Kaleidoscopic No. 7: Dior Thiam
on retrieving histories, belonging, and joy!
“we seek beyond history
for a new and more possible meeting”
from "Outlines", unpublished poem, Audre Lorde, 1984
in: Sister Outsider, Age, Race, Class, and Sex, p.123
Leonardo Bravo: Dior so nice to connect with you. We've been playing zoom tag for the last few weeks, but glad to finally have this conversation.
Leonardo Bravo: Part of my interest with launching Kaleidoscopic Projects is to make connections between the arts and culture community I know back in Los Angeles and artists and culture workers in Berlin. So I’m excited to learn more about your work. I thought to start off, just to learn more about your artistic journey and if you were born and grew up here in Berlin.
Dior Thiam: I was actually born in Cologne, not in Berlin. I moved here with my mother when I was five. So just before starting school. We moved at the time with the last of the embassies that moved from Bonn to Berlin after the wall fell, like after reunification. My mother worked as an assistant in the Namibian embassy. Still does. My father still lives in Cologne. He’s from Dakar originally. I attended French schools in Berlin, then started to study philosophy and social sciences in 2012 and rather quickly realized that it wasn’t what I wanted. I’d already studied a lot of philosophy in school so the beginning of uni felt like a lot of repetition in a way. It was more learning the history of philosophy rather than practicing philosophy. I think I always expected it to be a little more practical and it was very, very theory based and very Eurocentric and yep, I just didn't feel it.
Dior Thiam: I'd always painted and drawn but I never really took it that seriously. At some point during my studies I just started going less and less to university and just stayed home painting all day long. So I thought I might as well just do that in university because I obviously do and enjoy this a lot more… laughs.
Dior Thiam: So it was a slow shift into art. I got into Leipzig art school for painting in 2015 and studied there for four years. Over the last year I was trying to make the transfer to Berlin. I spent a few months in Senegal during that time as well. I also realized that as much as art school was different I'd say then other universities, it's also very similar in many ways. There are a lot of structural issues obviously, especially if you want to talk about or deal with topics in your art that are political or decolonial. There's just not much space for that I'd say.
Leonardo Bravo: I certainly agree. I have been teaching at UCLA for the last two years in a department that combines arts and culture from an ethnographic perspective. So a super broad and dynamic approach to culture and world making. The courses I teach, at the core have a built in critique of structural systems, so it’s interesting to have that deep seated awareness that you are working within a site of privilege, and this structural system that represents primarily white supremacy in the
Dior Thiam: United States.
Leonardo Bravo: Yesss! So it's this conflict, this tension. It's almost like a paradox.
Dior Thiam: It's definitely a paradox. I mean, I still find it really difficult to navigate how much I am getting out of it. Like, do I really need to be there? And then in some ways, obviously there's so many advantages and privileges to having access to university at all. Then again I'm thinking there are so many artists that didn't go through art schools and created amazing work. It's not like that's the main disadvantage to having a career as an artist. And especially for me, realizing that over the last few years, I'd say my stepping into a public sphere with my work has not at all been due or much helped by me being in university. It was actually more like a constant struggle to unlearn a lot of what art school “teaches” us and finding all these other spaces and people apart from the institution because I didn't feel like there was any real space for me within it. I'm still trying to navigate that paradox of being in and out of the institution. Feeling a responsibility to change and address things but also wanting to go somewhere else where I feel I can have a bigger impact and stay sane at the same time.
Leonardo Bravo: Since you brought up this notion of invisibility, much of the work that I've done with artists in Los Angeles has involved researching and dealing with cultural and historical erasures, invisibility. Issues that are felt by primarily communities of color that tend to be on the margins and how the arts can bring stories forward that create a sense of agency. My partner shared with me this amazing film Audre Lorde - The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 directed by Dagmar Schultz. I absolutely love that film and started showing it to my students at UCLA. So powerful. I mean, a lot of them were very emotional after viewing it, since it is such an empowering story about centering the voices of women, Afro German women, that up until then did not have the tools or the agency to bring forth their voices and stories. So how do you build, I don't know if you need that responsibility of building, but how do you carry forth that legacy for yourself, in your work, in your presence, just in who you are?
