Landscape painting is associated with the classical tradition, with nostalgic views of often idealised landscapes (in England, by painters such as Gainsborough and Reynolds in the 18th century, via Constable in the 19th, and onto 20th century artists as varied as Ravilious or David Hockney). Above all it is associated with white, male, historical artists, and Dulwich Picture Gallery is home to numerous works by masters of landscape painting, in Britain and Europe.

And so the thought naturally arises: why not gather together works by non-white artists, by contemporary living artists who, in a host of different ways, can offer new and interesting perspectives on a well-worn subject? Hence this exhibition, ‘a contemporary retelling of landscape by artists from the African Diaspora.’

It sounds like a simple enough proposition but raises a surprising number of questions and issues, problems and perplexities, which I try to address through the course of this review.

Scope

‘Soulscape’ features about 33 works (20 paintings, 2 textiles, 10 photos and 2 videos and a video installation) by 21 contemporary Black artists. The works include large-scale pieces, a site-specific installation, and a big new painting commission from Michaela Yearwood-Dan. They cover a wide variety of media including photography, film, tapestry and collage. And they are all very 21st century. The oldest work is from 2012 but that’s an outlier, most are much more recent. I counted five a piece from 2020, 2022 and 2023. It’s up-to-the-minute stuff.

Some of the artists I’d heard of before, namely the film-maker Isaac Julien, photographers Marcia Michael and Mónica de Miranda because I’ve been to exhibitions of their work at the Black gallery, Autograph ABP (and de Miranda also features in Tate Britain’s current Women in Revolt! exhibition). But most of the rest were, to my shame, completely new to me.

As you might expect the show goes way beyond traditional limited interpretations of ‘landscape’ to bring in a host of weighty themes and ideas. Dulwich Picture Gallery is a relatively small space, made up of four consecutive galleries (with a small broom cupboard of a mausoleum at the break between rooms 2 and 3) and the rooms have each been assigned themes or topics, being: belonging, memory, joy and transformation.

1. Belonging

Room one is arguably the best room in the show. It contains just four big works, but I liked them all. They have been selected to illustrate the theme of belonging. I’m going to quote the curators’ introduction in full:

Belonging is fundamental to the human experience. It is intrinsically linked with our relationship to landscape and our place in the world. We can feel an emotional affinity to a place through shared histories, as well as being rooted somewhere through a collective identity.

Each artist here offers a unique perspective in the way their work draws links between self and nature. They reflect on the intersections of felt experience and the traditional understanding of belonging, often against the backdrop of colonial history, migration, and the complexities of disputed territories.

‘Limestone Wall’ (2020) is a large-scale painting by Hurvin Anderson, depicts the tropical foliage of Jamaica and explores the artist’s relationship to his ancestral homeland. The curators write:

Anderson is the youngest of eight children born to Jamaican parents, the only one born in England. His work reflects an attempt to reconcile his inherited and imagined knowledge of Jamaica with his own limited experience of the landscape. ‘Limestone Wall’ invites us to consider the liminality of belonging through a landscape that was inspired by photographs taken on a visit to Jamaica.

Limestone Wall by Hurvin Anderson (2020) © Hurvin Anderson. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery. Photo by Richard Ivey

‘The liminality of belonging’. For those not familiar with curatorspeak, liminality means ‘the quality of being in between two places or stages, on the verge of transitioning to something new’. It’s in fact a term taken from anthropology where it indicates ‘the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete’ (Wikipedia).

This is, as you can see, a big and complex idea to attach to a painting of what looks like some kind of terrace (of a café, maybe?) set against a lush green tropical jungle.

The idea that immigrants, emigrants, the children of people who have emigrated from one society to settle in another and who remain, in some sense, between two worlds, and two identities, is a Central Issue of Our Times, and runs like a thread through all the rooms in the exhibition.

The question which this first room raised for me was not the one the curators intended, about belonging or identity etc, but more like: Does the knowledge about the artist’s family background and immigration status (I apologise if this is insensitive phrasing, all I mean is knowledge of whether the artist comes from a family which has emigrated from an African country to somewhere in the West, Europe or America), does and should this knowledge affect our appreciation of the art?

On one level it doesn’t matter at all to me, I don’t care where any artist comes from or what their ethnic background is. I’ve come to an art gallery, I’m looking at 30 or so paintings (and a couple of videos) and deciding which ones I like purely on the basis of how they look and how they make me feel. But it matters a lot to the curators. It’s the curators who’ve made it an issue, because it’s the curators who include this ‘immigration information’ in almost every wall label, as well as in the articles which accompany the show in the Dulwich Gallery magazine.

