Christopher Myers: I Dare Not Appear: Frieze No.9 Cork Street

7 October - 23 October 2021

  • For the inaugural edition of Frieze No. 9 Cork Street, James Cohan is pleased to present I Dare Not Appear, a solo exhibition of new work by Christopher Myers. The exhibition will be on view from October 7 through October 23, 2021.

     

  • Installation View, Christopher Myers, I Dare Not Appear, James Cohan at Frieze No. 9 Cork Street, London, United Kingdom, October 7 - October 23, 2021

  • I Dare Not Appear is an ongoing project that brings together new applique textile works with a collection of historical letters written by Sarah Forbes Bonetta, a young Egbado girl who lived in Victorian England. Seven of Forbes Bonetta’s letters from the collection of the artist’s family will be exhibited for the first time, an intimate counterpoint to the large-scale tapestries created by Myers. These tapestries delve into this personally charged past to build visual narratives about the life of Sarah Forbes Bonetta. 

     

  • In 1850, Captain Frederick E. Forbes of the Royal Navy was bequeathed a little girl by King Ghezo of Dahomey....

    In 1850, Captain Frederick E. Forbes of the Royal Navy was bequeathed a little girl by King Ghezo of Dahomey. The gift of the “perfect genius” of an “amiable” child was intended for Queen Victoria, as a sort of tribute between royals.

  • Raised as the Queen’s goddaughter, her life serves as apt illustration of the conceptual knots of Victorian England. This was...

    Raised as the Queen’s goddaughter, her life serves as apt illustration of the conceptual knots of Victorian England. This was an era characterizedby a mindset that could simultaneously trample the world in colonial endeavor and see itself as civilizing souls like Sarah Forbes Bonetta.

     

  • The artist holds Forbes Bonnetta’s hand-written letters and associated documents, which his family purchased from a London antique shop in...

    At Her Majesty's Request: An African Princess in Victorian England by Walter Dean Myers. Published 1999 by Scholastic, Inc. 

    The artist holds Forbes Bonnetta’s hand-written letters and associated documents, which his family purchased from a London antique shop in the late 1990s. They form part of a collection started by his father, renowned children’s book author Walter Dean Myers, who based a book on these historical materials.

  • The letters range from the emotional to the quotidian and represent a teenage girl’s perspective of living in between worlds, trying to navigate the needle-eyes of courtly life, Victorian class structures, race and culture.

  • For Myers, his relationship to Forbes Bonetta is interwoven with his own biography and rooted in his family’s stewardship of these and other archives. His tapestries delve into this personally-charged past to build visual narratives about the life of Sarah Forbes Bonneta that speak to the slippages between history and mythology.

  • “I am interested in the ways in which the presence of Blacks in the West is always, periodicized, constructed as a curiosity, or an innovation, as if we first appeared on the Windrush in England, or on the shores of Virginia in 1619, when in fact we have been present throughout the world and in history part of longer continuity of cultural exposure and exchange.”

    - Christopher Myers

  • Much of Forbes Bonetta’s early narrative is parsed through Captain Frederick E. Forbes’ book Dahomey and the Dahomans, published in...

    Much of Forbes Bonetta’s early narrative is parsed through Captain Frederick E. Forbes’ book Dahomey and the Dahomans, published in 1851. In these memoirs, Forbes spends much of his time writing in lurid detail about the supposed bloodthirstiness of the Dahomans, typified by his descriptions of the extremity of human sacrifice during the “Annual Customs of Dahomey.” 

  •  Myers is interested in contrasting Victorian imagery of African despots collecting skulls, and the very real practice of anthropological collections of skeletal remains, which are still in contemporary European and American museums and universities. There are reportedly upwards of ten thousand skulls of African individuals in the possession of European museums today. 

  • Where the stories of King Ghezo and the Dahoman use of skulls in ritual contexts were widely publicized and documented—inspiring...

    Where the stories of King Ghezo and the Dahoman use of skulls in ritual contexts were widely publicized and documented—inspiring generations of writers and artists with lurid fantasies of brutality, savagery, and magic—the story of these skulls—collected in the thousands as ‘scientific’ trophies, no less magical, no less totemic—have at best been erased and at worst served to contrast the ‘science’ of the West with the ‘superstition’ of the continent. 

     

  • Collectively, the tapestries in I Dare Not Appear exemplify the artist’s deft hand in translating histories gleaned through careful research into evocative material form. 

  • Christopher Myers is a multimedia artist and author whose work across disciplines is rooted in storytelling. Myers delves into the...

    Christopher Myers is a multimedia artist and author whose work across disciplines is rooted in storytelling. Myers delves into the past to build narratives that speak to the slippages between history and mythology. His diverse practice spans textiles, performance, film, and sculptural objects, often created in collaboration with artisans from around the globe. In his ongoing series of textile works, Meyers uses appliqué, a technique that appears often in quilting and banner making, and has developed as a tangible union of diverse cultural and visual practices—African, European, and American. 

     

    James Cohan will present a solo exhibition of work by Christopher Myers at their new 52 Walker Street gallery space in February 2022. 

     

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