Dior Thiam: Yeah, I definitely do. I think that's been one of the main issues for me to sort out, how to bring that legacy forth. Where is that in me? How am I already carrying that legacy? Obviously because I am an Afro German woman there is a history that I can fall back on and relate to. Especially the Black German women's movement that developed around Audre Lorde has been something very present for me since I was a child. My mother always surrounded and provided me with books and stories trying to give me the tools, give me a language, give me some way to deal with the reality of being Black in Germany and so giving me answers beyond those that she could give me personally. So this history has always been present around me on some level. I obviously had to spend a lot of time to learn about and name that consciousness. To get to that point I had to let go of the feeling of shame and inferiority that is attached to growing up Black here and learning to find some outlet for all of those feelings. That's how I relate to for example May Ayim as someone who found a language that named all of those things. If I feel bad I can go and read this or that poem. And so I feel in that sense connected. And I can't imagine how it must have been to not have that at all. So I'm lucky to have this history to fall back on now because they didn't. That's a really different vantage point.
Leonardo Bravo: It's like standing on the shoulders of those that came before us in both the struggle and in seeking liberation, seeking those spaces for liberation.
Dior Thiam: And in art also. I mainly work in the visual arts, but I write as well and I do some sound, just a lot of different things. To me, also a large part of my inspiration comes from writers. People who found an expression that on the one hand names all of the “big” issues like racism, sexism etc. but then at the same time can kind of go beyond that and not feel responsible for talking about it all the time. Finding an artistry there that transcends all of those -isms and writing a beautiful poem without having to ignore them to do it.
Leonardo Bravo: And it can be simply joy!
Dior Thiam: Exactly. There is pure joy in this. I mean that's one of the main things that Audre Lorde writes: joy in revolution, joy in activism.
Leonardo Bravo: I'm interested in this sense of hybrid realities and that hybridity is embodied within your story. How do you navigate these different facets, dimensions in holistic ways, in beautiful, multidimensional ways? Do you feel empowered or is it always like one side or on the other side?
Dior Thiam: Yeah. Interesting question. .
Dior Thiam: Yeah. I think it's a constant process. I don't think I've really gotten to a point where I feel like I've like dealt with it or something. But also, and I'm thinking about this a lot, the idea of hybridity in general, between identities, between mediums, between subjectivities. The point that I wanna get to; is that I do not want to feel like there are two different poles that I have to navigate between and switch between. But that I am in one holistic space. I guess the difficulty for me personally is what you might call belonging.
Dior Thiam: This notion is not a reality for me. It is not really something that exists in the sense I've been taught to think about it. To be part of a group, meaning to be the same as the other members of that group is something I rarely experience. So to me belonging has always been linked to the possibility or rather impossibility of passing unnoticed, being invisible. Over the last years I've been going to Senegal regularly.I have a lot of family there and since like the beginning of my twenties, I've gotten to know them better.
Dior Thiam: This, and getting to know the country more has made it a lot easier for me to navigate this hybrid space. Before it used to be like I didn't really actually know this other space, but in Germany everybody wants to ask about this other place you are supposedly linked to but that you actually don't know. So how do you navigate that? I found that a lot more difficult than I do now when I actually do know a bit. I now have friends in Senegal, work there, and some kind of life. At the same time, it's still difficult every time to go back and forth. It's still difficult to navigate that difference and in the end to let go of that feeling of missing out on something…
Dior Thiam: Not being complete anywhere. Yeah. I mean this idea of being two people, you're half this, half that. Instead you could also claim that you're completely this and completely that. You're two things, you're not less of one or the other. In anything. This is an approach though that we often have, and in a way of course it's real. I don't speak Wolof for example, I am not a Muslim, I haven't grown up in Senegal, so of course I have a different relationship to the place, and I know less about it than Germany. But claiming an identity for yourself can mean that you don't have to make one complete self out of the all of the little pieces of identity that you embody, maybe you can just exist with all of these pieces next to each other or at the same time.
Leonardo Bravo: I think that's profound. It's profound because it goes back to what we were saying about European philosophy, that it positions this singular universal consciousness and way of being, which is very linear. Instead of a set of multiplicities. This sense that we all embody these multiplicities.
Dior Thiam: I think that's the fascinating thing cuz for a long time I tried to sort of live in this duality that I've been told I have to represent. And this has been extremely frustrating because obviously I am one person. Right. So I'm never gonna be that. I'm not gonna be two people meeting in one body as if was divided into both my parents, right?
Dior Thiam: Maybe to just end this on a positive note, because even as complicated and frustrating as it all can be, I love being able to have this point of view as well. I love being able to touch on “both” or multiple facets of my cultural heritage. I love being able to go deeper into it because I'm allowed to. I'm always sort of on the outside, but also I'm not, because I'm in between it. And so I can sometimes see more. I do believe that!
Leonardo Bravo: I see so much of that in your work. So let's talk about some of the individual series, like The Wet Eyes of The Sentimentalist. I love that title.