This is the room which hosts the pieces by Marcia Michael and Mónica de Miranda. Of the Miranda triptych of photos, the curators write:

De Miranda, a Portuguese artist with Angolan ancestry, explores the poetry of belonging throughout her work. This piece, from the series ‘The sun does not rise in the north’, investigates the physical and mental concept of borders and migration. Depicting landscapes that witness hope, de Miranda examines the complexity of migrant histories in Europe in relation to the politics of land. The three figures, standing amid breaking waves, lead us to consider the limitations of belonging.

Sun rise (detail) by Mónica de Miranda (2023) Courtesy of the artist and Sabrina Amrani Gallery, Madrid

She’s also represented by ‘When words escape, flowers speak’, massive digital photos of twin Angolan sisters standing in the seemingly natural but carefully constructed landscape of the botanical gardens of Floresta da Ilha (Island Forest) in Angola’s capital city, Luanda. The curators describe this city, Luanda, as bearing ‘a history of colonial presence’. Well, yes, Luanda ‘bears’ quite a bit more than that, since Angola gained independence in November 1975 and was immediately plunged into a devastating civil war which lasted, with interludes, until 2002, leaving up to 800,000 dead and the country’s economy and infrastructure in ruins. See my reviews of:

• No One Can Stop The Rain: A Chronicle of Two Foreign Aid Workers during the Angolan Civil War by Karin Moorhouse and Wei Cheng (2005)
• Blue Dahlia, Black Gold: A Journey Into Angola by Daniel Metcalfe (2014)

As so often, as in Tate Modern’s excellent exhibition of African photography, the (white liberal) curators bang on at great length about the evils of the colonial period, and simply ignore the 60 years of civil wars, military coups, famines and kleptocratic dictatorships which have ravaged Africa since the end of the colonial era.

On the big wall facing the entrance is Marcia Michael‘s 2022 work, ‘Ancestral Home 45’, from the series ‘The Object of My Gaze’. It’s a photograph of a jungle scene which has been mirrored vertically and horizontally to create a dazzling image of a tropical landscape.

Kaleidoscopic and mesmerising, this photographic work is a meditation on the sense of belonging that can be evoked through immersion in nature. It was created from a series of images captured by Michael on a visit to her late mother’s homeland in Jamaica.

2. Memory

Room two is devoted to memory. The curators, again, make a number of sweeping claims:

Landscapes have the power to unlock feelings that only a particular place can activate. Sometimes these memories are nourishing and affirming and at other times they are challenging, making us feel unwelcome or excluded. The artists in this section explore the space in between these extremes. 

Do landscapes ‘have the power to unlock feelings that only a particular place can activate’? Maybe. It’s a big claim, a big thought.

This room contains the most works, with 8 or so paintings and fabrics, 6 photos, plus a video and a still from a video.

The video is by Harold Offeh, is titled ‘Body Landscape Memory. Symphonic Variations on an African Air’ (2019) and is 20 minutes long. It consists of very calm, quiet shots of one, two or three Black people sitting on log benches in what looks like a typical (and typically boring) English park. There’s no dialogue or interaction. The calm scenes are accompanied by music from the early twentieth-century Black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. There’s a web page which gives more explanation, stills and a clip from the video.

The curators give an explanation which is presumably the artist’s, namely that:

These figures are liberated from any racialised notions of victimisation, or suffrage, to reimagine the inclusive possibilities of this romanticised environment.

The complete lack of action or dialogue is the point, and I (think I) understand the political or polemical aim, to show Black people in a nice park, with none of the melodrama or negative stereotypes which usually accompany Black people in TV dramas or movies. Bit boring, though.

In a similar vein, of normalising Black figures in non-urban settings, are two big digital photos by Jermaine Francis.

‘A Pleasant Land J, Samuel Johnson, & the Spectre of Unrecognised Black Figures’ by Jermaine Francis (2023) Courtesy of Artist Jermaine Francis

According to the curators Francis:

considers the issues that arise out of interactions with our everyday environments, positioning the Black figure in rural settings to instigate conversations around power, identity and the history of the English Landscape.

‘Conversations around power, identity and the history of the English Landscape.’ These are hefty topics, walloping great ideas, to simply mention and then leave hanging. For me they are like lead weights which have been hung on the photos, which drag down your response, which channel whatever initial response you have to them as works of art, into an urgent-sounding, political-sounding straitjacket.

And the ideas are just too big to engage with. Am I meant, somehow, to review the entire history of the English landscape based on just these two photographs?

