New art exhibition on Black poppies (& Other seeds) launched at Rhodes House

This week the Rhodes Trust opened our latest exhibition, on Black poppies (& Other seeds), hosted in the S. Ann Colbourne Gallery in Rhodes House. Our Artist in Residence is Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist Rebecca Pokua Korang. The exhibition has been sensitively and creatively curated by Rhodes Scholar Maitha AlSuwaidi (UAE & Lady Margaret Hall 2021.) We welcomed over a hundred guests to hear from Korang and AlSuwaidi, introduced by Sir Rick Trainor, Interim Warden & CEO of the Rhodes Trust. The launch drew a diverse audience from the Rhodes Trust community, the wider Oxford public and beyond, and attendees were keen to mingle and discuss the artworks together.

Responding to the theme of 'Radical Joy,' Korang centres the stories of Black soldiers in the Second World War, in particular the Tirailleurs Sénégalais, colonial troops recruited by the French from their West African colonies, and soldiers recruited by the British from East and West Africa to fight against the Japanese as part of the Burma Campaign.

The exhibition follows artistic and material explorations of Korang’s archive of photographs sourced from eBay. Taken from and through the oppressive colonial gaze, the original images are ridden with what Black feminist theorist Tina Campt describes as “technologies of capture”. The photos have lost their provenance by being sold and purchased online, yet Korang honours the joy and resistance that seeps through the interstices of the records. This body of work is a reminder that such ‘invisible histories’ are made invisible. The photos are interwoven with mediums including textile, weaving, painting and videography.

The artworks invite us to think about the politics of memory and commemoration. Commemorative bouquets of flowers made up of black poppy, lavender, and cotton stems are found throughout the exhibition space, a reclamation of ancestors and Black lives that are lost or long forgotten. Black poppies specifically commemorate the contribution of Black communities to the war effort, in the same vein as the red poppy, a more well-established emblem of British commemoration culture. These flowers are also a symbol of resilience even after the wilting of things, and a metaphor for solidarities inevitably intertwining across historical and contemporary liberation movements.

Korang’s work weaves a thread from histories of the Second World War, independence movements and the Cold War era, all the way to current injustices that are both global in resonance and local to the artist and her lived experience as a Black German. This exhibition is a culmination of multiple and intertwined threads; bridging the personal with historical, embodied, and situated explorations.

Korang insists that Radical Joy is not just an expression, but an embodied and a collective practice, spanning generations and geographies. It is present in music, in dance, in laughter, and in holding grief alongside joy. It is something to live by and to nurture.

We warmly welcome everyone to visit the exhibition. Our next tour is on Thursday 30 October at 11:00, led by curator Maitha Alsuwaidi. Sign up here. Alternatively, please get in touch with us to arrange a time to visit by emailing communications@rhodeshouse.ox.ac.uk .