HAMISHI FARAH (AU, 1991)
Residency period: October-November 2023
My residency at La Becque came after a busy period making two painting exhibitions back to back. As well as resting, I took the opportunity to conduct new research that brought me to the Château de Joux in France, a castle which in Napoleonic times, that was utilized as a state prison. During the Haitian revolution – a slave revolt which led to the first independent Black republic – the revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture was captured and held in squalid conditions at the Château de Joux that led to his early death a year later in 1804.
Today this castle is a historical monument with a small staff, and mainly operates as a tourist destination. On the daily tour, a guide walked me around the castle, explaining how life and operations at the castle may have worked, a kind of cross section of the 11th-19th century administration. The cell Toussaint died is advertised as a tour highlight. It contains framed letters documenting the cell’s veneration both as a historic site for Haiti and an acknowledgement of Emmanuel Macron’s visit in 2023 to commemorate 150 years of France’s abolition of slavery. It was furnished modestly with a simple 19th century desk, bed, dresser, and chairs – a revisionist restaging of how the cell could have looked during the imprisonment that led to Louverture’s early death. The cell – renovated for tourist access – becomes a projection of an uncanny and ‘kinder’ slavery & imprisonment.
During my time at La Becque, I also took advantage of the residence’s ceramics workshop to work with a different medium. I made miniature clay replicas of the cell’s furniture that are about restaging the prison for an audience.
I had been reflecting on the state messaging and art world response to the genocide in Gaza, formalizing the failure of an architecture of moral responsibility established by ‘the international community’ after WW2. Events that bracket and made possible the birth and failure of institutional critique as an aesthetic category separate from ‘tasteful’ aesthetic judgment. Monuments are a kind of effigy to hold the surplus affective weight of historical events. — Hamishi Farah
Born in Melbourne, Hamishi Farah is a self-taught artist of Somali descent, who currently lives and works in Berlin. Their work in conceptual and figurative painting is situated within the production of a politics and philosophy of representation with a particular focus on the libidinal afterlife of coloniality and its permeation through contemporary art.
Hamishi Farah, La Becque, 2023, photo Matthieu Croizier