Dior Thiam: I finished that series in 2021 for an exhibition at SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin and it was first shown there.
Dior Thiam: It's an ongoing series. The name might change at some point, but the technique and the whole approach is something that I'm getting back into a bit now. It's basically a series of a paintings that can combined as four, two or one image. They are woven into each other. And so each of the images were painted, cut, and then sewn up and sort of woven into each other to make a new image.
Dior Thiam: I washed the canvasses and there was a whole back and forth or maybe circular kind of process. They're all based on ethnographic colonial photographs. Most of them were taken or published by this French ethnographer in Dakar around the turn of the 20th century. They are from those cuts. I think I've been working on that topic or with this material for a while now, trying to find ways to use it, asking myself whether I should and how.
Dior Thiam: I was just generally asking myself a lot of questions about how to represent for example black women but racialized bodies in general, especially in a German context. And whether there was any way I could even represent them at all and show the work without sort of reproducing this dynamic of a certain gaze. Is that possible? I was thinking a lot about context, about how these pictures, how these photographs show real people and how they were looked at and forever inscribed into this exoticized colonial notion of the other, what they were made into by the photograph and whether that was fixed or could be shifted.
Dior Thiam: So I was wondering how visual codes from that time have been reproduced, especially in portraiture because so many of the images of non-white people in Western art contexts are colonial representations which for example are aesthetically linked to criminal photography. I found this very interesting. So I was trying to discern these modes of representation to see how can I shift them. Is there a way to shift them? How can I sort of incorporate the way we look at and into the picture so that the picture cannot be taken out of context and be used for something else. That was, I think my main fear. I've worked with self- portraiture and photography a bit before, and I can consciously decide to subject myself to a certain gaze. But as soon as I represent other people, that added a tremendous responsibility to the act of representing.
Leonardo Bravo: It's interesting because that colonial gaze, I mean, there was no permission given.These people, these are real human beings, they basically became archetypes or objects of the European gaze. But as I'm looking at them, I'm interested in that, I don't know if reclaim is the right word, but in these slippages or a resistance, and it's the way the interwoven images project a sense that all of a sudden you become transfixed by a recognition of subjectivity. There's something that's coming through that's forcing the viewer to really look directly at the subject, and the subject directing the gaze back at you.
Dior Thiam: Yeah, I like that. I think I was definitely conscious of exactly that. Most of the pictures I used are actually these typifying postcards creating archetypes very much based on racist science.
Dior Thiam: This is still something very, very present in that if I represent a Black person, that image can easily be made to represent all Black people and not the individuals themselves. What is a way around that? I was really concerned with exactly that. Nobody needs me to put out another picture that doesn't transcend this. So for me, that was my main issue, if I choose to use those pictures.
Dior Thiam: And to me it was a process of finding the people in the picture, the actual individuals in the picture beyond that representation that I can't change. So within that representation, I looked and found certain people who look back at the camera and you're just like, they see you. The way they look directly back at the camera, at the gaze with agency. They're not only oppressed. They're not.
Leonardo Bravo: There's a level of defiance!
Dior Thiam: There's so much defiance in certain eyes and expressions and this is so powerful if you look at it. To realize, it didn't rob them of defiance. It couldn't. So this is our job as viewers and artists to recognize that. If I think about the fact that I'm showing these works in Germany… I showed those works at Dakar Biennale as well. It was very, very different to show these works in an African context to a mainly Black audience where the gaze is if not completely still largely different.
Dior Thiam: A reason of why I'm in the visual arts, I think comes from an understanding that the image is so powerful. I think it's so powerful in how we see ourselves, how we see each other, how we react to each other. It's an actual real thing that has real consequences. How do you show people and what do you see when you look at them in real life? I think that was definitely really important to me to bring some kind of subjectivity into it. And then also to sort of keep a kind of protection over the actual people, the original material. I mean the protection was in some way painting them and not using the photographs.
Dior Thiam: But also weaving them into each other to me was kind of them protecting each other from view as well. You’re never gonna be allowed to look at them in their entirety because it does not exist. That was sort of my point. Personally that was also something I learned while making the work, it was not necessarily comfortable to do that. This idea of washing the images relates to this and is echoed in the title, in the idea of sentimentality of colonial nostalgia. The title is borrowed from an essay by James Baldwin, where he uses the book Uncle Tom's Cabin to talk about the hypocrisy of sentimentality and about how the sentimental novel and the depiction of violence is, in a Christian ideology, linked to this idea of redemption: seeing pain to understand pain.
