Untitled: The exhibition that finally gives a forward-thinking display of diasporic art

An untitled artwork is an invitation to dream up your own story. Rather than dictate to or guide the viewer, an artwork without a name resists categorisation and encourages us to dig deep and think inwardly, without relying on contextual information. But its meaning also adapts over time. Good art should find ever-shifting significance in the past, present and future.

To be untitled is much like the diasporic experience – belonging to many histories, stories, titles and categorisations. Untitled: Art on the Conditions of Our Time, a new exhibition at Kettle’s Yard at the University of Cambridge, focuses on 10 British-African artists from the diaspora and how both artwork and maker question and interrogate some of the most important cultural and political issues of our turbulent times.

The mixed-medium exhibition, where paintings and drawings sit in close company with performance, sound and video works, is a reminder to think beyond generalisations about black British identity. By not giving itself a name, it moves past the “black art survey show” and by putting the art first instead of the identity, we are encouraged to explore the grooves and ridges that score a multilayered experience of what it means to be human, and how art, culture and society intersect.

The exhibition makes explicit that art should be a catalyst for more; it should linger after you leave the show (and indeed, after you close the book, or the curtains draw). It should spark something, rouse something within you, and adjust how you interact with the world. It is thus natural that the themes these artists speak to are a veritable contents page of the current socio-political discourse agenda. They oscillate between sexuality and queerness, or interrogate a longstanding history and concern for migration and conflict, while ideas about technology and media loom, and commemoration and remembrance are approached with ready curiosity.

Kimathi Donkor explores history and the myths of Africa and the diaspora. His painting, Nanny of the Maroons’ Fifth Act of Mercy (2012), comes amid a new fervour about figurative black art but asserts the resistance in reclaiming the figure and the power of portrayal. It’s a subversion of a work by 18th-century English portrait painter Joshua Reynolds, which pictured an aristocrat with strong family ties to enslavement in Jamaican plantations. Now, it’s remixed and reclaimed with a direct adversary, Queen Nanny of the Maroons, an escaped slave who founded a village in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica and successfully raided plantations to free slaves.

It’s a powerful reversion of history to question who we remember, how we are commemorated, and how we reclaim forgotten stories while also questioning why they were forgotten. Donkor’s unpicking of historical figures such as Toussaint L’Overture retains the composition of the original paintings they derive from, but inserts an African presence at the heart of the work.

Large-scale, grand and impressive, his paintings have the sort of pomp you’d expect from the Louvre or within the gilded frames of the National Gallery. They have all the repositioning power of Kehinde Wiley’s Rumours of War, with an air of revolution – the Haitian revolution. “However, it cannot just be reducible to blackness,” says Paul Goodwin, a longstanding voice within the academic discussion of black art and the show’s curator. “He is discussing black history, but black history, of course, is world history. We need to give more space to [that type of] work.”

Then there’s the work of the mysterious artist NT, specifically a large-scale video work in a dark room in the gallery that confronts the audience with the interplay of the black image and architecture. The new commission focuses on the legendary Trinidadian carnivalist and dancer Greta Mendez, shot against the imposing Brutalism of the Barbican Estate in London. Filmed within the greenery of the conservatory, Mendez wears a veil in various poses, creating a challenging, non-narrative portrayal of an influential figure and calling for us to look at the past with new perspectives and energy.

Artists can transport us to new worlds, moving beyond the representational focus on the black body and drawing us closer to abstract and conceptual installation work. Indeed, London and Amsterdam-based artist Ima-Abasi Okon’s installation, of four large brass vents with jewellery fixed into the gallery wall, flirts with minimalism and is about as far from figurative work as you can get. An assemblage full of enigma, we come to consider the age-old question of what belongs in galleries, but perhaps also ponder our expectations of what black artists make. Why is the artistic creation of black artists pigeonholed into such narrow parameters and what does it say about how much more work needs to be done?

Two further innovators who are redefining black art are Larry Achiampong and David Blandy. They take on the weighty conversation of colonialism in Finding Fanon (2015-17), a powerful video trilogy by the two friends and collaborators. Phoebe Boswell’s new large-scale drawings, meanwhile, depict the lives and livelihoods of fishermen in Zanzibar, one of the largest former Arabic slave ports, and reckons with the impact the climate crisis and globalisation has had.

“I speak from an in-between place – from the space between here and there, which is like a diasporic consciousness,” Boswell tells me. “With my work, I try and search for notions of belonging and notions of home. Not referring to a place, but an understanding and reckoning on how to get to somewhere that feels like belonging and feels like home.”

At the core of her work, Boswell is asking us to reconcile what freedom really means. There is a freedom in the curatorial stance – the curator notably steps back and allows the works and their many, many themes to call out for the attention of curious minds and eager eyes. The artists and their work are free; from categorisation, expectation, preconceptions… and so we can appreciate their nuance.

When curating shows with all-black artists, we must resist the monolith. So often artists are clubbed together in trend lists and exhibition programming but less often afforded real contemplation. Untitled: Art on the Conditions of Our Time is a call to arms to understand, think, and dive deep into the worlds of these artists and their inner experiences. Only then, will we escape the idea of black art as a fad.

Untitled: Art on the Conditions of our Time is at Kettle’s Yard until 3 October 2021