My Ghostly MRI’s
Solo exhibition by Femi Dawkins
March 22 - April 13
Opening March 22 Friday 17:00
Schaafstraat 10
From March 22nd, solo exhibition 'My Ghostly MRI’s' by artist Femi Dawkins is on view at gallery van Fanny Freytag.
Femi Dawkins shows a series of MRI's, an ongoing research project consisting of paper works with Lapis Lazuli, beetroot, salt and Indian Ink. My Ghostly MRI’s is a meditation on grief, faces abstracted into emotional landscapes.
As a child of the Diaspora and it’s migratory movements, Dawkins journeys through in-between worlds. His work focuses on these fractured narratives and the significance of personal narratives that translate into universal truths.
Shaheen Merali, Curator/ Artist based in London said about Femi's MRI's:
My Ghostly MRI’s are envisaged by the Jamaican born, Netherlands and London based, artist Femi Dawkins as a series of haunting portraits deploying mix media practice to obliquely articulate memory, and radical loss. Dawkins' involvement with diverse visual notations has enabled him to depict the condition he describes as the “silence grown to a punctuation.” For Dawkins, My Ghostly MRI’s provoke our imaginations to push boundaries and social attitudes which otherwise would remain archival documents “failing a beginning.”
Femi Dawkins is an independent artist, he graduated with a MFA from Goldsmiths University London with distinction (2022). He won the Gieskes-Strijbis Podiumprijs (2022) together with Kate Moore, he was the first recipient of the Lisson Gallery scholarship (2022), was selected as a New Contemporaries artist (2021), and was awarded the the Ford Fellowship (1991-90). He received his BA/BS from Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY (1989) and is an alumni of La Guardia High School of Music and Art (1984).
He has exhibited his work in the exhibitin ‘Rites Of Passage’ curated by Péjú Oshin (2023) in Gagosian Gallery at the Brittania Street gallery in London and the South London gallery, Capital C in Amsterdam, Firstsite in Colchester, Barnsdale Municipal Gallery in Los Angeles and CC Pounder Gallery in Los Angeles.
Femi Dawkins, about the opening night
In the process of making My Ghostly MRI's,
I channel what's inside the enslaved body and the lived experience of a life in handcuffs or the constant threat of handcuffs.
My mournful rendition of Motherless Child amidst my work was filled with vulnerability and grief.
It comes from the same place as the tears that flow like washing the bodies in perpetual quietness looking for sovereignty of purpose.
What it is like, to live a life unremarked upon, but visited by violence, for violence sake.
No one likes seeing a black man on his knees, it recalls Rodney King and many other countless and nameless bodies whipped and mashed into submission to pain death and terror.
Yet there I was circling my work, head downturned singing Motherless Child, my knees dragging across the floors of the gallery.
Each round my voice getting louder and louder.
Recalling the transatlantic voyages of past ships and lost dead souls thrown overboard without a care, and buried deep under water and in soil.
The countless nameless faces and bodies broken and thrown on beds of antebellum medical schools and experimented on and thrown in graves unmarked and unremarked without names or even a mournful peep of anyone caring. I was performing poetry as prayer. Attempting to visualize the spiritual by spirit conjuring
"Far away from home a language like a man can lose face, hang its head in shame and wither into silence. I became by loving myself, loveless motherless child."
Through sonic reflection in the form of music and poetry , in this case singing Motherless Child,
I sought a deeper engagement with the forgotten histories and the suppressed forms of diasporic memories.
The sonic presented at My Ghostly MRI solo exhibition, are the poetics of words and the visual of falling down, are all contributing to the ground swell of being present in the moments of trauma and joy, a transformation of silence and being silenced into language and action.
Of black bodies that escape like angry liquids, somewhere, to catch their breath.
the blue Vein
That vibrates
Under the surface of the black skin,
Who is talking?
From what under water
and lost country ocean
will you return me The bone and the eye
The mouth
And the sound.”