Runway x Cool Change Contemporary: the hands should have no peace

The fourth Runway Journal x All Conference Conversation comes from Cool Change Contemporary, situated on the unceded lands of the Whadjuk people of the Noongar Nation.

Cool Change Contemporary asked writer Stas Julien-Martial to respond to the Perth Festival exhibition the hands should have no peace (Cool Change Contemporary, 19 Feb – 18 Apr 2021).

I start with Chiluba Young’s images in Gallery 1
I know black women dancing and black love
I grew up with black women dancing in black space
I know tension                 unleashing
and how that is different to a white body moving in a white space

a year ago, I bought a t-shirt that says
‘marginalised bodies moving is power’
I think about this every time I move in a rave

I end with Leila Doneo Baptist picking dragon fruit with long fingers,
pulling lychees out of their cases
                 this, too, I know
my sisters and I at the base of the lychee tree in my grandparents’ yard
a basket at our feet, long fingers grabbing,
reaching for all that is out of reach

and in-between it all I walk:
black,         used         to         be         woman;
white-passing, non-binary human,
knowing very well of the loss and grief Toni Morrison tells us of in Sula 

in the video capture of Pony’s work
I see the throat releasing all the yearning
but the throat is that of the string
and the yearning is that of broken glass and porcelain

if anything, I know how grief sits
its gait ever changing

sometimes, it is hard backed,                 stiff,
and sometimes it is curled to the mouth of the pillowcase
teeth clattering and begging at it to open

if anything, I know how grief decides to move with you
swaying at the kitchen island together like a well-crafted dance

it makes sense to build galleries out of it

a gallery mostly silent except for
Doneo Baptist’s iPhone ringing out radar at unknown intervals
and the smashing of what looks like precious things by Alexander Turner, Kelsey Diamond, Sage Pbbbt and Aisyah Aaqil Sumito

but they are not loud nor disruptive
you are left to quietly ponder Andrew J Williams and Jade O’Sullivan’s artworks
consider sovereignty:
                 not ceded to O’Sullivan
                 explored by Williams as a part of the personhood we embody when living on stolen land
                 and for Claudia Nicholson we map a landscape with her
consider colonialism                and how it can be replaced with a dream

how that,         too,         is also a grief to reckon with

how white fellas and non-Indigenous peoples

stretch themselves across a land, 

a land ‘in-filled and concretised’ [2]

and we can love Country, step lightly, show up for the fight,

but the land is still what it is (stolen)

and we are still trailing fingers through the same Derbarl Yerrigan,

pulling fruits apart with those same fingers,

holding the string that breaks the glass

moving them lightly through the air in a dance

because the hands shouldn’t have peace

they are a tight fist we hold in the middle of the street

taking time in Cool Change Contemporary I am struck by how well curated grief can be
how we can adapt the landscape to hide what we don’t wish to shake off
how similarly, there is no shying away from the bitterness,
how Morrison writes, ‘it was not a fist-shaking grief they were keening but rather a simple obligation to say something, do something, feel something’ [3]

the hands should have no peace allows for a solemn quiet and a muted anger,
one that can be sat in and held on to

it questions colonialism,         begs us to consider owed sovereignty;         the black woman who is allowed joy;         the unabashed voyeurism of media; and which bodies are allowed to take up space and where

it asks the gallerygoer to take a deep breath                         and release