In 1932, the Irish writer George Bernard Shaw published The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God. In it, Shaw’s Black Girl, newly converted to Christianity, takes literally the invitation to “Seek and ye shall find me.” Armed with a Bible in one hand and a knobkerry in another, she sets off on a journey to find God, in order to ask questions about the Old Testament that she cannot let go of. Two years later, the journalist and author Mabel Dove (who used the pseudonyms Marjorie Mensah, Dama Dumas, Ebun Alakija, and Akosua Dzatsui) critically responded with her own literary adaptation. The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for Mr. Shaw was published as a newspaper serial in The Times of West Africa. With a tennis racquet and a copy of Shaw’s book in hand, Dove’s more “modern” Black Girl embarks on a journey to find Shaw. As the September 14 and 15th issues of Times are missing from the archive, the ending of this confrontation has been lost to history. Nevertheless, the filmic installation proposes another, futuristic and speculative science fiction. Onuoha´s Black girl sets out from a distant future in which archives have been destroyed to find Mabel Dove and ask her about the ending of her story. On her journey, like the other Black Girls before her, she meets various characters who try to dissuade her from continuing on her search, but ultimately finds a way to time travel and meet her hero from a century earlier.
Gently and on many levels, Nnenna Onuoha unravels the stories and questions that the three Black girls ask themselves and others, and the categorizations they encounter. In the exhibition, Onuoha pays respect to Mabel Dove for her work, by collating archival prints of Dove’s journalistic articles and compiling her serial publication Adventures of the Black Girl as an illustrated book. The artist invites us to immerse ourselves in her research and storytelling of the Black Girl, to learn from experiences and their historical contexts and also to familiarise ourselves with the prolific work of one of West Africa’s pioneering feminist writers. She envisions a world where injustices are fought together, and where experiences with structures of discrimination are acknowledged and made visible. The future is full of film grain, recognition, warmth, and virtual energy. But it is also a future that we build together – by questioning critically, seeking dialogue, and finding answers.
Curated by Linnéa Meiners
