Vincent Meessen: Ultramarine

Color blue is the historical and discursive filter through which this “spoken word performance” unfolds. The precursor of hip-hop in the late ’60s delivers his radical poem as the Belgian percussionist Lander Gyselinck improvises to the flow of his utterances. Throughout the performance various museum objects – funeral figurines, automaton, astrolabe, mappa mundi, textiles – are juxtaposed to Kain’s own props. They invoke affective retrospections on exile and belonging, slave routes and colonial trade.

“So far, all that has given color to existence still lacks a history.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Gay Science

“Ultramarine” is composed like a spectrum: it unfolds and intertwines fragments of meaning. This narrative form creates the possibility of connecting Kain's radical poetic to a larger frame of investigation: museum objects and artworks from very different origins, all stored in Toulouse museums and in collections of the Occitan region. These objects are put in dialogue with stage props and reproductions of art works that surround Kain in his Amsterdam exile since the 1980s.

By disrupting the Eurocentric ways of writing history and organizing museum collections, Ultramarine brings together a constellation of objects that come alive and take on an active role. The immersive experience of color—presented here as something vibrant, textured, shifting, and multifaceted – is inseparable from its political meaning and from cinema understood as a form of magical practice.

Vincent Meessen

Vincent Meessen (Baltimore, USA, 1971) is an artist who lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. He builds collective, temporary and self-managed alliances, designs exhibitions in the form of essays, makes montage films, writes texts based on field surveys… all forms that represent attempts to break free from the regimes of epistemic coloniality and authority of Western History. He is a member of Jubilee, a platform for artistic research and production.