Howardena Pindell's exhibition at Kettle's Yard asks a lot of its visitors. You begin lulled by lyrical beauty: large evocative canvases of floaty coloured dots that reference Seurat and seem to position themselves and their creator safely within the framework of 20th century abstract expressionism. At this stage, you are unaware of the significance of the circle to Pindell - a blunt childhood awakening to the realities of segregation. But even as the story is told and the exhibition unfolds, the beauty remains. Her 'white-washed' collages of circles retain an optimism: in their insistent variety, the colours still visible, poking triumphantly through the surface, their texture suggesting an unstoppable, organically bubbling momentum. Yet you end the exhibition, trapped in a metronomic tick of leaden dread, listening to a faltering yet determined account of atrocity after atrocity. Is the shift just too great?
It seems wrong to criticise Fire/Rope/Water, a piece so powerful, so personal and so long and hard fought-for. It is meant to be uncomfortable and it is. But I sat worrying that I was uncomfortable for the wrong reasons; that here I was, a white woman, watching the same suffering that the white watchers in the images were revelling in. I wasn't sharing their sentiments, but I was still somehow complicit in a horrendous cycle of voyeurism which stopped the mutilated bodies becoming individuals, and preserved them forever as victims. The video, like a lot of Pindell's overtly political art, potentially suffers from overkill. The metronome, the voice, the sound of pauses and pages turned, and the final, seemingly endless roll call of names, is more than powerful enough. The images are too much.
The same can be said of works like Diallo where the circles reappear, now large, spread across the canvas, 41 gaping holes. They are accompanied by images of four guns, two names, key words - none are needed. Those stark wounds, white bone and red flesh through black skin shout loudly enough, or rather they resonate through the silence, like a constellation in the sky, to an ongoing, unspeakable, incomprehensible brutality. Pindell is at her most effective when she is at her quietest. Canvas, ripped and roughly resewn has a textural echoing of poverty and punishment, of homespun and much mended sackcloth, of flayed skin and half healed wounds. Works are pinned to the wall, unframed, objects more than images, rough and irregular, like maps of unknown continents; amoebic, organic, tangible and emotive. Alongside sit small, carefully calligraphed lists and tallies which suggest the commerce and bureaucracy of the slave trade and, like the overpainted chads, an indefatigable desire to restrain and rule. But equally, the hair-thin fragility of the script already fading on the page speaks to the ultimate futility of those systems of control, as the words and numbers dissolve and shift into abstracted pattern.
Pindell has spent a lifetime fighting, campaigning and overcoming, first within the art world itself, then in a wider political sphere. She can be forgiven for getting angry and being blunt. But what really hits home is the quiet determination. So appreciate it in the range of work, the variety of media, in her resolute refusal to be pigeon-holed. You hear it in the pauses and the page turns, you read it in the spidery scrawl of innumerable numbers, and all those thousands of collected chads. And most of all you feel it in the creativity and the beauty and the hope which she can conjure up. Horror hits hard in the exhibition, but the beauty lingers.
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