File Note 145: Atiéna R. Kilfa

Atiéna R. Kilfa’s exhibition The Unhomely continues the artist’s ongoing exploration into how the cultural patterns of perception and projection through which we read images, situations, or people belong to an intimate history of violence that keeps returning from the archives and afterlives of colonial modernity. Inscribed in the small, mundane and vernacular rather than in exceptional events, this history draws enemy lines through the bodies of your loved ones. In tracing these lines, The Unhomely brings violence close, as something that is not elsewhere or in the past but in you and me, here and now.2

Central to Kilfa’s concern with habits of perception and their cruelty are the mostly unconscious ways in which we animate images, assign roles and produce relations. The artist initially engaged with this narrative drivethrough a series of photographs including NM11 and You Look Lonely (both 2021), which depict black mannequins posed in domestic interiors. The scenes are generic, strangely familiar, yet not entirely definable. The photograph of a mannequin in front of an open refrigerator door, for instance, looks like a melancholic movie scene. Another series of a face with faux tears running down plastic cheeks appears disconcertingly genuine. The high definition of the photos adds to this impression of aliveness, making the mannequins look strangely vulnerable in their darkened and empty surroundings. In conjuring a sense of imminent threat, these images recall histories of the human avatar, from Fritz Lang’s female robot (Metropolis, 1927) and Ridley Scott’s replicant (Blade Runner, 1982) to more recent blockbuster television series like Westworld (2016) and the fate they all have in common. As liminal figures within the modern/colonial order of things, they embody a gendered and racialised fear of and attraction to contamination and boundary crossing. European cinema and popular culture have resolved such crises of division between life/death in a mostly uniform way: domestication or else destruction of the robot/avatar/replicant. With objects like 70E1 (2023) some parts of those discarded ordestroyed figures seem to return as Paul Thek-like reliquaries that assert their own material presence.

While this interest in the ambiguous role of human-like figures and fragments is in dialogue with earlier histories of what Mike Kelley, in his landmark exhibition The Uncanny (1992) called “mannequin art”,The Unhomely also signals a significant shift of focus.3 In place of the postmodern discourse of copies without originals, Kilfa’s vocabulary is rooted in a present in which technologies of image making, computation and circulation themselves produce narratives and entrench divisions of who counts as living and who or what is consigned to death. The artist thus draws our attention to how the technologically produced image type is refracted through and haunted by a history of the racial stereotype.4 Kilfa’s recent video tableaux Primitive Tales (Mother, Daughter) (2021) and The Landlords (2022) highlight this spectral sense of images as haunted by the undead, and the past.

Actor, mannequin, projection, memory image, animation – in drawing together these different roles and registers, Kilfa not so much invents a scene but narrates a latent history that runs through Surrealism, 1970s experimental cinema and the installation art of the 1990s into the present. Its starting point is somewhere in the nineteenth century, when life-sized dummies of black and brown bodies appeared in staged tableaux and ethnographic dioramas at world exhibitions, ethnographic museums or Surrealist magazines. These inanimate scenes of ‘primitive life’ made from papier-maché, plaster or wax were soon replaced by living people from European colonies, who were put on view in zoo-like displays for the profit and pleasure of ethnographers, film-makers, children and adults on their days off work.7 If The Unhomely draws attention to the afterlives of such scenes of subjection in the technologies and vernaculars of our visual vocabularies now, it also holds space for afterlives in a more literal sense: for those who come after life, the ghosts of the past who have escaped the museums and dioramas and now return the gaze – as actors, material agents or zombies, depending on how you look.