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Victoria Adukwei Bulley
VICTORIA ADUKWEI BULLEY is a poet, writer and filmmaker. She is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, and has held artistic residencies internationally in the US, Brazil and at the V&A Museum in London. A Complete Works and Instituto Sacatar fellow, her pamphlet Girl B (Akashic) forms part of the 2017 New-Generation African Poets series. She is a doctoral student at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she is the recipient of a Technē studentship for doctoral research in Creative Writing.

Articles Available Online


On Water

Essay

Issue No. 29

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Essay

Issue No. 29

& we say to her what have you done with our kin that you swallowed? & she says that was ages ago, you’ve drunk...

Interview

Issue No. 26

Interview with Saidiya Hartman

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Interview

Issue No. 26

The first time I encountered Saidiya Hartman, she was a voice in salt., an award-winning play by artist and...

Luke Hart’s Wall, recently on display at London’s William Benington Gallery, is a single, large-scale sculpture composed of a series of steel tubes held together by orange polyurethane joints The tubes at the base of the sculpture are welded together into an elongated S-shape, such that the work curves diagonally across the gallery floor, forcing the viewer to walk around it The welded base also provides the stability necessary for the rest of the sculpture to remain flexible The polyurethane joints make the work to some degree elastic, determining and limiting its movements   Wall, then, is not a wall in the conventional sense of the term The work’s lattice or weave-like structure articulates empty space It is a wall which, like a net, is mostly made up of holes And while the sculpture divides the gallery, setting a porous boundary between the spectator and the world, there is little difference between what is found on one side of the wall and what is found on the other There are further elements of the sculpture that add to its ambiguous status The polyurethane joints, for instance, work to hold the structure together, but there is also a tactile, almost fetishistic quality to the orange rubber, which looks like a tangle of muscle sinew This inscribes the sculpture in a bodily register and lends the work an anthropomorphic quality Like all elastic structures, moreover, Wall quickly settles into a particular position, while also remaining in a state of potential motion The way in which the sculpture pulls itself downwards dramatises its susceptibility to the laws of gravity Entropy might be too strong a word for this movement, but there is an unexpected sense of precarity and instability to the work, a sense that it might teeter over under its own dead weight   In a recent conversation, Hart explained that for him one of the most important aspects of Wall is its functionality At first the word seemed a misnomer It is true that, like a wall, the sculpture gets in the way, filling much of the gallery space, but otherwise its resemblance to

Contributor

October 2018

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Contributor

October 2018

VICTORIA ADUKWEI BULLEY is a poet, writer and filmmaker. She is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, and...

Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s ‘Heads of the Colored People’

Book Review

October 2018

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Book Review

October 2018

Somewhere on the internet is a two-hour video of a lecture by the late writer and filmmaker Kathleen Collins, author of the short story...

READ NEXT

feature

Issue No. 10

What Can an Art Magazine Be?

Orit Gat

feature

Issue No. 10

What can an art magazine be? Today, as the publishing industry reassesses its role in the age of the internet,...

feature

Issue No. 4

Tibetan Kitsch

Evan Harris

feature

Issue No. 4

I first glimpsed the Potala Palace behind the bending legs of a prostitute. She swayed, obscuring a vista of...

feature

November 2016

Hot Rocks

Izabella Scott

feature

November 2016

‘We have received around 150 of them,’ Massimo Osanna tells me, as we peer into four small crates stuffed...

 

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