“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
-W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
Torn Asunder is a means to reconsider the Black male form and charge it with introspection, meditation, prayer and what is lost between. Utilizing film photography, the ‘double exposure’ and prose, this body of work seeks to challenge the subject-position of Black men and soften the hard exterior we are socialized to understand.
Torn Asunder uses a queer eye and lens (not as a sexual desire), but as a means of opening new possibilities outside the hetero-white-christian-cis-able-bodied gaze to pierce the veil and open the meaning of maleness and blackness while maintaining the integrity and humanity of its subjects. What happens when we are able to experience the nude Black male form not as a fetish object, but as a map to freedom and revolution? What new worlds exist when we acknowledge the fullness of humanness in a world that seeks to reduce us to sexual objects full of wrath and carnal desire?
Torn Asunder is a speculative question from a queer vantage point: how can the Black male body, too, offer cartographers to freedom? How do we cast aside the things that bind our humanity? What exists in this liminal space of revolution?