David Ụzọchukwu‘s works in New Suns depict black figures within strange natural landscapes that seem to be dreams or myths, ranging from charred forests to dark-as-night seas and safran colored deserts.
By placing only black bodies in these environments, Ụzọchukwu invites us to reflect on the historical marginalization of people of color in the narratives of the natural world.
In the Western imagination, territories such as “the frontier” and “wilderness” have been sites of exploration or exploitation, virgin territories waiting to be conquered by settlers and adventurers. Black people, people of color, indigenous peoples existed to be subjugated, enslaved or exterminated.
Ụzọchukwu does not address these stories directly, but suggests other ways of living. Sometimes, the visions he evokes are rhapsodic, like the luminous naked man floating in a pink sky in Celestial Body ( 2020). Other works carry suggestions of apocalypse like the couple captured in a tender moment in Honey (2022), their heads tilted together as they lean in to kiss, while behind them everything is catastrophic. The earth is black and the sky is cloudy, and what looks like a jet of molten lava gushes from the ground. Perhaps it’s an image of the end of the world. Thoughts of the climate crisis and its disproportionate impact on the nations and peoples of the global South come to mind. But it could just as easily be a moment of rebirth. A creation myth in the making, just as Tectonic Shift (2019) offers the Edenic spectacle of two lovers embracing against a verdant backdrop, like the first couple at the dawn of a new world. To be Black in Ụzọchukwu’s photographs is to be connected to nature at a deep level of engagement and exchange.
It’s about being heirs to a living planet. For millennia, people of color around the world have conceived of the Earth in their myths, dreams and prayers as a network of species and systems. They gave it many names, as researcher Donna Haraway lists: “Naga, Gaia, Tangaroa (born of Papa’s full water), Terra, Haniyasuhime, Spider Woman, Pachamama, Oya, Gorgo, Raven, A’akuluujjusi, and many others.
In Ụzọchukwu’s photographs, we see other ways of living in the world and living with the world. Other scenes of the black being. Other ends and new beginnings.
David Ụzọchukwu : New Suns
Until January 11, 2025
Galerie Gomis
c/o Sheriff Gallery
53 rue de Turenne -75003 Paris
www.galeriegomis.com
