Act 3: As Visible as Blood
SILVANA MENDES, Sem título, 2024. Série “Frestas III” Courtesy of the artist.
Opening Reception: December 5, 7:30-9:30pm
Location: Gallery Gachet, 9 W Hastings Street.
Exhibition Dates: November 28th, 2025–March 14th, 2026
Symposium Dates: December 5 and 6, check back for more details.
Featuring artists Rebecca Bair, Silvana Mendes, Keisha Scarville, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, and Kariyana Calloway-Scott.
“The murderers in this draft are those who write the laws, who tell you to prepare for the tragedy of the afternoon because they have claimed—with their Black Codes—every morning of every country on this earth.”
“Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. ‘Peaches’ and ‘Brown Sugar,’ ‘Sapphire’ and ‘Earth Mother,’ ‘Aunty,’ ‘Granny,’ God’s ‘Holy Fool,’ a ‘Miss Ebony First,’ or ‘Black Woman at the Podium.”
Act 3: As Visible as Blood begins where the semiotics and technologies of cultural domination — literature, visual art, popular culture, and the archive — collapse within themselves to conjure the racist visions of Black womanhood, sexuality, eroticism, and labour that have been absorbed and naturalized within the world as we know it.
Crystallizing through the constellatory thought of Black feminist writers, past, present and future, who bridge the experiences of women on the continent and across the diaspora, the exhibition redresses the long-standing absence of Black female subjectivity and the narratives of capture, enslavement, colonization, and early post-colonial life.
Positioning itself as the speculative third act to Saidiya Hartman’s Venus in Two Acts, Act 3 reanimates the historical archetype of the Black—or Sable—Venus: rendered ubiquitous by nature and defined through violent, painful, and abject circumstances that reveal little about her inner spheres of survival and being. Despite her many names, locations, and guises, her historical rendering as a sexualized, geographic, and physical body — ripe for domination, control, and the gendered bondage of imperial womanhood—remains laid bare, unchanged, beyond cartography and chronology.
She is defined as much by her utterances as by her enforced silences. In this incarnation, however, she attempts to try her tongue. She presents herself as Rebecca Bair, Silvana Mendes, Keisha Scarville, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, and Kariyana Calloway-Scott — donning the aberrations known to us as her reflections: the woman who gazes upon herself through an infinite mirror, or the woman who turns the mirror back on us; the enslaved girl who serves the domestic despot poison; the mother who is not the mother, who may indeed be the mother but goes by the title wet nurse; the Black girl with the silver slippers; the lioness; the Sable Venus who crosses the Atlantic to retrieve her daughter—whose name did not make it into the archive, remembered only by the word Ship affixed to her forehead.
Across these reflections, she resituates the sensual immediacies the Black female body carries and returns to the first battleground — the domestic sphere. It is here that the possibilities of pleasure, self-regard, self-veneration, self-liberation, and beauty coalesce with the monstrous intimacies, coercions, labour, and horrors that comprise Black life.
This third act signifies a defiant refusal of closure and of the eternally static depictions of Blackness and Black womanhood. A refusal of servitude, and the unrealized desires, sexualities, and possibilities for self-evolution through self-representation. In doing so, Act 3 positions itself as a disruption to the visual and imaginative grammars of empire, colonization, neocolonialism, slavery, rape, and police violence. Against a social order long rehearsed in the tolerance of Black suffering, the chorus assembles to name the abject disregard for the conditions of Black femmehood, while adopting the modus operandi of the women of Ursa Corregidora’s lineage to render the metaphysical injuries and interruptions of slavery as visible as blood.
— Olumoroti George, Director/Curator
