Artists

Emmanuel Awuni, Divine Southgate-Smith

Press release

Public Gallery is pleased to present SPIT, a duo exhibition of painting, sculpture, sound and film by London-based artists Emmanuel Awuni and Divine Southgate-Smith. Conceived together over a year-long research driven collaboration, SPIT explores the untethered rhythms of abstraction, architecture, poetry and song.

As collectors, archivists, composers and artists, Awuni and Southgate-Smith explore diasporic creative expression, sharing in a mutual capacity to guide others towards deeper metaphysical understandings. Their practices converge in celebration of Rhythm, described by philosopher and poet Léopold Senghor as an ordering force that constitutes the essence of African expression. Calling on and responding to objects interned within museum collections, Awuni and Southgate-Smith understand ethnographic materials as not limited to the legitimacy of institutional structures; by recognizing the metaphysical energy from which these materials were created, their work embodies and frees the vital force within. ‘Spit’ is a physical offering, a demonstration of action; it is evidence of words being uttered, of energy being released. This energy lives in orbit within ourselves and between each other, mixing with the clay and earth that sits in mounds on the gallery floor. SPIT desires to release the energy from the glass cages of the museum. SPIT is an expression of joy, a living archive celebrating the limitless breadth of Black creativity. The artists invite guests and friends as active interlocutors, to partake in a living dialogue and engage with Rhythm in all its forms.

Ghanaian artist Emmanuel Awuni mobilises diasporic traditions of oral history, hip-hop, jazz and Afrobeats to question established systems of power. As analytical vehicles for cultural deconstruction and reconfiguration, his practice draws comparisons between the mechanisms that underlie systems of incarceration and disempowerment, and those that support our cultural institutions, likening the encyclopaedic museum to a zoo of non-western cultures in cages. While music is at the core of his work, Awuni describes any repressed expression, no matter the medium, as ‘singing’ against the bars of oppression. Within the context of museology and its cultural biases, he reconfigures cast busts and found objects in blue packing foam bases, naming their spiritual potential and attending to them with ceremonial tenderness. Presenting his largest work to date on the upper level of the gallery, Awuni awakens and manifests the transformation of latent object to metaphysical being, inviting his viewers to bear witness to the act of emergence and liberation. Across all three floors of the gallery space, Awuni’s paintings hold space for free abstraction, dictated by breath and intuition. Recent works were completed during a residency at the The Roberts Institute of Art in Scotland, where Awuni was particularly inspired by the rural landscape around Cortachy and the River South Esk. His gestural compositions meditate on nonviolent resistance and freedom reimagined, echoing the river and its rhythms.