IDOL

Idol shines a radiant blackness. Using the human form and the photographic medium, this series of portraits by Malick Welli features a convergence of distinct but related iconographic registers of Black Muslim life. They consist of a reference to the once enslaved companion of the Prophet Muhammad, Bilal, whose voice called the early community to prayer. Another reference conjures the firebrand orator Malcolm X whose images speak of Black self-possession and self-determination. And yet another reference is that of a Senegalese tradition of picturing religious leaders, or marabouts, in homes, on the street, and even through talismanic ornamentation on the bodies of followers. The resulting composite, and the use of an exaggerated monochromatic contrast, framed by an iconoclastic title poses a question: What if God is Black? And if so, what manner of seeing, of regard, of beholding and being held would be required of the Divine that is Black?

These are no idle questions, but provocations against a religious imagination that would erase the Black presence in Islamic history by the spiritual bypassing of the insistence of a color-blind faith, the fetishization of exceptional Black Muslim personalities as tokens, or even the Islamophobic accusation of a cosmic anti-Blackness. Instead, Welli, recalling a Prophetic saying, offers the hand, the voice, and the heart as symbols of a timeless serenity anchored in agentive autonomy. Such tender, prayerful gestures, offered by and directed towards the subjects of the work, establish intention, a human capacity of the highest order. This universal theme is paradoxically made to speak through interpretations of the specificity of Arabo-Islamic dress -- the immaculate white thobe of a contemporary but neoclassical Arabian style, or the tasseled tarboush of Ottoman-inspired modernity, or the unassuming kufi plainly knitted with the outlines of the black stone Kaʿba at the center of Muslim spiritual geography. Elsewhere, the downward gaze of a covered girl might be mistaken as a humbled looking way when in fact the luminescence emanating from her face reflects a looking toward the light of the Book. The visual effect of these aesthetic choices make the Black subjects centered in this series beam beyond time and place. 

Text by Wendell Marsh