Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, ONE WALL A WEB, 2018

‘One Wall a Web’ gathers together work from two photographic series, ‘Our Present Invention’ and ‘All My Gone Life’, as well as two text collages all made in, and focused on the United States. Through a mixture of writing, portraiture, landscape, and appropriated archival images, the book describes quotidian encounters with fraught desire, uneven freedom, irrational fear, and deep structural division, asking whether the historical and contemporary realities of anti-Black and gendered violence – when treated as aberrations – do not in fact serve to veil violence’s essential function in the maintenance of “civil” society. The book traces a chronological path through the two series, concluding with an extensive essay that explores resonances between questions of black life and the strange ontology of the photographic image.