Paul Maheke.

Though many of us might have first encountered Paul Maheke’s work through his body of performance and dance, the artist’s early practice is largely comprised of drawings and wall-based works. In one of his six drawings from the series Le fantôme (2011), a pair of eyes appear softly drawn within the frame of an otherwise mostly empty white sheet of paper. Studded with an iridescent pigment made of nacre, these eyes piercingly assert a presence despite highlighting a missing face, creating the possibility for the rest of a being that, though whose outline is hidden or absent, seems to be nevertheless hauntingly there.

Across various forms and artistic disciplines, Maheke has sustained a long-term exploration into the ways that marginalised bodies, narratives and histories are made visible and invisible. Resisting a probing of identity that sits solely within the framework of identity politics, Maheke’s trajectory has continuously been channelled through spectral sensations. The artist has called in ghosts, spirits and non-human beings into his works to invite a re-orientation to the way that we, the audience, are able to perceive; which is to say, to reframe the way that we are able to see, feel and listen. In reconfiguring the sensible, Maheke seeks to shift the dominant systems of discourse production and understanding that heavily depend on representation, visibility and legibility as the ultimate forms of truth, value and/or power. Instead, the artist nurtures the formation of a self through a state of in-betweenness; one where esoteric, spiritual, queer and embodied knowledge(s) help Maheke garner the potential for prophecy.

For the artist’s first solo exhibition in an institution in France, at Triangle in Marseille, Maheke invoked OOLOI, the third sex figure among the extra-terrestrial Oankali from Octavia Butler’s sci-fi trilogy, Xenogenesis. This fictional – yet, for all purposes here, real – entity infused the space with a heightened sensory field; one in which words, light, sounds and even subtle movements nodded to its invisible presence. Of particular sensory effect was the waving of sheer scarlet curtains that hung floor-to-ceiling across the vast expanse of La Friche Belle de Mai. Partitioning and dividing a physically vacuous room of the former tobacco factory, the curtains created a depth of field that blurred vision. Maheke’s own body appeared and disappeared through these curtains as part of Sènsa(2019), a performance that saw the artist moving across the space, making himself at times as faintly visible – yet as palpable – as OOLOI. Both through his strategies for (dis)appearance and the seemingly improvised nature of his movements, Maheke’s Sènsa undoes the Western canon’s efforts of devaluing the transcendental by insisting on what is felt over what is seen; by being trusting of what the body and mind know, over what it has been asked to learn.

Diable Blanc (2019), the title of Maheke’s second solo exhibition at the Paris-based gallery Sultana, similarly sought to dispel invisibility as being synonymous with absence, instead of calling on the occult to take up space. For Possessed, the artist revisits some of these works. Here, 3D laser-etched drawings in glass cubes depict devils rendered in the style of European Symbolist painting; their very tittle dis-associating their angelic, frail and innocent ‘nature’ from their diabolical, powerful and consequential forces. The barn owl – a recurring symbol in Maheke’s practice – also makes an appearance, and with an equal reparative purpose. Believed to be a messenger of untold stories, the barn owl bears with them wisdom and knowledge, bringing into light what is all too often left in the dark.