Gallery 01:3

JAZZ It is said that collectors put their most cherished work in the bedroom. Henri Matisse, after a surgery left him largely bedridden, created his Jazz series in 1947. He used a technique of cut-paper collage (or decoupage) that he would use until his death in 1954. Originally published as a book, Jazz is in fact not about jazz, but mainly depicts scenes set in the circus and the theater. The title is a reference to Matisse’s method: improvisation – a visual freestyle, in which cut papers were pinned down, taken up, moved around, pinned again, to explore their relationality, which is improvisation’s most constitutive ingredient. Here, we freestyle with Matisse’s Jazz series, in a rotating programme of film and video works, which you are invited to enjoy on the bed.

FILM PROGRAMME, CHAPTER 6

Bouchra Khalili: Twenty-Two Hours April 23 ‒ June 16, 2024

A key figure in Bouchra Khalili’s film installation Twenty-Two Hours is Jean Genet, the French writer and political activist, who came to the United States between March and May 1970. He was there at the invitation of the Black Panther Party, a Marxist and Black power organization founded in 1966. Genet delivered a speech at a May Day rally in New Haven, Connecticut, where he says, “I must be very careful when I speak in the name of the Black Panthers.” Genet was aware of his position and privilege in relation to the Party and knew that he, as a white queer male, could not embody their struggle or politics. Instead, he aligned his own activism with the politics of the BPP, and championed solidarity.

Nearly fifty years later, Quiana and Vanessa, two young African-American women from Cambridge (USA), examine Genet’s visit to New Haven. As much storytellers as film editors, the young women combine fragments of images, sounds, stories, and film footage, to tell the story of Genet’s commitment to the BPP. Simultaneously, Doug Miranda, a former prominent member of the BPP who was involved in organizing Genet’s tour on the East Coast, narrates his meetings with Genet and his own dedication to the Party. Twenty-Two Hours asks the question “Who is the witness?” Is it Genet who stated that he came to the U.S. to bear witness to the repression suffered by the Party? Is it Doug Miranda bearing witness to the struggle for liberation to which he dedicated himself? Or is it Quiana and Vanessa who commit to calling the ghosts of emancipatory history?