Studio/Chapple is excited to present 'Icyyy Grip', the first solo exhibition in London by multidisciplinary visual artist Kialy Tihngang.
This new body of work connects breast flattening (a niche practice in the artist's familial country, Cameroon, where young girl's breasts are pounded with heated objects to stop early development, theoretically preventing sexual assault) with their own breast reduction through sculpture & video. While posing for pre-procedure pictures, Tihngang thought of colonial photographs of bare-breasted African women & girls. The subjects of these purportedly ethnographic, subtextually titillating images were observed, posed, & dissected in uncomfortably familiar ways.
In 'Icyyy Grip', Tihngang thinks expansively and auto-ethnographically about Black women’s bodies as the skewed and pixellated object. This stemmed from earlier research into enforced bodily modification of Black women’s bodies, from multiple perspectives. She interpolates images of Black women splashing water on their faces, mined from beauty and skincare advertisements. This repeated, exaggerated motif feels evocative of a protective ritual, more magical than breast ironing and more beautiful than surgery. The work also draws aesthetically upon hair relaxer packaging, referencing the first outward time, for many little Black girls, their bodies are modified. In temporally freezing the film’s subjects in moving image and print, Tihngang seeks to trap them in their clean, featureless digital environments, where it’s safe.
'Icyyy Grip' will think expansively about the literal, photographic, and digital capture of Black women’s breasts across cultures, geographies & histories, framed by the changing boundaries of the artist's own body.
