here is a necessity, as urgent as breath.

And joy is insistent. For as poet Koleka Putuma writes in her poem Black joy: 

But

isn’t it funny?

That when they ask about black childhood,

all they are interested in is our pain,

as if the joy-parts were accidental. (14) 

This is a “Black feminist joy” that “does not disown awareness of systemic injustice. It does not deny oppression; it defies it. It doubles down on the imperative to imagine against the status quo. To dream biggest’(15).

In the intimacy of building community and chosen family, of twinned siblinghood and of home, these works reverberate in their reflections, asking us how and who we see, with “concern for what stories we tell, who does the telling, and the consequences of these decisions”(16). As portals, they are portraits in perpetual motion – spaces of becoming, travelling through locations and experiences – questioning, holding, seeing and reflecting Black girlhood in all of its expansiveness. In sound, image, video, abstraction and sculpture, the works of these artists ask for our own reflections, as they present theirs. They are reflections that gaze back at us.

1. Victoria Collis-Buthelezi and Deborah Thomas, 2022: Sighting Black Girlhood Course Materials
2. This exhibition is the second group exhibition that draws its inspiration from the course. The first, “Sighting Black Girlhood”, was shown in Jamaica at NLS (New Local Space).
3. Shange, Ntozake, 1977. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide, When the Rainbow Is Enuf: A Choreopoem. New York, MacMillan.
4. bell hooks, 1993. Sisters of the Yam Black Women and Self-Recovery. South End Press, Boston.
5. Saidiya Hartman, 2019. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. New York: W. W. Norton.
6. Christina Sharpe, 2023. Ordinary Notes. New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
7. Toni Morrison, 1988, c1987. Beloved. New York : New American Library.
8. Saidiya Hartman, 2019. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. New York: W. W. Norton.
9. amaica Kincaid, “Girl”. Available:  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1978/06/26/girl
10 . Natalia Molebatsi and Latoya Williams, Memory Politics: The Poetics of Reimagining Black Girlhood in a Post-Apartheid South Africa. National Political Science Review. 20 (1), 101-115.
11. Kéla B Jackson, Note to Self: An Artist's Reflections on Black Girlhood. Panorama Journal. Colloquium Fall 2022 (8.2). 
12. Christina Sharpe. 2019. Beauty is a Method. e-flux journal. Available: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/105/303916/beauty-is-a-method/ 
13. Saidiya Hartman, 2019. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. New York: W. W. Norton.
14. Koleka Putuma, 2017. “Black joy” in Collective Amnesia. uHlanga: Cape Town.
15. Gabrielle Civil, 2019. Experiments in Joy: a Workbook. Company Conspirator Press.
16. As Mwenya B. Kabwe writes on Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi’s work in the essay “Gymanium: as a time like this”,  “Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi has a conspicuous concern for what stories we tell, who does the telling, and the consequences of these decisions. She deals with the ones that do not and will not get told – not the stories of centre stage, but the ones of anticipation, of rehearsal, of preparation, of failure – the midsentence, not the final exclamation mark. Each a snapshot of insight into the less glamorous moments of performance, the trials and errors, the pre-set, while also smoothly indicating larger implications”.