“This is how we’ve heard it: During slavery, there was hardly anything to eat. They would whip you until your ass was burning, then they would give you a bit of plain rice in a bowl. And the gods said, they said that this is no way for human beings to live. The gods would help them. ‘Let each one go where he may.’ So they ran.” —From the oral history of the Saramaccans
Welcome to the dense and self-reflective conceptual world of 34-year-old multimedia artist Ben Russell, an assistant professor in the School of Art and Design at UIC who this month is enjoying locally the sort of recognition he’s already enjoyed at festivals and museum shows elsewhere in the U.S. and abroad. He’s the featured artist at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s 12×12 emerging-artist series, and for the rest of this month his latest short, “Trypps #7 (Badlands),” runs there in a site-specific installation. This Saturday at 8 PM, the museum will screen all seven parts of his “Trypps” series (65 minutes total), which Russell has described as “an ongoing study in trance, travel, and psychedelic ethnography.” These range from the deconstruction of a reel from the 1979 film Richard Pryor: Live in Concert to drastically slowed footage from a Lightning Bolt concert in Providence to a single, static shot of an Arabic sign above a much larger, pulsating neon sign reading happy.
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Let Each One Go Where He May was filmed in the Republic of Suriname, a former Dutch colony bordered by Guyana, French Guiana, and Brazil on the northeastern coast of South America. The film’s two main characters, the brothers Benjen and Monie Pansa, come from a remote village called Bendekonde populated by a tribe known as the Saramaccans, the descendents of colonial-era slaves. In the 1600s, some of these slaves, who were of West African origins, began to escape, fleeing into the jungle and along the Suriname River until they’d outrun their captors and could stop to build settlements.
The issue of the ethnographer’s controlling eye and his subjects’ relationship to it would crop up in Russell’s work again and again.
“It might have been a bit naive of me,” Russell says, to expect that it would be a good experience for all involved. Instead, he ran up against some of the same troublesome cultural dynamics he evokes in his work.
Through 9/27, Museum of Contemporary Art, UBS 12×12 Gallery, 220 E. Chicago, 312-280-2660, mcachicago.org, $12, $7 students/seniors, members free, Tuesdays free.
Trypps #1-7 Sat 9/18, 8 PM, Museum of Contemporary Art Theater, $8, $6 members
Let Each One Go Where He May Sun 9/19, 8 PM, Cinema Borealis, 1550 N. Milwaukee, 773-293-1447, nightingaletheatre.org, $10.
