Review of Christina Kimeze’s Between Wood and Wheel, South London Gallery
February 2025
Christina Kimeze’s first UK solo show is a disco – candid snapshots of a roller-skating rink blurred with memories of Uganda.
Currently displayed in the main space of South London Gallery are nine suede windows into this neon parade. There is a constant back and forth in each: the presence and absence of its subjects who seem to dip and blur and reappear in the next. We are invited into a ring of paintings to watch them skate around us; sometimes they’re above like a ghost or a bird; sometimes below looking up; palmy glades are banana leaves or carnival umbrellas swaying back and forth and sometimes they are paintings or photographs or prints.
Kimeze’s chalky oil paintings depict vivid fever dreams of a place in-between, where Black relationships to each other and to nature nurture interior structures of community and belonging. With semi-automatic scratches, she paints in whichever sunshiney shade or cobalt the party lights cast them in each moment, and each is applied in line after line after line, clanking together like woodwind and carving out space for the faces and the arms.
The work seems to embody the result, or even by-product, of a tactile, rhythmic process. The touch of suede skin and repeated lacquer gestures evoke the sensory event of its creation – Kimeze transporting us to places past like the smell of the right shampoo or the sound of a parquet floor underfoot. Her rhythmic gestures move away from the intentional creation of a perfect object and towards art-making as an activity – of adding and of taking away in a cyclic gliding motion, of the bodily desire to find pattern in a more playful, and less rigid, mark-making practice. Kimeze’s own body seems to have encountered her canvas, and the situation of this show is an offshoot.
The largest painting and only landscape in the room is Between Wood and Wheel (II). It’s fiery figures overlap like a flipbook, shuttering to reveal a pink-hued harpy taking flight, or perhaps a group of women dancing in canon. Here is the mesmerising archetype of Kimeze’s power: an unshiftable sense of movement. These dancing figures decidedly reject the history of silent European stillness that fashions the guilt pedestal on which the painting typically hangs – in this room, there is no sacred ascendence to mark them different than us.
Moreover, Kimeze moves her female figures beyond subject and object; these are not women from an outside perspective, this is how it feels to be a woman. Whether they are arms or faces or palm leaves or bird wings, these are embodied subjects: they do not pose for us, and maybe they are not individual, colonial selves, but sites of corporeal exchange, gliding through atmospheric hubbub. Through these windows these women are articulated, and become not the objects of our viewing, adoring or otherwise, by the very ambiguity of their presence. Their movement, their soaring, is imperative: for it’s this exhilarating quickness that reminds us that these are not women, these are paintings – the women live and dance and soar and we are them and they are us.
Upon leaving, having watched them soaring from the ground and in all the quiet politeness of a white cube gallery space, I’m left wondering: what is it these walls keep us from?
First image: Between Wood and Wheel (II)
Further reading: Night at the Roller Palace, a poem by January Gill O’Neil
After the birthday crowds thin out,
after the “Hokey Pokey” and “Chicken Dance,”
after the parents have towed their shaky kids
like cabooses ready to decouple
and the pint-sized skaters have circled the rink
like a gang of meerkats spun into a 10-car pileup,
you turn sideways and angle by as “Another One Bites the Dust”
thumps overhead. You give a finger point to the DJ stand
because, in your mind, we are soldiers in the march against time,
grooving to the retro beat while the disco ball shines overhead
cut crystal against rainbow walls.
You glide like Mercury or Apollo Ono
without wings or skin suit, in low-rider jeans
that hug your body like you hug corners,
pass them all on the smoothed-out parquet floor,
worn down by time and rhythm. The trick is
to make it look effortless, remind them that
your quickness is a kind of love. You are the spark
between wood and wheel. And when your cranky kids
hang out by the wall ready to go,
holding those eight wheels by their brown leather tongues,
you give them a wave and keep circling,
Just one more song, you say.
This is your “me” time. It’s all-skate.
You’ve got your whole self in—
That’s what it’s all about.
Kate Butler 