but tell it slant: Zadie Xa’s more-than-human time

Essay for Zadie Xa’s exhibition catalogue, House Gods, Animal Guides and Five Ways 2 Forgiveness
Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2023.

Excerpt from the essay:

At this point, one may be keen to ask (and Zadie Xa certainly does), what are the stories we tell ourselves about past and future and how do they make sense of our being-in-the-world? And where do they come from? Who has told them and what projects can they subtend, or indeed what wounds could they heal? Often diffracted through the prisms of myth, folktale, legend and speculative fiction, Xa’s environmental and social consciousness, across species and beings, shines through in vivid palettes. In Whitechapel’s galleries, Xa’s paintings and sculptures resonate with the ghostly presences of paintings and sculptures that have shared the same space but at another time, as birds coexist in a landscape by singing at different frequencies. If we step into the artist’s deep-time and simultaneously timeless paradigm, those works are still here, co-present, in dialogue. Xa’s overlooked goddesses and marginalised shamanic practitioners – endangered lives, human and more-than-human, from this dimension and beyond it – all are honoured and find agency in her installations: they greet us, they watch over us. But also: they watch us, as we them. They remind us that all life finds its meaning in death and transformation as it does in self-determination and affect; that all life is relational and bound to practices of attention and mutual responsibility. That time may sometimes appear as a line, but the time of myth and story is ancestral, present and speculative, and all at once, because myths are guides, not events. They are invitations. 

From Sumerian poetry through to Greek goddesses, in the interstitial spaces between the lines of creation myths the world over – we intuit agricultural practices, social structures, ways of making sense of the weather. So many stories, in one way or another, are about the weather, after all, or about death and ancestors – that is to say, about life in its perennial reconfiguration. And besides, aren’t those (the weather, death) also already one and the same – haven’t we been mineral, and so rain, and so mountain, at some point or another? Across Xa’s canvases, colours and sounds journey, with the eye and the ear, from dawn to dusk. Again: outside of time, or in eternal time, isn’t it always dawn to dusk and then dawn again?