MOJ OF THE ANTARCTIC. WHITE FACE SCAREY, ANTARCTICA

• 30 X 36in (76.2 x 91.4cm)
• Giclée print
• Created: 2005
• Value: $5,000 - $6,000

MOJ Series

This series was created for Mojisola Adebayo's theatre production, MOJ OF THE ANTARCTIC. Based on the story of Ellen Craft, an African-American slave who, in her search for freedom, passed as a white man. In this portfolio of images the supposedly rock-solid signs of race and gender are rendered fluid. Positioned in a desolately unpeopled all-white Antarctic landscape, every visible signifier of identity cancels out every other one such that the usual binaries we use to understand our world, i.e., white and black, culture and nature, pride and shame, male and female are completely undone. Self-evidently performative in its Victorian garb and its potent contrasts, this series speaks to a larger interest in the liberatory prospects of transness - most free at the very moment it refuses the delimiting binaries our culture offers.

~ Jonathan D. Katz

This image is part of a series that depict Mojisola Adebayo performing white face on the frozen slopes of the Antarctic Peninsula. We had traveled there on an 'eco cruise' in order to do research and make images to be included in Mojisola's one woman show MOJ OF THE ANTARCTIC that uses the story of Ellen Craft as it's point of departure.

~ Del LaGrace Volcano