A shimmering xerographic map on nine vellum panels caught my eye as I entered Jean-Ulrick Désert’s monographic exhibition “Conspicuous Invisibility” at SAVVY Contemporary. The Waters of Kiskeya/Quisqueya, 2017, centers on a devised visualization of the Caribbean islands and surrounding oceanic contours, infused with detailed drawings of flora, fauna, Creole spirit entities, and colonial vehicles. Each of the islands is marked by a number, as in a colonial survey, but in lieu of an imperial taxonomy, the artist constructs his own legend. This Glissantian urge to resist easy classification presents a lens through which to see the Haitian-born, Berlin-based artist’s wide-ranging oeuvre. Two single-channel video works, BLING and GLORIA, both 2017, part of Désert’s plan for the unrealized Haitian pavilion at the Fifty-Eighth Venice Biennale, similarly imbue stereotypical representations with complexity. In GLORIA, a hole within a shelf of hardcover books reveals the open mouth of a Black figure contorting in hunger. A hand reaches out to feed the concealed body a selection of German meats, juxtaposing the illusion of sexual freedom in Berlin with the violence faced by racialized bodies seeking to access European economies of resources and desire.
Featuring works from 1997 through 2023, this exhibition is part of the Wi Di Mimba Wi commissioning prize for artists of color based in Germany, launched by SAVVY and AKB Stiftung, of which Désert is the inaugural recipient. Exemplifying the need for such a grant, the new commission The Archive/ a work in progress, 2023, offers one of the most meaningful uses of extended reality technology I have encountered recently. It extends the motif of the cosmological chart from Sky Above Port-au-Prince Haiti 12 January 2010, 21:53 UTC, 2012, through a mobile app that conjures detailed 3D experiences of five Yoruba sculptures locked in the vaults of the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin. In seeing the “ghosts” of these plundered objects against the bedazzled bloodred map of Sky Above Port-au-Prince, I couldn’t help but mourn the extent of all that has been looted and lost or rendered visible and invisible.