When Melancholia Turns Black

Abstract

The term Black melancholia - when melancholia turns black - speaks to a profound collective gloom born of insistent socio-historical violence. With it, Dr Nana Adusei-Poku takes the concept of melancholy and extracts it from a highly racialized discourse in which notions of loss are pathologized and reserved for white cis (fe-)male subjects. Adusei-Poku subverts the idea of melancholy to describe a particularly Black experience of sadness, one borne of fatigue and the certainty of loss in the future. Her reading of sadness takes into consideration colonial legacies of pain and grief, as well as the aesthetic practices that utilize this emotional space as a creative force. Curated by Adusei-Poku, the exhibition ‘Black Melancholia', which took place at the Hessel Museum of Art and Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 25 June 2022-16 October 2022, brought together works by twenty-eight artists of African descent that expand and complicate the notion of melancholy in art historical discourse. While the show included powerful visual artworks, this interview with Alhena Katsof focuses on the performative aspects of the exhibition to explore the ways Adusei-Poku activated the space. Katsof, a scholar of performance studies and exhibition histories, is also a friend and interlocutor of Adusei-Poku. In ‘When Melancholia Turns Black’, they pick up their ongoing conversations about exhibitions and performance, transforming their long-distance phone calls into words on a page.