Taboo Durag, Paul Maheke (2021) (EMPIRE LINES x Mostyn, Glasgow International)

Contemporary and performance artist Paul Maheke moves between France, Congo, and Canada, exploring the ‘archive of their body’ through drawing and dance, via Taboo Durag (2021).

To Be Blindly Hopeful emerged from the very last sentence of a journal that Paul Maheke kept between August 2020 and June 2021, capturing the turbulence of the COVID pandemic on paper. Central to his practice is a delicate dance between the individual and the collective, personal and broader sociopolitical contexts, echoing the sentiment expressed by bell hooks, who reminds us that ‘the space of our lack is also the space of possibility.’

Currently based in France, Paul shares work ‘staged’ in previous exhibitions at South London Gallery, Chisenhale Gallery, and Tate Modern, highlighting how these ‘new’ drawings, prints, book illustrations, and paintings of birds have long formed part of his practice. He explains how performance and dance can be both emancipatory and trapping, with respect to queerness, masculinity, and gender, and the reality of being ‘brown body looked at by a white audience’. Exploring these lived experiences through movement, Paul’s work suggests of Stuart Hall’s thinking about living archives - but the artist also shares his lifelong admiration for the French-born ice skater, Surya Bonaly.

We delve into Paul’s plural popular culture and academic Influences like Grace Jones and Félix González-Torres, Audre Lorde and Édouard Glissant, and Bruce Nauman to Paul B. Preciado - not as icons but real, complex people. Finally, Paul highlights how his work changes in its global travels, from Paris, to the Baltic Triennale in Estonia, and Johanneburg, South Africa. He also speaks of his collaborations with family members and the fellow artist Melika Ngombe Kolongo (Nkisi) for the Congo Biennale in 2021, his personal relationship with arts institutions on the continent, as a diasporic artist.

Paul Maheke: To Be Blindly Hopeful runs at Mostyn in Wales until 29 June 2024. It includes Taboo Durag (2021), produced as a performance to camera for Glasgow International 2021. This episode marks this iteration of Scotland’s biennale festival of contemporary art, which continues until 23 June 2024.

Paul has also shown work as part of the Diaspora Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, the first to feature an official performance programme co-produced with the Delfina Foundation, and in the Drawing Biennal 2024, which runs at the Drawing Room in London until 3 July 2024.

Hear another of Paul’s collaborators, Barby Asante, on Declaration of Independence (2023), part of Art on the Underground in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/aa2803b68933ab974ca584cf6a18479c

For another exhibition from Mostyn, hear artist and curator Taloi Havini on Habitat (2017) and Artes Mundi 10: pod.link/1533637675/episode/e30bd079e3b389a1d7e68f5e2937a797

For more about bell hooks, hear Professor Paul Gilroy, on The Black Atlantic (1993-Now): pod.link/1533637675/episode/90a9fc4efeef69e879b7b77e79659f3f

And on Édouard Glissant, listen to Manthia Diawara, co-curator of The Trembling Museum at the Hunterian in Glasgow, and artist Billy Gerard Frank on Palimpsest: Tales Spun From Sea And Memories (2019), part of PEACE FREQUENCIES 2023: instagram.com/p/C0mAnSuodAZ

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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