Vigil in a Wilderness of Mirrors:A Visit to the October Gallery.

Benin, Congo, Kenya, France, Jamaica, and the UK were all represented at The October Gallery's recent Life Through Extraordinary Mirrors exhibition and, like the gallery itself, it was a pleasant, none too taxing, half hour distraction from the worries of everyday life and a respite from the hectic London streets outside.

Cyrus Kabiru - Kubwa Macho Nne - American Darts (2015)

Not that it was jolly as such. Just that, where politics is concerned, the contributing artists aren't the type to hammer home their message. They're far more nuanced than that. If you're on the side of progressive politics and you consider Boris Johnson's recent landslide as the complete disaster it looks to be, it might be an idea to take that approach too. Calling people cunts, racists, idiots, and morons (even when some of them clearly are all, or some, of those things) hasn't worked - and neither has telling people to "fuck off and vote Tory".

Unsurprisingly enough. You'd think it'd be simple logic that if you want someone to vote one way, don't tell them to vote in the complete opposite way. But that's not the country we live in now. It's a country, by the looks of it, on the slide but it's still a country that's not got it as tough as others. We should try and remember that, before we dismiss Britain as a shithole, there are people that have it a lot worse. 

I'm not saying that the countries, primarily African, represented here are worse places to live. I wouldn't have a clue as I've not visited most of them. I imagine there's a range of lived experiences in each and every country on the list. It's not what either the curators or artists themselves appear to be trying to say either. But they are trying to shine a light on both the pros and cons of a world now so globalised that insular harebrained schemes like Brexit are doomed to failure from the off (though I now believe it has to happen because the damage to democracy if it's not 'done' would be even worse than the damage Brexit should wreak.

Romuald Hazoume - Teruko (2016)

Romuald Hazoume - Fariza (2018)

Romuald Hazoume - Romanella (2018)

Romuald Hazoume - Helcio (2018)

Alexis Peskine - Teireik (2019)

The Internet has seen to that so unless this new government is planning on banning, or limiting, that (you wouldn't put it past them but there really would be a riot if people's WiFi speeds got slower) the world is going to at least feel like an ever more connected place. You can argue with politics with people in Canada and Australia easier than you can ring your mum to wish her happy birthday these days.

Romuald Hazoume (representing Porto-Novo in Benin) uses what I guess we'd call 'found materials' (everyday junk, basically) to create what appear, at first sight, to be of ritual significance or somehow culturally relevant. It seems to me there's an attempt to subvert our gaze. As if Hazoume is saying that by putting something up on a gallery wall (even an old spring, fan or jerrycan) we start to look at it as art. It's an old Duchampian trick but it's been given a sweet Beninese twist.

Better still, for me, is Alexis Peskine's work. Peskine's from France but of Afro-Brazilan/Russian descent and makes portraits of people from the African diaspora (for this show he's focusing on those with their origins in the Congo basin, the world's second largest river basin following the Amazon) using gold leafed nails hammered through stained wood. There's a dignity and depth to Peskine's portraiture that really stops you in your tracks. It wasn't the first time I'd seen his work but I remain as impressed.

Alexis Peskine - Tass Yakar (The One Who Broke People's Hope) (2018)

Alexis Peskine - Tilo Ndin Ngo (2019)

Zak Ove - Skateboard P (from the Lost Souls series) (2011)

Zak Ove - Remix Culture I (2013) 

Zak Ove - Resistor Transistors 4 (2017)

Zak Ove - Resistor Transistors 5 (2017)

Cosmo Whyte - Nkisi (2014)

Cosmo Whyte - Expact (2017)

Both Zak Ove and Cosmo Whyte take a different route. Ove (London, Trinidadian descent) works in film and photography but for Life Through Extraordinary Mirrors he's allowing his sculptor self to come forward. It's a mix of what appear to be mock ups of traditional African masks and more modern diversions like skateboards, record players, garishly coloured ghetto blasters, and model aeroplanes.

Ove appears to have found his groove in the now, understandably, highly lauded area of Afrofuturism whereas Cosmo Whyte (St.Andrew, Jamaica) is interested in the perennial, but more relevant than ever before, question of how does migration affect us. Do we belong to the place we come from or the place we have moved to? Or both? Or some liminal state in between? Is it possible to ever truly shake off the shackles of our colonial past? Not least when there are so many determined to cling to spurious notions of nationalism and exceptionalism.

They're interesting questions for sure, and there's a lot to be explored in that area, an area where the time is certainly finally coming when we hear the stories of those who have lived through those experiences, rather than just read or thought about it (like me) but with just two intriguing pieces in the show it's hard to gauge what, as an artist, he's trying to say. A brief Google image search suggests he's someone worth paying further attention to.

LR Vandy, who is of Nigerian/Irish descent, transforms the hulls of model boats into crude masks and, as with Hazoume, there's something about them that both speaks of ritualistic sculpture yet also gently mocks it at the same time. Or at least mocks the conception of it that people who are not of, or from, that culture have. Of course, the central motif of an upturned boat on its own says something about those that have met watery deaths over the centuries. Either those forced into slavery drowning in the Atlantic or those seeking to escape a war or poverty in the Mediterranean in more recent years.

LR Vandy - Top Brass (2019)

LR Vandy - Blue and White Rivet (2018)

Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga - Oubliez le passe et vous perdez les deux yeux (2016)

Cyrus Kabiru - Kubwa Macho Nne - Ferrari Gasket (2015)

Completing the magnificent seven artists who make up the show are Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga (born in Kinshasa, DR Congo) and Cyrius Kabiru (born in Nairobi, Kenya). Ilunga's meditation on Congolese history is colourful, modern, and very probably makes historical points that go completely over my head but it's aesthetically very pleasing. While Kabiru gives us self-portraits of himself wearing his own fantastical creations. He's both man, superman, and something a little bit silly.

As we all are. Each and every contributing artist has brought something to the party but the show hangs together far better as a whole showing that, once again, we're better together than we are apart. Even if that's not the way we're heading.

Zak Ove - Rumplesteelskin (2017)