Leonardo Bravo: So let's switch and hear about a sound installation you did, Where is That Paradise, which is such a different approach formally to the work we just discussed.
Dior Thiam: I made this work for an exhibition I was invited to at this year’s Dakar Biennale in the residence of French ambassador. It’s this huge villa with a beautiful garden, greener than all the rest of the city combined, and obviously not accessible to the general public. The exhibition was the first time that they opened this space to the public. I was invited by the curator of Galerie Manège of Institute Francais Senegal, a woman I’d worked with before.
Dior Thiam: I was really happy to be invited by her although I had my doubts about showing work context. What does in mean to be in a place like this? It’s not necessarily just a class thing, but of course the relationship and history of France and Senegal is not exactly and easy, digestible one. For me as a European artist having been educated in a French so-called “elite” school in Berlin, being in that space raised a lot questions about how to position myself.
Who am I gonna show my work to, and what do I wanna say here? Also, what am I gonna be allowed to say? I was kind of trying to push those boundaries a little bit and see how far I could incorporate a critique. In the end the work I made relates to all of those questions. The whole exhibition was like a walking tour through the garden. We were eight artists. To me there was this idea of beauty again and how it relates to colonial history, botanical history as control or classification/collection, the organization of space, symmetries, exoticism etc.
Leonardo Bravo: It's that same impulse to classify and objectify the other, but in this case nature is the other, not human beings, and the European or Western impulse to contain it and suppress it.
Dior Thiam: Yeah. So came the idea of exploring the notion paradise in relation to the garden. So the word paradise actually comes from an old Persian word, pairi-daêza, which literally means royal or noble enclosure and later referred to the enclosures and gardens of the Persian nobility. So it was always related to a class thing. I found this really interesting with regards to how this notion of class plays into the idea of paradise? How did the idea of gardens develop from this point on? Especially in countries where there's not enough water this is still a huge question. You have all of these gardens, enclosures and I mean, you kind of have to ask yourself, what is this garden for?
Dior Thiam: It's not like the general people living have access to it as a space. It's a thing of status and it's a thing of beauty, contrived and designed. Those were the questions that sort of guided me. And then, the notion of the other, as you said, was also a crucial point to me because I feel like in all my research, the idea of paradise was always, whatever it meant at that specific time, related to a distance, to somewhere or something other than where or what you are. To an idea of otherness. And then I found this story about Tété-Michel Kpomassie, one of the first Africans to reach Greenland – which he imagined as a paradise. To him Greenland was paradise. That was his idea of paradise. This was just so fascinating, him saying there are no trees, there are no snakes, it’s cold, and that to him sounded like paradise. Whereas to other people, basically everyone from the Global North paradise is somewhere warm,
Leonardo Bravo: Tropical, palm trees,
Dior Thiam: Beaches! Exactly. And then you have someone who comes from this supposed tropical paradise and wants to go to Greenland. So, yes I find fascinating this level of longing for the other as not only related to colonial history or entanglements, but also to just something deeply human. Related to the idea of a garden, I feel it's even more interesting because it represents the longing for somewhere else, but you don't actually wanna go somewhere else. You wanna contain the somewhere else in your garden at home that you can visit and prone while still having all of your “normal” routines.
Leonardo Bravo: Dior, this has been such a fascinating conversation and definitely want to do a studio visit. I'm just so excited keep the conversation going. What I'd love to finish with, and this is interesting for me just recently having arrived in Berlin, what's inspiring you here and what's the community around you? Because from my perspective, it's such a rich arts and culture community and ecosystems here in Berlin.
Dior Thiam: Well, I think to a large part I'm still looking! Like, I'm not sure I could say like I've found my tribe or whatever.
I've definitely met amazing and fascinating people through work. I love it in Berlin for that. Especially because I spent four years in Leipzig before, I love how internationally connected the city is. How so many artists and curators from all over the world meet here and it just moves so much all the time. The discussions are moving. I feel like there's more and more spaces for those kinds of discussions that I'm interested in and for the people that I'm interested in that go and look beyond this country and this city.
And we also have People of Color and histories that are beginning to gain some visibility and that are brought to the forefront. We have some historical figures that we can sort of look back on. Retrieving those histories, this is what’s happening now, obviously not for the first time, but it’s happening on a larger and larger scale.
Even a space like SAVVY Contemporary that now exists and is established would not have been possible 15 or 10 years ago, at least not on that scale. Some positions in German institutions are first being filled by people that are not necessarily German or white. So there is change happening and I feel the community is constantly in the process of changing. And that is exciting!
IG: @dior.thm