Speculations Within and Beyond the Black Fantastic

Text by Olumoroti Soji-George.

Lively yet harrowing, familiar yet distant, Speculations Within and Beyond the Black Fantastic addresses the history of Western photography and the political power dynamics that attempt to pathologize the Black subject – and, by extension, Blackness itself – within and beyond the frame. As the subject of speculation, the Black body has historically been rendered as a diminished “other,” burdened with meanings imposed upon its likeness from elsewhere.

In response to these turbulent relations between Western photography and the Black body, Munsya’s and Smart’s images embrace the fantastical and the speculative. Both artists employ these as aesthetic and liberatory practices to document Black life as it exists today, while envisioning possible realities and afterlives for Blackness – both in this world and those yet to come.

Incorporating Ekow Eshun’s In the Black Fantastic (2022) and the works of Black speculative fiction writers like Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Toni Cade Bambara as points of departure, Speculations Within and Beyond the Black Fantastic scrutinizes the construction of race and the animate and inanimate paraphernalia utilized to reinforce its fictitious nature.

Whether born in the Congo and now living in Vancouver, as in Munsya’s journey, or having roots in Sierra Leone, as in Smart’s case, their practices illustrate the dynamic canon of Black lens-based artists. These artists participate in an interplay of subject matter that merges traditional African and Afrodiasporic folklore, Afrofuturism, and the contemporary state of Blackness. Through this synthesis, these works offer a vibrant, wondrous, and kaleidoscopic vision of Black life that lauds the uses of the speculative, reconfigures notions of Black subjectivity, and envisions realities where Blackness transcends the impossible.

Presented in partnership with The Black Arts Centre.