Ain't Misbehavin', 2022, Video

Medium
Two-channel video installation with wallpaper.
Dimensions
Dimensions variable. Duration: 14 minutes.
Ain't Misbehavin', 2022. Two-channel video installation with wallpaper. Dimensions variable. 14 minutes. 'The Disorderly', A Palazzo Gallery, 2022. Photo: Melania Dalle Grave / DSL Studio
Ain't Misbehavin', 2022. Two-channel video installation with sound and wallpaper. 'FERNWEH', MEWO Kunsthalle, Memmingen, Germany, 2023. Photo: Sebastian Bühler
Ain't Misbehavin', 2022. Two-channel video installation with sound and wallpaper. 'FERNWEH', MEWO Kunsthalle, Memmingen, Germany, 2023. Photo: Sebastian Bühler
Lasana wallpaper, 2022. Dimensions variable.

For the work Ain’t Misbehavin’, 2022, Boyce has re-worked the performance documentation from her exhibition, Six Acts, 2018, to re-stage a sense of reverie and abundance that characterises the other performances of that night by Lasana Shabazz and the drag collective Family Gorgeous (Cheddar Gorgeous, Anna Phylactic, Venus Vienna and Liquorice Black).

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Six Acts was a project that attracted world-wide attention for the take down of a Pre-Raphaelite painting ‘Hylas and the Nymphs’, (1896), by John William Waterhouse held by Manchester Art Gallery.

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In Ain’t Misbehavin’, Lasana Shabazz begins the films in front of a painted portrait of a black male, the first work of art to enter the collection of the Manchester Art Gallery in the nineteenth century. The painting by James Northcote 'Othello, The Moor of Venice', (1826) was originally titled ‘The Moor’ meaning simply ‘The Black’. The anonymity inherent in the title was changed after museum curators discovered that it was a portrait of the celebrated 19th-century Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge, who had a prolific career first in the US where he was born, and then in the UK. 

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Shabazz appears in drag, a performative mode that is often associated with Shakespearean theatre when females were forbidden to publicly appear on stage and, instead, males played female roles. Aldridge, as a performer, was also known to appear as a black-face minstrel – a racist caricature of African Americans typically performed by white actors – he also performed in white-face when he played white characters on stage. Shabazz delves into these complex and contradictory identity formations as he interacts with the invited audience, who are coerced into responding to his uncomfortable prompts. 

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Across both projects, transgressions proliferate. They un-mask and resist binaries, instead releasing historical constraints and conditions, whether that is about the imagined certainties of race or gender or sexuality – and criss-cross between the everyday and the extraordinary.

Wallpaper series

Related theme: Sound / Singing

Related theme: Performance

Related theme: Participatory / Collaboration