“Subconsciously, Take Me to the Water is a reference to the negro spiritual,” Ayana V. Jackson explains, unpicking the multi-layered title for her recent exhibition with Mariane Ibrahim Gallery at its Chicago space and at Paris Photo. “But consciously it’s simply setting us up on the journey that we’re going to take.” A journey - in many ways - into the deep.

Over a decade-long career, Jackson’s photographic and performative works have navigated concepts of colonialism, the body and the role of photography in constructing identity. Her latest series, in a departure from exploring “lived histories,” sees the artist explore the mythical realm. Jackson summons up water spirits from across the African continent and beyond as Mamiwata, Yemoja, Olukun, Kianda and Mame Coumba Bang float and dance across the walls.

Marking another first, the celebrated artist has collaborated with two designers (Rama Diaw from Senegal and Mwambi Wassaki from Angola) to clothe her mercurial subjects - each one performed by the artist herself. Some of the resulting costumes will be displayed alongside Jackson’s works at her major exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, next autumn.

Alongside water spirits, the creation myths of African American musicians like The P-funk and Sun Ra have also been sources of inspiration. Most prominent is the mythology of the 80s techno pioneers Drexciya – “The techno began in Detroit,” Jackson asserts. Like the Afrofuturism of Sun Ra, Drexciya’s narrative sought to reclaim and rewrite the terrors of the Middle Passage. The band's members, Gerald Donald and the late James Stinson, believed themselves to be the descendants of pregnant women who either jumped or were thrown overboard the slave ships. Able to breathe through the embryonic fluid of their mother’s womb, the children were born able to breathe seawater. They thus populated an “aquatopia’’ at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, one “consisting entirely of humanoids that survived the transatlantic slave trade,” Jackson explains.

A Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship enabled Jackson to explore the Drexciya narrative alongside the mythology of African water spirits, particularly those originating in countries impacted by the slave trade such as Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, Benin, Cameroon, Angola and the Congo kingdom. Depicted as ocean dwellers who collect or imbibe the flotsam of the sea, Jackson’s characters are adorned in the detritus of trade: physical, intellectual, ephemeral. “If they’re coming from the deep, how would they fashion themselves?” she asks. “What would have been on the boats? What could have capsized? What could they have got?”

Darker than that, they interact with the decay of the slave trade, from material to human. “The fundamental ecosystem of the Atlantic Ocean - the coral, the fish - would have been transformed by the triangular slave trade,” Jackson reasons, considering how these bodies might have been accepted by the sea. With this, and the excess of plastic that adorns many of her deities - are the works consciously ecological? Perhaps. “For me the project is as much about African traditional mythologies and religious iconography, as it is about this relationship that we as humans have to the water,” she offers.

The mythical beings on show are conflations or re-imaginings of the spirits, imbued with Jackson’s own personal mythology. It’s a deliberate choice, a way to highlight the often diluted understandings of African religions by self-facing African Americans. “My dad played West African music and dance for schools around town - stuff from Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana. My family tried to give us some sense of our African-ness without any real understanding or tradition to call from,” reflects the New Jersey-born artist.

It is the politics behind this childhood knowledge which motivates the series: “Why can I cite Greek and Roman mythology, but I was led to believe that all belief systems and religious embodiments and spirits which came from a place with people like me were evil and demonic? There is something very unfortunate about the black body in this country being denied the chance to relate to the spirit, and to relate to their own mythologies. I want to know as much about to Kianda as I do about Neptune and Poseidon - and want y'all to too! All ancient peoples have some relationship to respecting the water as the source – it’s only the young civilisations who don’t have enough memory to consider the elements to be divine.”

Regardless of how you deal with these other realms and beliefs, she concludes: “The biggest takeaway is that we somehow understand and respect the life force that we’re given through the water - the impulse, since the beginning of time, to respect that which is 70 per cent of our body.”

Words Emma Gilhooly

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Published on 05/12/2019