I mentioned Isaac Julien. He’s represented by a big colour photograph, a still from a 2015 film installation Julien made titled ‘Onyx Cave (Stones Against Diamonds)’. The film aimed to celebrate the beauty of natural elements. The sequence the still is from was filmed in the rarely accessible ice caves in the Vatnajökull region of Iceland. It shows a Black figure standing in a beautiful ice-white and azure cave. It is accentuated by the presence of the onyx figure, dwarfed by the magnificence of the backdrop.

Onyx Cave (Stones Against Diamonds) by Isaac Julien (2015) © Isaac Julien / private collection, London

But this beautiful, awesome image isn’t enough. Again the curators corral it into one of their polemical concerns about Black inclusion/exclusion from the tradition of landscape art.

Historically, these depictions of cold-climates excluded the Black figure, so its presence here challenges notions of belonging and memory.

Obviously this is an idea implicit in the image, if you choose to read it this way. But if Julien really did intend his piece to be first and foremost a celebration of the beauty of nature, I wonder how he feels about this broad aim being straitjacketed into yet another discussion about Black figures in art. It made me wonder what any of these 21 artists thought about being chosen for this exhibition primarily for the colour of their skin rather than the quality of their work.

Interlude: the Mausoleum

It’s a quirk of Dulwich Picture Gallery that half way through, between rooms 2 and 3, off to one side, there’s a smallish circular room which is actually the mausoleum of three of the founders of the gallery. It is shaped to recall a funeral monument, with urns atop the building on the outside, sarcophagi above the doors and sacrificial altars in the corners.

The back wall is flat and it’s onto this wall that Phoebe Boswell has created a ‘site-specific installation’, namely a big door-shaped projection of a video titled ‘I Dream of a Home I Cannot Know’ (2019). This is a kind of visual collage depicting everyday activities of (Black) people in a beach in Zanzibar. It’s happy and innocent and lovely, with a low soundtrack of laughter and conversation and chat as holiday makers and day trippers runs, skip, play, go swimming, handle fishing boats etc. There are four attractive stools carved from a gnarly old tree because they contain gaps and holes, for visitors to sit on and be nicely lulled. It’s more or less the only piece in the show which really does convey a sense of the happiness and relaxing quality of being out of doors. However, the curators rope it back into their concern with migration, disaporas and the artist’s multi-country identity:

The work is a reflection on belonging, community, freedom, and migration. Boswell is informed by her own history, which spans various geographies and landscapes, and her work navigates the spaces between.

3. Joy

Room 3 is devoted to the theme of Joy. It contains nine works.

The joy that that comes from connecting with nature is a deeply personal and emotional experience. Whether experienced in solitude or socially with others, this feeling is often underlined by the nourishment and release that arises from being at one with the natural world.

The artists here invite us to join with them in sharing this moment of euphoria. For some, this is conveyed through evoking the sensory delight that comes from an immersion in the beauty of nature; the smell of fresh flowers, the feel of petals between one’s fingers. For others, depicting scenes of familial joy that place Black figures into classical pastoral scenes is a way of expanding the possibility for Black bodies to experience true ease and freedom.

‘…expanding the possibility for Black bodies to experience true ease and freedom’ rather begs the question: Do Black bodies currently not experience true ease and freedom? Anywhere? What would it take for Black bodies to experience true ease and freedom? The wall labels begged loads of questions which I found worried and distracted me from the art.

Anyway, I’m afraid I found most of the pieces in this room pretty meh. After strolling through the four rooms four or five times, I came to the settled conviction that I only really liked about ten, about a third of the 33 or so works. Some I found so horrible that I could barely look at them. It would be invidious to single out the really bad ones, but here are some I thought were very average.

‘Unforeseen Journey of Self-Discovery’ by Kimathi Mafafo (2020). The medium is interesting – it’s a hand- and machine-embroidered fabric so that when you get up close, you can see the individual threads and appreciate the extraordinary amount of time and patience it must have taken to make. I just didn’t like the final image very much. Maybe you do. Tastes vary.

‘Unforeseen Journey of Self-Discovery’ by Kimathi Mafafo (2020) Image courtesy of the artist / Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery

However the curators load the work with some rather scary issues.

Mafafo explores the joyous embrace of nature as an act of resistance. The woman emerging from a cocooned veil of white muslin peers out with an air of excitement and wonder. The veil, once a sanctuary of peace and introspection, billows around her playfully as she rediscovers her world, uplifted by the natural beauty that defies the weight of patriarchy and racism.

Looking at the image cold, was your first response be that it is an act of resistance to patriarchy and racism? Maybe it was. But these struck me as being huge, troubling issues to load onto what (I think) is intending to be an image of innocence and natural beauty.

