a most beautiful experiment (2024) WESTSPACE, Melbourne

an interdisciplinary artist with astonishing versatility

wani toaishara is a Congolese artist based in Melbourne whose works span various mediums including image-making, performance, installation and film. His practice explores African visual culture and representation, dislocation and Indigeneity as well as the effects of colonialism on Africa and its diaspora. His Practice celebrates Black life and interrogates the complexities of Black sociality in urban spaces, often using his personal history to create intimate and personal works. wani’s use of urban spaces is significant in transforming banal spaces into dramatic stages for exploration and reflection.

education

wani toaishara’s educational journey has equipped him with a deep understanding of research-based practice founded on relational accountability and communal care.

art

Solo exhibition by wani toaishara, HAYDENS Gallery, 2024

catalogue essay

wani toaishara

The Uncanny and the Magnificent has been born out of my desire to re-imagine the African experience as pertaining to anti-Blackness and Afrophobia in Australia. It speaks to questions of safety and un safety, the relationship between people and place, as well as histories of dispossession. The mediums used include photography, video Art and installations consisting of varying symbolisms, some quite obvious others subtle but ultimately always present. They work both in conjunction with each other but also as stand alone pieces with their own agencies. This work was made with love, and includes an amazing collection of friends, family and peers, who I am deeply indebted to for their time, care, kindness and openness in sharing themselves with me in all the ways that they have.

These works have been inspired by a great deal of thinkers, artists, writers and makers including but not limited to; Hamile Ibrahim, Tina Campt, Saidiya Hartman, Brian Martin, Khalil Joseph, Arthur Jafa, Dianne Lawson, Jean Depara, Roy DeCarava, Fred Moten, Mary Graham, Ja’Tovia Gary, Anthony Ankibola and Fred Moten. I want to thank them for the work they have done and continue to do in order to lay foundations for works like this to exist, but also for us to exist fully as ourselves both through the work and outside of it.

In an Essay by Tina Campt called ‘Adjacency: Luke Willis Thompson’s poethics of care’ Campt challenges us to witness, witnessing as an active and participatory encounter, a move away from looking. Who has the right to look or the right to look away? Who chooses to look and who chooses to look away? What or who gets seen, and what or who gets silenced or goes unheard in the process? So when considering the nature of our encounters with blackness in contemporary art how is it that we move from observer to witness? She calls this form of witnessing the black gaze. It is a gaze that transforms this precarity into creative forms of affirmation. It repurposes vulnerability and makes it (re)generative. In doing so, it shifts the optics of “looking at” to an intentional practice of looking with and alongside. A black gaze does not allow viewers to be passive to its labor or impassive to its affects. It is a gaze that demands work. It demands the work of maintaining a relation to, contact and connection with, another.

“The black gaze I am describing should not be confused with empathy. It is not a gaze that allows you to put yourself in the place of another, nor does it allow you to presume you share another person’s experiences or emotions. It’s not about sharing the pain or suffering of differently racialized subjects. It is recognizing the disparity between your position and theirs and working to address it. It demands the affective labor of adjacency. It is the work of feeling done both in spite and because of these differences, and choosing to feel across that difference rather than with or for someone living in very different circumstances.” - Tina Campt