Beschreibung
Kensise Anderss work grapples with the reality of Black peoples lives. Born in Haiti, she was adopted by a German family when she was two. After a difficult childhood, with stints in a psychiatric institution and a boarding school, she eventually found art as a medium that lets her work through her experiences. She uses the crochet needle to create masks with which she ironically appropriates white identities and play carpets that show the world of her childhoodapartment blocks, streets; the hole, as she calls this environment. She also arranges crocheted threads on the canvas as though they were brushstrokes. One series of pictures is dedicated to a Black doll; another, to naked female bodies, including the artists own, with references to Courbets "LOrigine du monde" (1866). The works are acts of resistance to the prudishness of whites. Black dolls became popular in this country during the colonial era and never quite went away, like the racism in our society and in our heads. Anderss weapon against that racism is the crochet needle, which she wields patiently and with flair as well as the necessary radicalism.
