Colored Folks

performance

Colored Folks ( 2001-2) was a collaboration between Oreet Ashery and Shaheen Merali, based on the idea of Ashery becoming a black man, whilst Merali, a white woman. The process of regular discussions around identity and becoming, took place over a number of months. Colour Folks was first performed in Toynbee Hall, where Ashery and Merely where transformed in a room away from the audience over a number of hours by the make up artist and stylist, the late Brixton Bradley.

A live feed was projecting the footage into a monitor in a second space where people where having drinks, socialising and watching the progress. A VJ was mixing live footage from the past few months process leading to the performance and from the performance itself, so sense of time got distorted. Ofica Humana took Polaroid images at every stage and brought them out to hang in the social space. At the end Brixton rolled Ashery and Merali out on chairs to face the audience and the limitation of make up. (see video section)

“ Articulated here is a suggestion that the performance effected more than the temporary switch in the categories of race and gender. Rather, there is a sense of the relinquishing the culturally fixed boundaries of subjectivity – the ‘who I am’ – and release on desire into a movement of becoming that is not attached to an already fantasized and impossible object, but has an uncertain outcome”
Jean Fisher on Colored Folks.

Colored Folks was performed at Artsadmin, Toynbee Hall, presented and included workshops at the ICA, London, the video was shown at the NRLA, Glasgow and the prints were shown at the Centre of Attention show A Man, A woman, A Machine.