SYMPTOMS OF A PATHOLOGY
Symbols of purity, class, race, exploitation and enlightenment are explored in Valerie Amani’s Pathological Museum. Writer Jesse Gerard Mpango stepped into a space in which questions about oppression, colonialism and personal identity are probed via installation, video, digital imagery, performance and poetry.
EXERT:
On a wall at the back of Valerie Amani’s latest work series are pictures of humans in bell jars; restrained, gagged, blind folded; held in chiffon, lace, and cling film. Under a dome of glass against panes of muted colour they resemble caged birds, their fragile beauty twice bound by their imprisonment and the absence of things that characterize their freedom. They are enshrined as acts of consequence. Three scenes of misdirected purpose and the kind of derived self-definition that drive the historical and personal vehicles of containment examined by Amani in her Pathological Museum.