Unfixed and Expansive Transcript

When we hear about “identity”, it’s often spoken about in these polemical, even defensive ways. And yet, identity is multilayered, unstable, sometimes fluid. Interior Infinite celebrates artists who understand and embrace the expansive capacity for discovery, for realisation, and for imagination that resides within us.

Claude Cahun was a trailblazer in this regard, way ahead of her time. She discovered self-portrait photography in 1913, and over the course of her life used it to deconstruct and reinvent her understanding of gender – personally and societally. 

Lots of artists in the exhibition take up self-portraiture in this way. By centring themselves in the frame, they’re able to make visible their own embodied realities – their lived experiences that have oftentimes, throughout history and in the present, been subject to suppression or erasure. Zanele Muholi is a powerful example of this, foregrounding their own image as a Black queer woman from South Africa. Four of their portraits recur throughout Interior Infinite, all in different costumes that satirise fashion, femininity, and exoticism, while making specific references to histories of labour and migration in the African diaspora.

And costumes have a key role to play in this exhibition. We think of disguise and masquerade as methods for concealing our identities – but, in fact, these are powerful strategies for revealing ourselves. Yinka Shonibare works extensively in costume, using Ankara fabric. It’s a patterned cloth that’s widespread in West Africa, and yet arrived there via Europe from the Dutch, who copied it from Javanese batik, a type of wax-dyed textile. Shonibare embraces the impossibility of essentialism; the inherent plurality and hybridity of culture.

We see this sense of hybridity in the film by Zadie Xa, who expresses herself as a woman of Korean ancestry born and raised in the Pacific Northwest by combining the ancient shamanic Korean goddess – the creatrix Magohalmi – with J2, the late matriarch of the J Pod of Southern Resident orcas off the coast of BC. This complexity echoes in the photographs by Dana Claxton, who in her self-portraits is covered in handcrafted works by Indigenous artisans. Adornment gives visuality to inner life; through it, these artists manifest their understanding – or investigation – of themselves as carriers of knowledge and experience. And it gives us as viewers clues as to how we might unlock a deeper knowledge of ourselves, and braver ways to express what we discover.

Martine Gutierrez, Meryl McMaster, Aïda Muluneh – all of these artists draw from tradition, and like Claxton and Xa, they remix it, and make it about this moment, about the future. They make it timeless, and embody possibility. And together, the collectivity of these images is reminiscent of Carnival. Carnival is a Christian Shrovetide festival that marks the beginning of Lent. It’s known for traditions of masquerade and parade, which revellers use as opportunities to embrace new social roles and, temporarily, participate in a new society. And this is believed to have come from Christianity syncretising various folk practices associated with Springtime renewal. So this need for masquerade – this need for an occasion to dress up in otherworldly garments, and imagine away normative customs and social hierarchies – this need is transcultural. Every society needs this relief; this opportunity to, if only briefly, rethink the way society is organised.

Historically, Carnival was a festival that even enslaved people were allowed to observe. Acclaimed photographer Carrie Mae Weems reflects on Mardi Gras celebrations in the American South, donning tuxedos and animal masks that make her gender and race ambiguous. She embodies the complex and entangled politics of race, sex, and class that have been part of Carnival’s history; politics that Carnival­­ – by its very nature – subverts, and calls into question.

And this is the ethos of Interior Infinite: that our prevailing cultural narratives erase, or treat as strange, many lived realities that too often go unrepresented. The narrow aisle of quote-unquote “normality” is exclusionary. By expanding our social imagination, Carnival – or, the carnivalesque – pushes that narrow aisle wider, and makes it more embracing. It redefines acceptability. Carnival creates space to breathe. I hope that this is what Interior Infinite can aspire toward as well. Zak Ové’s photo-documentation of Trinidadian Carnival – which is one of the largest Carnival parades in the world – serves as a touchstone, a reference, for the portraiture in this exhibition.

As does the Soundsuit, by American artist Nick Cave. The first Soundsuit was made in 1992, entirely out of twigs, to provide camouflage and armour for the Black body against police brutality. Cave was disturbed by the beating of Black civilian Rodney King by the LAPD in 1991. Since then, the Soundsuit series of wearable sculptures has become celebratory, unabashedly flamboyant and queer. This act of resistance, of claiming safe space though heightened visibility, is a quintessentially carnivalesque gesture.

The idea of the carnivalesque has, in modern literature, become symbolised by the Greek goddess Baubo, because she pushes the limits of acceptability and flagrantly defies norms. In mythology, Baubo is an old witch who’s also sexually promiscuous, with an exaggerated vulva. Not only has artist Kris Lemsalu made a sculpture based on her, which features in Interior Infinite, but Baubo is also mentioned in Rablais and His World by Mikhail Bakhtin, which is the text from whence the title of the exhibition comes.

Bakhtin writes: “The interior infinite could not have been found in a closed and finished world, with its distinct fixed boundaries dividing all phenomena and values.” I think of the interior infinite as an elasticity, a potential for growth and change within each of us; potential that too often lies fallow, terrorised and stifled by hegemony – and yet, irrepressible. It builds up, and seeks release in the form of the carnivalesque: through beauty and excess, as well as parody and satire.  

So the carnivalesque is not only about representing personal histories and cultural legacies in all their colours and textures, but also about critiquing the systems that fail us. Skeena Reece’s work foregrounds contemporary Indigeneity by confronting colonialism. Sin Wai Kin uses drag performance not as a doubling-down on gendered stereotypes, but as a means of deconstructing gender’s artifice and arbitrariness. Ursula Mayer challenges us to expand our sense of ourselves to include, and be accountable to, the many other systems – organic and technological – that make our lives possible. Charles Campbell reimagines Actor Boy, a trickster figure from the Jamaican festival of Junkanoo, as an amateur anthropologist trying to understand why Black emancipation didn’t beget racial equality. Lacie Burning’s new installation casts footage of a forest into colour negative, throwing it against mirrored mosaic to create an atmosphere that’s both glittering with iridescence and yet fractured and brittle. Burning considers what it means to be a keeper of one’s ancestral land in an era of cascading environmental crisis.

Interior Infinite is an exhibition, but it’s also a gathering: a procession of beings that are both otherworldly but also deeply rooted in this world. They hint at all the incredible perspectives and stories that this world already contains, but that have often gone unsung, or have been suppressed. They suggest what the world could look like. Because the more we understand ourselves as unfixed and expansive, the more we can perhaps appreciate that our society, too, isn’t fixed and finished. It’s exactly what we collectively imagine it to be. With a little creativity, there’s no reason why it couldn’t be re-envisioned to celebrate the things that make us unique, rather than using discrimination and conformity to try and shove us all into the same, normative moulds.

This is a show about possibility; and anything is possible.

Text by Elliott Ramsey

Video credits
Text and narration by Elliott Ramsey
Cinematography and editing by Everett Bumstead