Nottingham Contemporary | Autumn / Winter 2020 Exhibitions Programme
Virtual Exhibitions

NOTTINGHAM CONTEMPORARY
Weekday Cross, Nottingham, NG1 2GB

Grace Before Jones: Camera, Disco, Studio

A cross between fan-fiction, study and biography, Grace Before Jones: Camera, Disco, Studio departs from the iconic singer’s career and her collaborations with artists, designers, photographers and musicians to question black image-making and gender binarism as well as both performance and the performance of life.

In 1979, Grace Jones had her face moulded by her collaborator and then-partner Jean-Paul Goude to produce multiple ultra-realist masks. These were intended to be worn by fellow musicians, performers and models, but were also for herself. Grace Jones had multiplied, turned herself into sculpture and serial form – an armada of Grace. Departing from the observation that Grace Jones is not one but multiple, the exhibition Grace Before Jones: Camera, Disco, Studio unfurls a range of Grace Joneses: from disco queen to dub cyborg; Jamaican to French; runway model to nightclub performer; black to white; feminine to masculine.

In embodying these seemingly opposite poles at once, Grace Jones entangles binary systems in style and in flesh. She both exemplifies and complicates theories of gender, sexuality, performance, race and cybernetics, discourses that flourished in parallel to her career. Dexterous in the art of self-reinvention, Jones’ modes of performance can be said to borrow from what academic Daphne Brooks has called ‘the theatricality of blackness’, whose techniques are, in the words of Malik Gaines, ‘able to articulate not the wholeness of black identity, but rather the constructedness of all identity’.

Grace Before Jones presents a multifaceted portrait of the iconic singer. Travelling through time, it also seeks to give both a historical background and contemporary perspective to Grace Jones’ image-making, while expanding on stage design, music and fashion. The exhibition presents itself as an alternative way to write and tell art history.

Jimmy Robert: Akimbo

This major survey of the Guadeloupe-born French artist Jimmy Robert (b.1975) brings together sculpture, installation, film, works on paper and performance in the largest-ever presentation of Robert’s work in the UK.

The exhibition explores emergent themes in Robert’s work, including performance and gesture, the politics of spectatorship, appropriation, and the personal and political body, along with their racialised and gendered readings. By drawing together work from 2002 to the present day, the exhibition will bring into focus the intertextuality that has shaped Robert’s work through the myriad quotations and allusions that he deploys. From American choreographer Yvonne Rainer to the Suriname-born Dutch conceptualist Stanley Brouwn, these references act as points of critical departure, which are complicated through shifts in context to create a layered set of reflections, mirrored across time, place and identities.

The notion of reflections and mirrors can also be read through Robert’s engagement with questions of the gaze and desire, of visibility and invisibility. At times, Robert borrows from art-historical instances where black bodies have been fetishized but, more often, his own body provides a point of focus. Many of the films and performances featured in the exhibition, including Joie Noire (2019) as well as earlier Super-8 films such as Brown Leatherette (2002), implicate the body as a vehicle of language, positing it as a site of interference and resistance. Conceptualism meets sensuality in such works, where slippages between image and language, object and image, and materiality and representation are constantly being enacted.
The exhibition will tour to CRAC Occitanie in Sète, France in spring 2021 and to Museion in Bolzano, Italy in summer 2021.

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Find out more: nottinghamcontemporary.org
From 26 September 2020 to 3 January 2021.

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