Like dragonflies in amber, Ma#hew Angelo Harrison’s polished blocks of transparent resin are time capsules of a sort. !ey populate the artist’s first solo exhibition in Europe—featuring all new work and his most ambitious project to date—where the personal and ancestral collide with the historical and political. Lumi- nous prisms of varying opacity (some tinted, some clear) encase wooden African e"gies, ceremonial masks, long-handled spears, or, in a single spectacular case, a nearly five-meterhigh totem with a head at its base. Hailing from the cultures of Bambara, Dogon, Makonde, Senufo, and others, most are a#ributed to unknown makers and were bought by the artist from European secondary market dealers selling on the internet. !e digital trade routes that these objects traveled—contemporary versions of those that once carried enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean— interest Harrison, just like the transnational transactions, dispossession, and violence that the circulation of these objects chronicles.
!e interruption of this tra"c by the artist is central to understanding his practice, as is the recirculation of the artifacts in an a#empt to complicate how we think about the colonial project and track its enduring legacy in the twenty-first century.
!e exhibition opens with a clear resin block containing a mid-twentieth-century mask from the Dan tribe, its gouged eyeholes and tendrils of hair floating amongst air bubbles, appearing to be submerged in water but miraculously breathing. For now. Entitled Bated Breath, the sculpture summons another time and place, traditions and rituals far from the US where the artist made it or Europe, where it now stands. Yet, it also eerily portends a moment when the words “I can’t breathe” have become a rallying call. Equally, Reservoir Master—presented at some distance behind Bated Breath and containing a Dogon Nommo figure with its hands up—recalls the gesture signaling submission to the police, now also doubling as an iconic protest gesture in the struggle against continued police killings of unarmed people of color. Like any time capsule, Harrison’s objects speak not only of the past but also to the present..
Sca#ered among these are blocks that envelop workers’ protective gear or labor union para- phernalia—some dating from the last major US United Auto Workers (UAW) strikes of the 1990s. !ese may not be the spoils of conquest and colonial rule, but they are Black relics of another sort—born from African-American labor and collected by the artist’s own mother and her union colleagues. !ey underline the critical intersection of colonialism, low-wage labor, and technology at the core of Harrison’s concerns..
Among his prismatic forms are those cut into stacked segments or etched using a CNC router (computer-controlled milling machine) to create surfaces and cavities with no less complexity than a car’s engine block. So it is with Bodily Study: Inverted W, in which the gloves of a worker seem so mangled by the cuts of the CNC router that they are hardly recognizable. Or, Single Mother (Divided), in which the artist’s own mother’s unionembossed bomber jacket encounters similar treatment..
African artifacts face such cuts and deformations, too. Observe the resin-embedded wooden mask in !e Navigator or figurine of a boy in Touched By an Angel, each rendered partly illegible by the mechanical hive of cylindrical holes and raised nodes surrounding

Opening weekend with free admission :
June 3 – 6, 2021

mpefm SWTITZERLAND art press release