Spanning the entirety of the Bermondsey gallery, the artist debuts a new series of architectural interventions, large-scale installations, film works, and archival responses.
Marking the centenary of Malcolm X’s birth and the 60-year anniversary of his assassination, in Gates’s latest exhibition, “1965: Malcolm in Winter: A Translation Exercise,” the artist honours the revolutionary translation and archiving practice of the late Japanese journalist, Ei Nagata, and his partner, Haruhi Ishitani, who devoted their lives to preserving Malcolm X’s legacy following his assassination.
On the heels of his first major solo show in Japan, “Afro-Mingei,” at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Gates encountered Haruhi Ishitani, the caretaker of a prolific collection of documents, images, and correspondence chronicling Malcolm X’s global influence and the transnational legacies of radical Black Power movements across the world. Through the meticulous and careful archiving and translation of Malcolm X’s speeches into Japanese, Ishitani and her partner created new touchpoints and audiences for his message.
In this body of work, Gates builds upon his decades-long interrogation of the truth of Blackness in Japan, a thread he began to unravel when he studied pottery in Tokoname, Japan in the late 1990s. Having received the archive just five months prior to the exhibition, Gates finds a powerful collaborator in Ishitani as he harnesses the archive and Japanese aesthetics to examine the political activity of the Black power movements in the 60s, beginning at the moment of Malcolm X’s assassination.
“I’ve always been interested in how political thought, activism, policy, governance and power take form in the world and how they are realized within my artistic practice”, says Gates. “Nagata Ei and Ishitani Haruhi have provided new form to Malcolm X’s speeches through translation. I hope to both steward this amazing Black Japanese archive and draw from its source inspiration for the creation of new projects and works.”
In this exhibition, Gates continues his artistic investment in the archive as a tool for the liberation and restoration of Black stories and histories. In this past year alone, Gates and his non-profit artistic project on Chicago’s South Side, have completed the digitization and cataloguing of more than 82,000 objects between the Frankie Knuckles Record Collection, the Ed J. Williams Collection of ‘Negrobilia’, and the University of Chicago Glass Lantern Slides. Currently on view at his Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago is ‘When Clouds Roll Away: Reflection and Restoration from the Johnson Publishing Company Archive’, a monumental, experimental exhibition extending the empire of the publishers of Ebony and Jet magazine and reporting on the care that Gates has offered the material legacies of the Black media empire since closing their headquarters in 2011.
For Gates, the Nagata archive demonstrates the substantial care, protection, and activation worthy of historically significant collections. “1965: Malcolm in Winter: A Translation Exercise” is, in many ways, the first act in a lifelong engagement with the contents of this archive.
at White Cube Bermondsey, London
until April 6, 2025