Imitation of Life: Melodrama and Race in the 21st Century

HOME Manchester is delighted to announce Imitation of Life: Melodrama and Race in the 21st Century, a major new group exhibition of newly commissioned and existing work, examining the performative and melodramatic connotations associated with racial politics in an evolving world, co-curated by Omar Kholeif and Sarah Perks. Oral histories and verbatim storytelling drawn from theatre and cinema, painting and sculpture, confront the fluid and evolving politics of representation and race. Inspired by the 1959 film of the same name by legendary German-American director Douglas Sirk, the exhibition, like the film, is filled with subtext and double meaning. Imitation of Life considers the context of racial politics over the last 15 years in the US and Europe, focusing on artists whose work uses melodrama as a form of social, political and institutional critique.

As part of Imitation of Life, critically acclaimed artist Sophia Al-Maria will present newly commissioned Scarce New Flowers (2016), dealing with the politics of passing, representation of whiteness and racial dysphoria through the actual packaging of facial Whitening creams from Chemical Corps Taiwan, Indonesia and Thailand. These holographic, shiny images are manipulated to generate large scale images for the exhibition, and seep into Al-Maria’s contribution to the publication, musing on the chemical make-up designed to adjust and change appearance.

Other artists included in the exhibition are Larry Achiampong, Michael Armitage, Kevin Beasley, Jordan Casteel, Loulou Cherinet, Loretta Fahrenholz, Lauren Halsey, Tony Lewis, Jayson Musson, Jacolby Satterwhite and Martine Syms.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication Fear Eats The Soul, edited by Omar Kholeif and Sarah Perks, a collection of new poetry, fiction and essays by contributors including Sophia Al-Maria, Zach Blas, Zachary Cahill, Pamella Dlungwana, Jackie Kay MBE, Omar Kholeif, Monica B Pearl, Sarah Perks, Jacolby Satterwhite and Martine Syms, available in the HOME bookshop. The publication will be launched on the first birthday (Friday, May 20) of the RIBA award winning building HOME, followed by a performance by Larry Achiampong and David Blandy. To complement Imitation of Life, HOME will present a mini-film season with an opportunity to watch the 1959 version of Imitation of Life on the big screen, along with subsequent homages to Sirk’s film.

Sarah Perks commented: “Imitation of Life is the last in a current series of exhibitions that use ground-breaking 20th century films as thematic inspiration and narrative structure for the curation of 21st century contemporary visual art. The essence of Imitation of Life—a melodrama about the effect of society’s rigid structures on women and specifically the black Afro-American experience—is re-presented as a group exhibition of works from the last 15 years. Despite a new set of conventions and systems over 60 years, from civil rights victories to the notion of post-digital, the issues remain vitally important to debate.”