Another work which didn’t light my fire was a set of four paintings by Kimathi Donkor from her ‘Idyl’ series (2016 to 2020).

‘On Episode Seven’ by Kimathi Donkor (2020) Courtesy of the Artist and Niru Ratnam, London. Photo by Kimathi Donkor

These depict:

The concept of Black joy is a central theme of Donkor’s Idyll series. The figures in his painting display gestures of ease, relaxation and shared play between friends and family members. The pleasures of public green space and balmy weather are celebrated as precious gifts of nature, available to uplift us all.

‘Black joy’? Is this a lot different from white joy? Chinese joy? Latinx joy? Asian joy? Then comes then the polemical kicker:

For Black communities, this joy is also a form of resistance against being excluded, silenced or classed as victims.

OK, if this picture is something as serious and politically committed as ‘a form of resistance…for Black communities’, am I even allowed to have a view of whether I like it or not? The other three in the series were all in the same style and, well, I just didn’t like them very much.

On the plus side, the room contained two very good works. Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s lush multimedia piece, ‘Cassava Garden’ (2015), layers images from fashion magazines, pictures of Nigerian pop stars, and samplings from family photo albums to represent a hybrid cultural identity.

‘Cassava Garden’ by Njideka Akunyili Crosby (2015) © Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner. Photo by Robert Glowacki

I always like collage, whether in its 1910s Cubism, 1920s Weimar or 1960s Pop guides, so I straightaway liked this. But I just responded to the size and feel of this work, it’s big and striking. I liked the way the repeated face of the women embedded in the fabric on the right is at right angles to the picture plane. You can’t really see them in this reproduction but in the two big green leaves at the top are embedded (from left to right) the faces of an African woman and man and they are both stunningly vivid and realistic. Maybe they’re photos somehow worked into the piece. If they were painted they’re extraordinary. And the off-centre positioning of the stalk of what is, presumably, the cassava plant. It all combines to make this one of my favourite pieces from the show. According to the curators:

The Nigerian-born American artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby uses an abstracted collage to engage with the idea of memory. The main feature is the cassava plant, whose broad leaves extend across the canvas and are layered with photographic images of the artist’s family life.

The collage is a reflection on Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s childhood trips to her ancestral land which were marked in her memory by the presence of cassava plants. She also references traditional West African material and patterns, signifying the duality of her cultural identity since making a new life in the USA.

Nearby are two more really good pieces, ‘The Climber’ (2022) and ‘Moonlight Searchers’ (2022) by Che Lovelace which depict the flora, fauna, figures, landscapes and rituals of the Caribbean. Again this catered to my slightly Asperger’s taste for squares and geometric shapes. I immediately responded to the way it consists of four rectangles bolted together, each signalling a different perspective or colour palette on the main composition. And then I liked the rather Cézanne-like way the two naked women are turning into geometric shapes or geometric shapes are emerging from their bodies, beginning to schematise or diagrammatise them. And I liked the colours, especially the green fronds of the palm tree leaves on the left.

‘Moonlight Searchers’ by Che Lovelace (2022) private collection. Courtesy of the artist, Corvi-Mora, Various Small Fires and Nicola Vassell Gallery

According to the curators:

Lovelace reflects on the loving embrace of the landscapes found in his homeland, Trinidad. His depictions of the rhythms of life on the Caribbean island are informed by his rootedness there. The result is a complex and nuanced expression of his sense of identity, as well as an exploration of postcolonialism, resistance, freedom and joy. The division of the canvases into quadrants reflects the interactions between different cultures on Trinidad. Both works show bodies at ease with nature, exploring and connecting with their surroundings.

Once again the wall label raised questions in my mind: Is this painting ‘an exploration of postcolonialism, resistance, freedom and joy’? Or are those just fashionable words thrown at these paintings, combined and recombined in an impressive number of ways but, at bottom, representing just a handful of ideas, none of which actually is actually ‘explored’. Are these terms like confetti thrown at a wedding, bouncing off the central figures and then lying around on the floor till swept up and thrown away?

4. Transformation

The Gallery often reserves the fourth and final room for Big works, acting as a climax to what came before and this exhibition is no exception, the fourth room containing four big, big paintings. The curators explain the theme of transformation thus:

Nature can be a powerful force that changes the way we see the world and its history, as well as equipping us with tools for healing physical and emotional wounds.

