Installation view (City Art Centre, Edinburgh)
Flattening Room, 2024
‘PLATFORM’ Group show at City Art Centre, Edinburgh
9th-25th August 2024
'Flattening Room' replicates the beautification of Black and brown trauma as shared online: suspiciously beautiful and/or digestible images designed with maximum engagement in mind, to help audiences wash down the constant imagery of brutalised, racialised bodies. These flattened digital aesthetics were particularly prevalent on my timelines following the murder of George Floyd, the acceleration of Israel’s apartheid in Palestine, and the ongoing racist, Islamophobic and anti-immigrant terror attacks here in the UK.
The work thinks expansively about a selected trauma: the literal, photographic, and digital capture/control of Black women’s breasts. It puts breast flattening - a niche cultural practice in Cameroon, where young girl's breasts are pounded with heated objects to stop their growth in the hope of preventing sexual assault - in contrast with my own breast reduction, which came too late in life to be effectively preventative. The invasive nature of the medical photographs I posed for, pre and post procedure, felt analogous to colonial ethnographic photographs. Their thin veneer of science created an opportunity for socially acceptable nude photography, circulated both for propagandistic education about bare-breasted 'savages' in the colonies, and for the purpose of clandestine titillation.
From paintings of Leda and the Swan, to recipes for Sicilian desserts, to infographics about breast ironing, ‘Flattening Room’ uses flattened digital aesthetics to loop seemingly unrelated information into an unending cycle. It reproduces the exhaustion I feel existing as a Black woman online amongst the barrage of destructively impulsive oversharing and vicarious trauma that seeps into the everyday. Shown on 2 opposing screens, the viewer must succumb to constantly missing and misunderstanding information, and the exhaustion therein.
'Flattening Room' is heavily, heavily indebted to Otobong Nkanga’s performance, installation, and digital photograph, 'Fattening Room' (1999) and Ngozi Onwurah’s documentary film, 'Monday’s Girls' (1993)
‘Emerging Talent: Platform at Edinburgh Art Festival 2024’ The Skinny interview with Ella WIlliamson
Flattening Room
2-channel video installation, 04'40"
The Twins
The Voice
Pigment print on paper, frame, fake fur, 40cm x 40cm
Installation photographs by Sally Jubb
Installation video by Rachel McBrinn
Citations
- 'Léda et le Cygne', Antoine Coypel (18th cent.)
- 'Leda und der Schwan', Heinrich Lossow (19th cent.)
- 'Leda col Cigno', Leonardo da Vinci (1506-1508)
- 'Leda mit dem Schwan', Peter Paul Rubens (1598-1600)
- 'Léda et le Cygne', Attributed to Gillis Coignet (1592-1599)
- 'Leda en de Zwaan', Cornelis Bos after Michelangelo Buonarroti (1544-1566)
- 'Léda et le Cygne', Attributed to François Boucher (c.1740)
- 'Léda et le Cygne', Jean-Jacques Feuchère (1850)
- 'Leda s Labuťou', Alexander Nyulassy (1862)
- 'Léda et le Cygne', Jean-Baptiste Cariven (1887)
- 'Léda et le Cygne', Emmanuel Benner (1888)
- 'Leda e il Cigno', Drancesco d'Ubertino Verdi Bachiacca (16th cent.)
- 'Léda et le Cygne', François Lemoyne (1737)
- 'Léda et le Cygne', Paolo Veronese (c.1585)
- 'The Benin Disaster: Scenes In The Niger Protectorate', The Illustrated London News, p123, Jan 23rd 1897
- 'A Native Chief And His Followers', photograph supplied by Dr Felix Roth, The Illustrated London News, p123, Jan 23rd 1897
- 'Breast Flattening', nationalfgmcentre.org.uk
- 'Feinstein International Center, Understanding Breast 'Ironing': A study of the methods, motivations, and outcomes of breast flattening practices in Cameroon', Rebecca Tapscott, May 14th 2012
- 'Minne di Sant'Agata (Sicilian Ricotta and Chocolate Pastries)', food52.com, January 27th 2016
- 'Martyrdom of St. Agatha', Lombard School, (17th cent.)
- 'Neutrogena Gabrielle Union Deep Clean Daily Scrub' advertisement, March 9th 2010
- 'Leda and the Swan', William Butler Yeats, 1989