Belinda Zhawi’s poem ‘This body wants what it wants’ is taken as the starting point of a discussion around Claudette Johnson’s work and her treatment of the body and more specifically the female form. Both Zhawi’s and Johnson’s creative practices expand understandings of the body, what it means, what it does, where it goes and what it feels. Placing Johnson’s work in dialogue with Zhawi’s poem this lecture seeks to open up wider conversations around the ways in which Johnson centres Black women’s bodies through her use of scale, media, colour, and texture. Johnson’s larger than life studies refuse the limited perspectives historically projected on to the female form and instead offer the viewer depictions of Black women’s bodies with agency, portrayals of bodies experiencing pain, pleasure, and leisure among other things.
Alongside poetry this lecture also encourages an engagement with the work of Johnson and the female form through sound, ascertaining that Johnson’s artworks exceed their physical forms. It draws on Saidiya Hartman’s notions on writing back to historical silences through critical theory and creative writing and Tina Campt’s ideas around ‘listening to images’, where Campt asks us ‘not just to look but to listen well’ to images.
Dr Sylvia Theuri is an art educator, researcher and independent curator. She is currently a lecturer in Contextual Fine Art and Photography at the University of Wolverhampton.
Sylvia co-curated the more things change at Wolverhampton Art Gallery (April – July 2023), a major exhibition exploring the work of the Blk Art Group who were active from 1979 to 1984, as well as focussing on the artists evolving individual practices from 1985 to the present day. Sylvia was Research Lead for the Runnymede Trust’s research project ‘Visualise: Race, Inclusion in Art Education’ commissioned by the Freelands Foundation (August 2021 – January 2022). She was also Curator in Residence at The Herbert Art Gallery and Museum (2019-2020), working in partnership with New Art West Midlands, International Curators Forum and Coventry Biennial. Her residency culminated in the exhibition Thirteen Ways of Looking at The Herbert Art Gallery and Museum (October - December 2020).
Her recent publications include ‘From Institutional Racism to Duties of Care: Moving Interventionist Practices away from Racism and Colonial Dominance’ commissioned by UAL Decolonising Arts Institute and the Contemporary Art Society (2022) and ‘Who Belongs in Art school?’ in K. McMillan Representation of Women Artists in Britain During 2020, Freelands Foundation (2021).
She is part of the advisory group for ICF (International Curators Forum).
Organised by Professor Dorothy Price (Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Critical Race Art History, The Courtauld) and Xiaojue Michelle Zhu (Doctoral Researcher, The Courtauld) as part of the 2023-24 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series, ‘Black British Art: Histories, Presence, Futures’.
