Shakespeare’s Othello, a Black man in a predominantly white Venetian society, navigates love, energy and alienation inside a framework that exoticizes and finally destroys him. For British artist Anthea Hamilton, Othello embodies a projected ‘different’—desired, feared and misinterpreted. Her newest exhibition ‘Smooth You’ at Rome’s Fondazione Memmo takes its title from the play’s closing monologue. On this charged, blood-soaked second, Othello addresses these current earlier than his suicide, saying: ‘Smooth you; a phrase or two earlier than you go.’
Othello: A Play, De Singel, Antwerp, comissioned as a part of Come Nearer: Encounters between Sculptures and Efficiency, 27–28 September 2024. Courtesy Anthea Hamilton and Delphine Gaborit
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of the artist)
In Shakespearean English, ‘gentle you’ serves as an interjection, asking the listener to attend a second as Othello seeks to talk his thoughts. This interjection—poetic to modern ears—underscores Othello’s need for a remaining second of reflection earlier than his tragic finish. His phrases are stuffed with remorse, magnificence and violence; Hamilton channels that emotional ambivalence via her materials selections and spatial composition. Smooth textile works of giants butterflies coexist with chilly, reflective chrome steel. She additionally returns to visible components that characterised her physique of labor, such because the sculptural renditions of legs, primarily based on the outlines of the artist’s personal.
The exhibition continues on the artist’s engagement with Othello from her 2024 piece Othello, a Play. Premiered at DE SINGEL in Antwerp, this stage efficiency was one in every of Hamilton’s most bold explorations of her sculptural strategies. She reworked all components of the theatre—together with stage, viewers, scenography, mild, sound and time—into sculptural supplies enacted by the performers. Right here in Rome, photos from that play grasp, in chrome frames, across the exhibition house. Within the Everlasting Metropolis, the place could foundational components of western society will be traced again to the dominance of the Roman Empire, Hamilton acknowledged the burden of inserting her intuitive aesthetic commentary.
Anthea Hamilton, Leg Chair (Sushi Nori), 2012, perspex, brass, wax, plaster, rice desserts, 81 x 92 x 46 cm. Ph. Douglas Atfield. The Hepworth Wakefield Assortment, Wakefield
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of the artist)
A few of her interjections are weightless. Working with scent designer Ezra-Lloyd Jackson, who makes a speciality of growing perfumes for darkish pores and skin, Hamilton created a scent named Chilly, Chilly Coronary heart. ‘It’s a self-portrait,’ she tells Wallpaper*. ‘I had the sensation that my physique was metallic, not natural, so there are a number of components in it which might be sharp, like menthol and lavender. I don’t even know if that feeling was good or unhealthy.’
Lit incense sticks carry the scent into the exhibition. Hooked up to hazel branches that curl across the partitions, the smoke rising from them echo the branches’ swirling traces.
A big sculptural desk anchors the house, rendered in black lacquered wooden. Produced particularly for this exhibition, it’s lined by a mosaic created by Alice Rivalta utilizing the Rankaku approach—an historic Japanese inlay technique that employs quail eggs to brighten small and valuable objects. Hamilton applies this method to a monumental object, whose performance as a desk is put into query as a few of its components are sure with a Shibari rope. Suspension and stress make the desk into ‘a form of dare,’ as Hamilton places it, asking ‘might you try this once more?’
Anthea Hamilton, Smooth You, Set up view, Fondazione Memmo, Roma © Daniele Mulaioli
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of the artist)
‘The phrases below which I need issues to occur are very particular,’ she explains. ‘I want rigour. However I like to work collectively; the work is that I’ve to search out the best vocabulary, visually or linguistically, which affords the script, or handbook or instruments for one thing to occur in the best method.’
The exhibition turns into a stage the place sensuality and severity coexist. It’s a sharpening of her dedication to disassembling hierarchies of that means via surreal juxtapositions and cultural layering. Which is to say that Hamilton doesn’t makes an attempt to ‘resolve’ Othello, however quite to inhabit spatial, geographical and cultural hybridity—to stage the play’s affective terrain as an area the place race, gender and emotion turn into sculptural supplies in their very own proper, not sure by character arcs, however refracted via the artist’s idiosyncratic visible language.
Anthea Hamilton, ‘Smooth You’ at Fondazione Memmo, Rome till 2 November, 2025
fondazionememmo.it
Supply: Wallpaper
