Cast But One Shadow: Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities

The identity depicts two fronds of the genus Livistona, a tropical palm that thrives in areas in Southeast Asia, South Africa, areas of South China Sea, Indian Ocean, and the Pacific. The image takes cue from trade paperback book designs and film posters. In particular the identity converses with the graphic representations of the exoticism of the Orient and the tropics as represented by the book covers of the Chinese-born Eurasian novelist and physician Han Suyin in the 1960s and the visual language of posters of Blaxploitation films popular in the 1970s.

For the exhibition’s identity these fronds overlap, creating a composite image wherein a vivid and solid green leaf interfaces with an overly saturated orange frond rendered in halftone. This interfacing results in a deeper and more somber green frond. This overlapping as logic of imagemaking speaks to the interests of the exhibition in looking at the entangled histories that it proposes to account for and the conditions and stakes of these historical moments that the exhibition seeks to flesh out. While these may be seen as discrete and loosely related events in the history of the region, what thinking about them as simultaneous developments brings is a richer understanding of regional histories and affinities.

This overlapping also pursues the provocation of the title of the exhibition. The title’s syntax forwards the effect of casting a shadow rather than an emphasis on the shadow’s source. It also prospects not a simple logic of casting multiple shadows, but the resistance to cast a singular and unitary shadow. While the identity simulates a singular image, its singularity is created by overlapping layers. The use of halftone achieves the same effect as it fleshes out the shape of a leaf by creating a continuous tone using a series of dots.