2026 explores the concept of black masculinity in a future African Utopia, providing a counter-narrative to current stereotyped and idealised imagery by challenging heteronormative attitudes towards sexuality and self-expression through fashion.
“Freedom is no fear” - on Kristin-Lee Moolman & IB Kamara
Agnes Grefberg Braunerhielm
The clothes are the thing – the look is the thing – in IB Kamara’s and Kristin-Lee Moolman’s work. And this is despite the fact, or maybe because of the fact, that the clothes actually are “nothing”. Kamara and Moolman sourced the clothes and accessories the men in the photos are wearing from skips and local thrift shops. These are not clothes a designer created with an eye to making relevant fashion. Still, to me the outfits connote the exact idea Kamara and Moolman want them to signify: the future. “2026” is a dream about a utopia ten years on, a utopia where male sexuality, and especially black male sexuality, is free and open to other definitions. These works tell you a story about a world where norms, ideals and prejudice about black masculinity aren’t a prison fenced in by racism and colonialism. This utopia is expressed through and on the body.
“2026 is escapism,” Kamara explains, “It’s all the things I long to be, it’s the black man I aspire to be: expressive, confident, not holding back, regardless of sexual orientation, gender or race.”
And just as the men in the photos are from a space-time that isn’t here (yet), the clothes they are wearing are not treated as though they carry any collective memory, either. The look is post-gender. The purpose of the fashion is not to distinguish a man from a woman, or create an androgynous style; rather it intends to dissolve gender altogether to form a more true idea of masculinity.
Kamara explains his point of view best himself: “Because I often clash with fashion’s conventions, it evokes an awareness of my consciousness.” The clash which these works subject us to create a catharsis in our gaze. It is fashion at its most urgent – demanding that the eye remodel the inner, never-asked-for workings of the brain and how we perceive each other, presenting another reality – one that rejects the immanent constructions of this world. Which is one definition of art.
The men portrayed in “2026” are good friends of Moolman. And though not many of them define themselves as anything other than straight, there is an innately queer sensibility to the photos. If asked to define queer, I would paraphrase fashion scholars Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas and say it is a feeling like being expelled from paradise, wandering the earth looking for a backdoor somewhere that is open. Passing through the door, you realize how falsely we create this world, and you feel an urgency to recreate it, falsely afresh. The words of Oscar Wilde come to mind: “To be natural … is such a difficult pose to keep up.” Instead, queerness and more specifically queer fashion rejects “the natural” to find “a truth that is a matter of style” (Wilde again).
But to be queer is also to be broken. Because society does not talk to you, or about you. Society talks about heterosexuality, and it wants you to conform to it to make you a well-adapted individual. Queer identity on the other hand is about diversity and difference, and it sets out to eradicate the forced hetero-homo binary.
In the Japanese art of Kintsugi, or Kintsukuroi, you repair broken pottery by filling the cracks and fractures with gold. This is what “2026” does to the inevitably broken queer soul. Or at least to mine. I find there the gold that mends the future of being human.
Nina Simone once said: “Freedom is no fear!” “2026” is a place of no fear, photographed in a land just recently plagued by fear. And the bridge between no fear and freedom must be imagination, because to imagine a new future is fearlessly creating one.
