Nowing: A Political History of the Present by Anique Jordan

Issue 150

I am a first generation Canadian in a family of Caribbean women. My mother danced in her youth and put my brother and I in folk, drum and Afro-Caribbean dance lessons as children. We were encouraged to participate in Carnival. We had to know and understand the history of the jumbie, the blue devil, the fancy sailor, these characters and the pantheon of masqueraders that are central to old mas traditions were woven into the ways I understand how stories can be performed, how city space can be taken up, how political content and contexts can be masked and offered to a public to manipulate, distort and make new worlds from. It is in this procession that my work is grounded.

Anique Jordan’s installation includes six photographs of annotated newspapers and sculptural silhouettes. The newspaper images are from her hometown Toronto Star and its weekend edition, The Sunday Star. These pictures bear the fullness of Jordan’s commentary in the form of extensive handwritten notes in which she grapples with information consumption and the narratives produced by media institutions. Jordan diarizes her thoughts directly on the newspaper page, speaking back to the headlines and meditating on ideas concerning disposability, grief, and incalculable loss stemming from the COVID pandemic as well as systemic racial injustice and violence. The sculptural works draw their inspiration from Trinidadian carnival, recalling ancestral figures who walk among us, spiritual interveners known as jumbees—or in the Trinidadian carnival context, a figure known as the Moko Jumbie. These protective entities are larger than life, their height endowing them with the ability to foresee danger faster than their human counterparts.

Anique Jordan is from Toronto ON and presently lives and works in Providence, RI.
www.aniquejjordan.com | @aniquejordan

Images © Anique Jordan