This begs so many questions, it left me dizzy. Is nature ‘a powerful force’? What does that mean, exactly? Surely we are part of ‘nature’, every organic thing, plus the geographical and geological environment, surely these are all part of nature? So what does it mean to say that ‘nature’ can change ‘the way we see the world’? How are these terms, ‘nature’ and ‘world’ different? Is it because the curators are assuming that ‘world’ gestures more towards the world of humans the world of culture and technology we surround ourselves with?

And what does it mean to say that ‘nature’ can change ‘the way we see…history’? How, exactly? Does walking through a park change my view of the French Revolution or the Rwanda genocide? I don’t really see the connection?

And these are all implications of just the first half of that sentence. the second half goes on to make the huge claim that ‘nature’ equips us ‘with tools for healing physical and emotional wounds’. Does it? What tools? How?

So I found myself hugely distracted by this simple couple of sentences, my mind buzzing with an explosion of implications and issues, so it took quite a while to settle down and actually look at the works in the room.

These include the one specially commissioned for the show, by Michaela Yearwood-Dan, ‘Another rest in peace – from a holy land in which we came’. It’s a huge landscape-shaped canvas filled with swirling paints, with ceramic petals and other matter stuck to the surface, and I actively disliked it. It looked like an abortion on a canvas and had absolutely no healing impact on me.

Next to it is an equally huge painting of a tropical rainforest which appears to be hanging over a river, although the paint is handled in such a way that it looks like it is melting into the river, an uncomfortable image of distortion, reminding me of the cover art for a science fiction book where some horrible radioactive disaster has struck the world. the grey blobs on the right, from a certain angle, looked like distorted skulls.

‘There Is Water at the Bottom of the Ocean’ by Ravelle Pillay (2023)

This is ‘There Is Water at the Bottom of the Ocean’ by Ravelle Pillay (2023) and, according to the curators:

In this moody and evocative painting, Pillay explores the legacies of colonialism and transformation of painful colonial histories alongside the conflicting nature of historical memory. The lush shoreline sits against the backdrop of a jungle made up of palm trees that appear weighted and changed by the histories they have witnessed. The water seems to hold spectral energy. The artist allows us to consider the way history can affect a landscape and reveal wounds that call for healing and change.

None of that was obvious to me. I just found it huge, overpowering and depressing. Maybe you think differently.

And, finally, a pair of enormous paintings, dominated by orange and browns, by Christina Kimeze, namely ‘Wader (Lido Beach)’ and ‘Interior I’, both painted in 2022. Here’s a link to the Wader, and to the Interior on Kimeze’s website. Actually, in small reproduction they scrub up quite well, the orange palette coming across very powerfully. Also, on the internet you can see installation shots of exhibitions with lots of her works together, which I imagine give a strong cumulative effect.

But here, the context of two other huge and not very appealing works dragged my reaction down into negativity. In the ‘Interior’ I found the space (is it inside a hut?) offputtingly square and rigid, and the depiction of the woman’s shape or outline disconcertingly clumsy and unappealing.

The figure of the pregnant woman in ‘The Wader’ is a lot more appealing, as is the liberal use of purple marking or strokes but, in the flesh, huge and oppressive in a small room, I found both these works the exact opposite of healing or transformative. I couldn’t wait to get away from their looming presence.

Summary

After carefully reading the 40 or so wall labels which repeatedly invoke troubling social and political issues around racism, ethnicity, migration, identity, Black oppression, Black suffering, Black exclusion and Black exploitation, I felt anything but soothed and healed by nature. I felt very troubled and anxious about some of the hottest hot-button issues in modern society. The labels of almost every work have the harassing, hectoring tone of a Guardian article lecturing you about your white privilege and asking what you are going to do for the Black Lives Matter movement. Quite stressful.

As to the healing, joyous and transformative power of nature which the main room captions repeatedly invoke, one minute in the lovely gardens surrounding Dulwich Picture Gallery, amid the deckchairs and playing children and picnicking families, was more instantly and deeply healing and calming than anything I saw in the challenging hour I spent in this difficult and very uneven exhibition.

Exhibiting artists

• Njideka Akunyili Crosby
• Hurvin Anderson
• Michael Armitage
• Phoebe Boswell
• Kimathi Donkor
• Jermaine Francis
• Ebony G. Patterson
• Alain Joséphine
• Isaac Julien
• Christina Kimeze
• Che Lovelace
• Kimathi Mafafo
• Marcia Michael
• Mónica de Miranda
• Harold Offeh
• Nengi Omuku
• Sikelela Owen
• Ravelle Pillay
• Alberta Whittle
• EVEWRIGHT
• Michaela Yearwood-Dan

Promotional video

Related link

• Soulscapes continues at Dulwich Picture Gallery until June 2024

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