‘Black Venus’ Opens at Somerset House, London

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Curator Aindrea Emelife learnt the story of the Hottentot Venus from her mother when she was just seven or eight years old.

The name ‘Hottentot Venus’ was used to sell tickets to see Sarah Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman from what is now South Africa who was enslaved by Dutch colonists and toured around Europe during the nineteenth century.

‘At a time when Black women are finally being allowed to claim agency over the way their own image is seen, it is important to track how we have reached this moment,’ said curator Aindrea Emelife.

Emelife’s group show Black Venus at Somerset House in London opened on 20 July and continues through 24 September 2023.

It juxtaposes archival imagery from the late 1700s to the 1930s with 40 contemporary artworks by artists including Carrie Mae Weems, Ming Smith, Lorna Simpson, and South African artist Zanele Muholi.

One of the works that connects most directly with the exhibition’s title is Carla Williams’ self-portrait Venus (1992–1994), in which the artist claims comparison to the Roman goddess of love, beauty, and desire on her own terms.

‘In looking through these images, which span different stages of history, we are confronted with a mirror of the political and socio-economic understandings of Black women at the time and how the many faces of Black womanhood continue to shift in the public consciousness,’ Emelife said.

The show at Somerset House in London was expanded from earlier presentations at Fotografiska in New York and the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD). Tickets are priced ‘pay what you can’. —[O]

Main image: Ming Smith, Me as Marilyn (1991) (detail). Hand-tinted photograph. © Courtesy the artist and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London.