Michelle Eistrup: DIKENGA – Four Faces of the Sun

Artist’s Description:

“Michelle Eistrup’s Four Faces of the Sun (2023) is a richly layered work centered around the ideology and symbolism of the Bakongo religion and the Kongo cosmogram, known as Dikenga. This large-scale multisensory installation builds upon Eistrup’s earlier work and her extensive research and interviews with renowned scholars, cultural anthropologists, and art historians. Here, she implements visual, sonic, and kinetic elements in a four-channel video installation that brings the spiritual language and power of Nkisi objects to life.

Stolen from Africa and dispersed throughout Western ethnographic museums, these artifacts (and what they represent spiritually) are also directly connected to the stories and heritage of African Americans living in the southern United States. In a continuation of Eistrup’s ongoing history lesson, she explores entangled colonial histories through a pared-down visual language that combines movement, dance, and music to convey themes ranging from respect and sorrow to honor, joy, and remembrance. The spiritual significance of Nkisi objects thereby comes to life visually and musically. With dance and movement at the core of this work, the wider implications of the movement of Black bodies takes on multiple layers of meaning—through history, across oceans, and between geographies.

As is often the case with Eistrup’s interdisciplinary approach to the shared cultural history of the Black Atlantic, Four Faces of the Sun connects bodies across geographies through objects, movement, and sound. The dramatic poses of the dancers, conceived in direct response to the Bakongo gestures that are symbolized in Nkisi figures, create a strong visual impact against the brightly colored red, yellow and blue backdrops. The work translates to a powerful visual reminder of the direct link between the capture and containment of African bodies and the theft and looting of African artifacts during the colonial era. One can almost hear the gentle whisper of ancestral voices in an extended scream from one side of the Atlantic to the other.

Positioned here, in the American south, on the Fisk University campus, at the very library that houses the original printing plates of W.E.B. Du Bois’s seminal book The Souls of Black Folks, the work takes on additional nuance. These dancers are not simply performing, they are part of a crucial transition from passive observer (of a distant colonial past) to active participant (in a forceful decolonial strategy). As they move across the external facade of the Fisk University Library, they activate and mark a historical site, through gestures and movements that are ultimately linked to the forced displacement of Black bodies from Africa, across the Atlantic, and to the Americas.”