Behold at Brooklyn Museum, New York entangles the sacred with the brutal and violent
It is said among some Santería practitioners that during the transatlantic slave trade, the seven Orishas (the major deities of the religion) took to the ships and journeyed alongside the enslaved; within the unspeakable brutality of the hold, there was also divine presence. This commingling is deeply felt in María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s retrospective, where the sacred is entangled not quite with the profane, but rather with the brutal and violent – with the foul markings of forced dispersal and its aftermaths. Yet in this exhibition, which designs a psychic space somewhere between biography, memorial and prayer, the artist leaves us with a sense that things can be made whole, that remedy is not only possible, but present at hand.
The exhibition is deftly crafted through Campos-Pons’s singular transdisciplinary tactics: it is a meeting between photography, video, performance mixed media and things in between. This dialogue of media begins with Spoken Softly with Mama (1998), an installation that incorporates all of the above. Here, Campos-Pons tends to the threads of her family narrative to weave a tapestry concerning broader histories of racialised and gendered migration and labour: seven ironing boards – a nod to Black women’s domestic labour – function as arenas of display: three bear projections of video footage of household work, while the others are printed with family photos. On the floor in front of them, blown-glass sculptures shaped like irons are arranged in a pattern that resembles a fleet of ships, alluding to both migration and the slave trade.
In her multipanelled Polaroid self-portraits, Campos-Pons takes these motifs inward. Here, her body is literally disjointed, cut into panels, while also being the element that unites and spills across them. She visualises her subjectivity as simultaneously fragmented and expansive, the site of both deconstruction and suturing. The formal vocabulary of the works strikes as a kind of visual metaphor for the vicissitudes of dispersal and dislocation.
In both her portraits and videowork, Campos-Pons figures her body as a site of adornment, makes it resplendent with sundry and beautiful materials. More often than not, these decorative elements are encoded with spiritual references. Take, for example, Red Composition from Los Caminos (The Path) (1997), a photographic triptych in which the artist has isolated her hands, torso and feet in the three respective panels. Prayer beads are draped from the head and rest gingerly around the face, traversing closed eyes and lips. Arms are streaked with red body paint – an homage to Eleguá, the Santería deity associated with possibility – while hands clasp coils of beads and ribbons. The artist appears composed, still, yet underneath this something stirs with the divine, flashes with a tinge of the surreal.
Such portraits exact an almost unsettling command on the eye, reminding us of the exhibition’s title: Behold. It is indeed a fitting appellation for Campos-Pons’s work, both a solicitation and a provocation. The works here, in the directness with which they negotiate biography and history, body and spirit, ask: dare you look? What kind of gaze are you bringing to this material? Mobile #3 from the series Rise of the Butterflies (2021) gestures towards these questions explicitly. Here, Campos-Pons has configured a largescale mobile out of several blown-glass orbs she made after studying images of eyes and teardrops. Assembled together, these motifs allude to a collectively witnessed pain, a way of seeing and lamenting that is mutually implicated. To look and to grieve are woven together, but not reducible to one another. For our tender regard for one another will always be in excess of the hurt.
Behold at Brooklyn Museum, New York, through 14 January
