Sampada Aranke on Care, Black Visual Culture, and the Radicalized Body
An interview for Sixty Inches From Center
September 2019
Several years back when I was torn between interests in archives and contemporary art conservation, I came across the concept of fugitive media, or materials that were not built to stand the test of time and are prone to decomposition or fading. The use of fugitive media when creating something can inevitably render that object ephemeral, causing it to transform or disappear over time.
A close cousin of that concept is the idea of making something ephemeral-by-design, which adds a layer of intentionality to an object or artwork’s creation through the materials used. As the term suggests, when artists create something that’s ephemeral-by-design, it’s a strategic decision to make the work fleeting, potentially adding a layer of meaning or metaphor to any interpretation. Our read of an artwork can shift substantially through this aim alone.
Oscillating between all of these possibilities sits the musings of Sampada Aranke. Sampada is a scholar of performance studies, writer, curator, and professor who is currently leading courses like Afropessimist Aesthetics and Mean Moms and Other Feminist Strategies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Across her practice, Sampada asks questions of ephemerality and intention when it comes to objects of protest or materials and movements of the body, which includes everything from print media created for and by the Black Panther Party to the materials that make up and are emitted from the bodies of women and Black people.
In her upcoming book, tentatively titled Death’s Futurity: The Visual Culture of Death in Black Radical Politics, Sampada is using the stories of Fred Hampton, Bobby Hutton, and George Jackson to better understand images of death during the height of the Black Power movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s alongside the protest signs, posters, and materials that circulated around those monumentally tragic moments in history.
In “Feel Me?” at Iceberg Projects, her most recent curatorial project, Sampada brought together the work of West Coast artists Sadie Barnette, Xandra Ibarra, Dylan Mira, Kristan Kennedy, and Tina Takemoto. The show offers a feminist lens through which to consider how traces of body and bodily materials that are so inherently personal and, in some cases, quiet in nature can manifest in social settings and provoke new, booming awarenesses.
While sitting in the gallery of Iceberg Projects and with Xandra Ibarra’s Menstrual Rorschach Interpretation whispering quietly in the background, Sampada and I spoke about her current work, reading the colonized body and Western Enlightenment through a feminist lens, and what it means to be in and not of the institutions of academia.
Photo Credits:
[1 +2] Portraits of Sampada Aranke, photographed by Kristie Kahns.
[3+4] Installation view of “Feel Me” at Iceberg Projects. Photos courtesy of the gallery.