“That’s why my life has been so hard, and that’s why I get so tired now”. ¹

Discrimination is a parasite. It targets vulnerable subjects, without which it cannot sustain itself and whose detriment it relies upon. It is opportunistic, invasive and self-serving, fuelled by eating away at the subject’s resources. Discrimination is an attack on difference, in the form of racist slurs. It attempts to undermine solidarity between groups, in particular people of colour. Discrimination is but one symptom of white supremacy:

a political, economic and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily re-enacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.²

Historically, ‘whiteness’ has functioned as both a neutral category and the ‘norm’. The white (male) gaze has been cast upon ‘othered’ bodies, classifying them within an insidious racial hierarchy.

Korean and Black American interdisciplinary artist Dana Davenport shares personal experiences of racism in ‘긴장 (that’s why I get so tired now)’, her first solo exhibition in Australia at SEVENTH Gallery. Sydney-based curator Nanette Orly extends an earlier collaborative project with Davenport³, establishing a dialogue beyond borders in order to highlight adversity across a vast range of social and geographic contexts. The exhibition’s title stems from an audio recording of Davenport’s mother speaking about the impact that discrimination has had on her life and her experience of raising mixed-race children in Korea.Davenport’s mother feels worn down, scrutinised and backed into corners where she would have no choice but to resort to language that could have caused further tension, for the sake of defending her daughter and her family.

Davenport has re-imagined this harrowing testimony as a zine, placed atop a rice mound in the 7UP gallery space. This new work references 200 Pounds of Rice (2016), a performance in which the artist carried a heavy bag of rice to alleviate the burden placed on her mother and to share the load of unrelenting labour, expended to fight prejudice in a deeply racist society. At the core of their struggles was intrusive pressure from friends, neighbours and strangers to adhere to white ideals that had been upheld as the pinnacle of wealth and success in Korean culture. As Davenport’s mother reveals, race is inextricably tied to class in this context: white people are viewed as effortlessly stylish (read: affluent) by virtue of their skin colour, whereas black people, by the same token, are considered ‘too poor’ to dress comfortably – a visual marker of social status.

However, this situation is not as simple, or as dualistic as ‘black’ and ‘white’: it reveals the embedded tactics of white supremacy, lurking like an ever-present spectre in Korea (and other colonised countries) to ‘divide and conquer’ minority groups, to turn them against one another and therefore reproduce the same structural inequities that have maintained the status quo for the dominant cultural group. Davenport’s mother is infuriated by racial profiling – the assumption that black people are criminals, based on stereotypes perpetuated throughout pop culture and the media. Her interracial partnership was frowned upon, as though she had transgressed social boundaries by marrying a black
man.⁴ Davenport and her family members have been put on the line time and time again, unapologetically resisting these national and racial constructs. However, the fight for survival and visibility necessarily outweighs the unwarranted comments, the assumed superiority and the scornful attitudes that abound.

Davenport’s practice foregrounds her body: the way it absorbs and endures the pain of racism. This sensation is taken to extremes in Learning Korean(2015), a video work that implicates the viewer in a drawn-out, excruciating act of pinning. Davenport listens intently to her Korean language teacher (an anonymous figure, other than for the hand that enters the frame to inflict measured torture) and attempts to recite a series of introductory phrases, with varying degrees of success. Each time the artist trips up, or offers incomplete utterances, another wooden peg is pinned onto her face. It becomes a kind of tensely voyeuristic experience for the viewer, who locks eyes directly with Davenport and is deliberately positioned at close quarters to the screen. They, too are complicit in this unfolding scenario, and this piece forces them to acknowledge and own that. Davenport stares down the barrel of the camera with a strong and steady presence. Remarkably, the artist does not flinch once, despite the pegs pinching almost the entire surface area of her face.

In the corner of the gallery hangs a small family photo, signalling Davenport’s closeness to her kin and sense of pride in her cross-cultural heritage. A chandelier overlaid with synthetic braids hangs from the ceiling; hair becomes an extension of the body. Together, these elements are reminiscent of a living room scene, a space for family to gather and partake in sentimental traditions. On a broader level, Davenport seeks to foster “pluralistic coalitionary engagements”⁵ between Black and Asian peoples, bridging the gulf that whiteness has coercively fabricated to engender mistrust and incite hatred. Orly, as Davenport’s collaborator, is committed to the same strategies of resistance; this exhibition embodies the principles of “curatorial activism”, an ethical standpoint that pays careful attention to “counter-hegemonic narratives”⁶ by debunking the myth of the ‘white male genius’. This mode of curatorship recognises that artists do not exist in a vacuum, as the western canon has led us to believe - rather, they are critically responding to the unjust social conditions that are a fact of contemporary existence. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention.