Xaviera Simmons, Nectar, 2022. Installation photo by Aurélien Mole

Afterimage by Nina Strand:

It is an image in a image. A woman holds a black and white photograph in one hand; in the other is an old Roloflex camera. One eye is looking through the camera, and the other is staring directly at us. Do we see and understand? In the black and white image she holds, a group of Black men sit on a stoop. The one on the highest step, in the middle, points to his black eye. It is a story of violence. This gesture of an image of an image is repeated in other works that make up a larger series of portraits, where different figures hold images and apparatuses, all part of the current exhibition Nectar by the New York-based artist Xaviera Simmons at KADIST in Paris.

For her first show in France, Simmons has included photographs from the AFRO American Newspaper’s collection of historic images in her large-scale portraits. The newspaper, which has ‘crusaded for racial equality and economic advancement for Black Americans for 128 years’, was formed in 1892 by John Henry Murphy Sr., a former enslaved man who gained freedom following the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Simmons’ work deals with the United States‘ dark history of slavery. Her show was timely this Spring in France, when far-right politician Marine Le Pen gained 41 percent of the vote in the presidential election. In the small gallery in Montmartre, French audiences are forced to reflect on their own colonial history.

In the accompanying catalogue, Simmons talks about working with the vast archive of photographs in the collection to reclaim the history of the people in the images. Enslaved people, she explains, have been excluded from any official archive: ‘Somebody Black somewhere said something, sang something, painted something, made something, believed in something. And this has not been passed down, it has not been inserted in the canon.’

The Black man in the image is telling his story, pointing to the harm done to him. The group around him bears witness to his story. The old camera held by the figure presenting the image has its own connotations and history. But Simmons wishes to turn the archive away from being an object of the past, to show us how it can be a: ‘repository of language that we can draw from as we propose new models of repair.’