In 2005,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/20279/Lyle-Ashton-Harris">Lyle Ashton Harris</a> was invited to teach at New York University’s campus in Accra, Ghana. ‘I fell in love with the people there, the culture,’ says the New York-based artist. ‘And one semester turned into seven years.’ During that time he had an artistic epiphany. ‘I was on vacation in southern Ghana by myself,’ he says. ‘I came across a good dozen fisherman who were using this tarp made out of flour sacks as a shield from the sun. You just have this frisson where something sparks – I saw a readymade. It had salt in it, the texture of the earth and the sea, and it was symptomatic of a lot of my experiences in Ghana, a mixture of high and low. So I bought it from them.’

The patchwork of flour sacks, measuring 430 x 750 cm, appears as the base of the painting Blow Up (Verso) at this year’s Art Basel Unlimited. Completed in 2019, the piece had been a work in progress for years. It began in Ghana in 2007 as Untitled (Blow Up IV Sign Painting) when the sign painter&nbsp;Nicholas Wayo&nbsp;used the tarp as a canvas for a one-to-one painted reproduction of Harris’ wall collage Blow Up IV (Sevilla) from the year before. When it was shown at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona in 2008, it hung in the middle of the room, so both the front and back sides were visible. In 2010, Harris began to manipulate the work to obscure the front and now presents Blow Up (Verso), showing Wayo’s painting of Blow Up IV from the back, the colors having bled through the fabric. In the new work, the slippage of detail already visible between the collage and Untitled has been further blurred. ‘There’s almost an erasure of legibility, but within that illegibility one can still grasp the representational. It’s that tension that I’m interested in,’ Harris says.

Harris’ original montage was a composition of hundreds of photographs and newspaper clippings, many of them sourced from his 2001 photographic essay on racism in Italian soccer for The New York Times Magazine (Harris previously worked as a magazine photographer), interspersed with pictures of the artist’s own earlier works and artworks from the canon, such as Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (1866). Between underwear ads, a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/6731/Jean-Michel-Basquiat">Basquiat&nbsp;</a>painting, and a McDonald’s french fries container, these elements are joined mostly in incongruity, though seen through Harris’ eye for gendered and racial subtexts: how everyone in a stadium audience is white, for instance, and if soccer resembles bullfighting, with the players more bulls than matadors.The dense network of content is organized around a striking centerpiece: an Adidas ad showing a young Black man giving French soccer player Zinedine Zidane a pedicure. Harris had come across this picture in another experience of frisson a few years earlier, when he recognized in it an uncanny resemblance to Édouard Manet’s painting Olympia (1863) of a Black female servant receding into the background of a portrait of a naked white woman. The ad contains the same element of fetishization, though here of white masculinity, accompanied by an unthinking exhibition of racial disparity. In Harris’ Ready-Made (2001) and several other works this image is punctuated with yellow jets of dried semen – always emphasizing and complicating the tensions of racial difference and sexual sameness barely disguised in the original.&nbsp;

When Harris bought the tarp from the fishermen, a different Manet was on his mind: The Bullfight (1864), a work in which the barrier between the audience and the arena forms a kind of grid, reminiscent of both the stitched-together flour sacks and the structure of Blow Up IV. That’s when he had the idea to reenvision the sprawling montage work of cutouts on a unified surface as a painting. The power of Blow Up IV as a sign painting, its ‘incendiary quality,’ Harris says, comes from how the referents are obstructed but their meaning somehow remains. We no longer recognize Zidane, or Michael Jackson as portrayed by Andy Warhol, or Olympia, but can understand the fragmentary images almost completely independently of their original sources. In Blow Up (Verso) the play between the now faceless characters and colors becomes at once static and dynamic. The motif is literally reversed, but the tables have not turned.The new painting also ties the Blow Up series, which evolved through biennials from São Paulo to Seville, to the specific experience Harris had living in Ghana. ‘Sign painting is a long and rich tradition in Ghana, which came to an end around 2010,’says the artist. ‘I was interested in having my work engage that history and simultaneously capture the closure of a chapter of my life. It is a monument on multiple fronts, a historical painting that alludes to shifts in culture that anticipated where we are today’ – both in terms of the relationship between technology and craftsmanship, and the themes evident in the picture, such as the renewed discourse on racism – ‘but also a memento mori of my time in Ghana.’&nbsp;

Dancehall originated in the late 1970s in Jamaica’s most marginalized spaces, particularly inner-city Kingston. Bengolea is keenly aware of her presence within these contexts in relation to cultural appropriation: ‘Only dancers from Jamaica can invent dancehall steps, but everyone can reenact them to spread their spirit. The dancers in Kingston are inclusive and great teachers, eager to share their dancehall culture with foreign dancers and to reach global recognition, often through social media.’ This, among other things, grants the genre its powerful socially transformative function. ‘It is a way of communicating deeply across levels and celebrating life and death – an infinite library of steps, like Babel.’Transformation here also speaks to the body’s capacity to articulate sounds, move, and transcend its own matter. How did dance, choreography, and working with the body’s intelligence come to Bengolea and shape her practice? In Buenos Aires she found a teacher of anthropological dance, Guillermo Angelelli, who was affiliated with a community studying archaic ritual dances from South America and Asia. ‘I learned the dance of the wind from the Altiplano de Bolivia,’ says Bengolea. The three-rhythm dance uses hyperventilation to move at high altitudes, a technique necessary in the Bolivian high plains, which are more than 3,000 meters above sea level. ‘But Buenos Aires is at sea level, so we were hyperventilating more than expected,’ says Bengola. ‘We got into high, esoteric states of mind.’

How images circulate has changed radically between Blow Up IV in 2006 and its reincarnation in Blow Up (Verso) in 2019, and so has the political culture around them. On social media, images are considered a form of behavior or warrant trigger warnings. ‘The only trigger warning that I need,’ Harris tells me, ‘is against thirst traps’ – pictures that are vehicles for desire more than carriers of meaning. ‘I don’t want my images to be thirst traps. My work is meant to quench one’s thirst. Much of what we see online promises so much but in a way that is just a gesture.’When Harris processes his moments of frisson by cutting them up, re-photographing them, or having them rendered by a sign painter, he slows pictures down to demand another kind of attention from the viewer. The issues of race and queerness so present in his works are too enduring to rely on the whims of desire or risk becoming trends. ‘I want images to be able to make people accountable,’ he says. He’s found a way to do it.&nbsp;

<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/20279/Lyle-Ashton-Harris">Lyle Ashton Harris</a>&nbsp;is represented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1263/Salon-94">Salon 94</a>&nbsp;(New York City). In September, he presents Blow Up (Verso) in the Unlimited sector of Art Basel in Basel.Kristian Vistrup Madsen is a writer, art critic, and curator based in Berlin. His work has been published in magazines such as Artforum, frieze, Mousse, and The White Review. His book Doing Time: Essays on Using People (2021) is published by Floating Opera Press.&nbsp;All photos of Lyle Ashton Harris by Peyton Fulford for Art Basel.

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