This book furthers the reflection that was given form in the exhibition Blues Klair, a site to test History in terms of the present. A series of essays probes the enduring presence of colonialism as well as of alliances and cultural crossovers across time and space through the filter of the colour blue.
A poetic, formal, rhythmic, and discursive immersion in the colour of history, Blues Klair attempts to elucidate Western colonial modernity's urges to conquer, classify, and immortalize. Numerous illustrations and several new essays revisit elements of this exhibition that examines three journeys of exile at the end of the 1960s: African-American, European, and Caribbean. Voices, sounds, and shapes calling for an exile blues, poetics and politics that are dedicated to the harmonics of difference.
Published following the eponymous exhibition at Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal, in 2018.
Vincent Meessen (born 1971, Baltimore, lives and works in Brussels) is interested in the influence of realism and colonial rhetoric on the development of Western modernity. Through the use of various media (video, installation, prints, music and others) he re-animates hidden narratives and traces of the colonial. Meessen questions the operational capacity of interpretation, refers to the friction between fact and fiction and researches the potential of the speculative narrative, both in his work as an artist and in his para-curatorial activities.
Edited by Vincent Meessen and Michèle Thériault.
Texts by Corinne Diserens, Eric Fillion, Harmony Holiday, Gylan Kain, Vincent Meessen, Matthew Quest, Michèle Thériault.
