Submitting to the Cry from the Abyss: Opacity, Exorbitance, and a Brief Exercise in the Erotics of Decipherment

by KJ Abudu

We've all encountered the word before; have come across it countless times in exhibition statements, wall labels, catalogue essays, and art reviews—increasingly so in the wake of the World's so-called racial reckoning. We know we're about to encounter the term the moment the theoretician most associated with it is mentioned: Monsieur Édouard Glissant. Like many of the most richly theorized concepts (in the black radical tradition), the word has been called upon by artists, curators, and writers to perform all kinds of discursive labor. Some of the results have been generative—revelatory even—while some, regrettably, or perhaps inevitably, have pushed the word along less textured circuits, right into the heart of neoliberal capital.

Rather than provide an analytic (re)definition or develop an elaborate polemic/diss on the violent misappropriation of this polyvalent term— Opacity —this text is led by an appositional imperative: an unresolved tarrying with the unsubsumable Otherness, irreducible materiality, and ruinous aesthetic excess borne by a constellation of artworks. In honoring the spirit of Glissant's trenchant critique (which, in my view, exudes a poetic generosity that exceeds, without negating, the potency of the diss), this text explores, by way of a paratactic dance, what (anti-)definition(s) such an erotics of decipherment might call forth.

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Roy DeCarava, Man in Window, Brooklyn, 1978. Photogravure. Image courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.
An externally observed man sits by his apartment window in New York. It's 1978. He's topless, slightly crouched over, holding a cigarette in his hand, while a canned beverage rests on the window ledge just by his side. Certain regions of the man's physique—his neck, head, back, and left arm—appear just as black as the lowly lit walls that surround the vertical window frame. Bearing a contemplative posture and sporting a pair of rimmed spectacles, he looks into the undisclosed interior, which radiates a soft glow onto his always already marked flesh. The lone man's sideways-sitting figure desediments into an unstable topography; a polyrhythmic arrayment of silver crystals, their swayed materialization enacting an opulent tonal caress that interrupts the binaric coherence of that all-too-easily settled expression, "black-and-white photography." The emulsive image was taken by Roy DeCarava: romantic documentarian, worshipper of shadows, custodian of the darkroom's alchemical rites. What can be gleaned from DeCarava's visual articulation if not the scandalous refusal of an imperial calculus, set into motion long, long ago, that equates light with life / purity / knowledge / presence, and darkness with death / contamination / ignorance / absence? A master code of cataclysmic proportions. I can almost hear it. Maybe you can too. The quiet, unbounded churning of those deep blacks and misty greys, which remain interminably suspended in a subterranean aria, and gloriously so, lest they be violently brought into the light, into the realm of Transparency, which is to say, the parasitic zone of Being, of Subjectivity, of Law.

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Diedrick Brackens, the revolutionary rite, 2023. Cotton and acrylic yarn. Image courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, Dallas and Seoul.
Another shadowed figure. But this time, there are two. They lean toward each other with a certain balletic grace. Their nearly touching faces suggest the intimate exchange of a kiss or a whispered secret. Flanked on both of the figures' sides are two bloodthirsty dogs, which run toward them with unnerving speed. We've seen this before, particularly in the United States, from slave patrols, to the Civil Rights demonstrations, to the more recent uprisings in Ferguson—the weaponization of more-than-human life to secure the immanently hierarchical, proprietary impulses of the liberal democratic (read: police) state. Yet, the canines' pounces are stilled in Diedrick Brackens's loom-woven composition, pessimistically protracting the inescapable imminence of gratuitous state violence, while optimistically, and infinitely, deferring the realization of said violence. I am more interested, though, in the energetic force field that forms around the hips of these twinned figures. A mystico-erotic conspiracy that transforms the bottom half of their otherwise black silhouetted bodies into vivid red and orange hues. It is almost as if an apocalyptic plot, an insurrectionary scheme, or a revolutionary wish were clandestinely deliberated under this atmosphere of extreme duress. We've seen this before too: a cloistered gathering—irreducibly social and relational—as the condition of possibility for an anticolonial art of creative endurance, for the unfolding of a talismanic swerve.

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Rahima Gambo, Instruments of Air, 2020.
An encrypted poetics of relation formed not only with other (marked) persons but with the land and the incalculably entangled, and increasingly imperiled, ecosystems it hosts. Encryption not for obscuration's sake but as the emergent sign of an Other-philic grammar that evidences the radical decentering of Self, of Human agency, and the illumination of an improvised multispecies ensemble (along with its unruly maps of (extra-)cognition). But let's return to this later. For now, we can see someone walking. We do not gaze at them but rather with them in their errant wandering. Silently carried along, we adjust to the walker's embodied point of view as they traverse a savannah landscape in Burkina Faso's Central Plateau. In this video by Rahima Gambo (the walker in question) we encounter reddened earth, loosely dispersed trees, and some herds of cows along the way. Gambo's hand—at times repeated to form a three-split screen—remains outstretched in front of the jerky camera, fanning out toward the distant horizon as different bronze objects appear on her palm. These crafted objects bear multiple geometric shapes—a spiral, a curve, a triangle, a circle—and are offered to the earthly surroundings as if they were esoteric transmission devices, the smelted ideographic remainders of an ancient pre-capitalocenic script, now buried, lost to memory, which we find ourselves yearning for, returning to, time and again. A fractal. But how? A shape, a sign, a score, presented to us as an image but simultaneously performed as a walking path. Or, perhaps, a bird flyway. A moving image of an image of (cross-species) movement. What if we were to conceive of wandering as a kinesthetic modality of writing on and with the Earth, its destination unknown, unpicturable, unsayable? A perpetual peregrination. Like the wandering of the mind, the pleasure of thinking thought, which takes unexpected winds and turns through the mercurial planes of the imagination. In this interior zone, memories, dreams, impressions, and intuitions might form associative constellations, eventually cohering (always via constitutive exclusions) into formalized chains of cognition that materialize into communicable speech. But what of those other times? Those times where, in the wake of a catastrophe (one which never ends), such impressions emanate, symptomatically, from a present-absent elsewhere, from the field of the unthought? That terribly beautiful realm of irreducible abstraction which anarchically desegregates the negentropic process of sense cohesion.

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Ima-Abasi Okon, Infinite Slippage: nonRepugnant Insolvencies T!-a!-r!-r!-y!-i!-n!-g! as Hand Claps of M's Hard'Loved'Flesh [I'M irreducibly-undone because[ —Quantum Leanage-Complex-Dub, 2019. Commissioned and produced by Chisenhale Gallery, London. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andy Keate.
A gentle, sustained breeze caresses my face. Not unlike the machinic bass rhythms, deftly chopped, artfully screwed, that vibrate the hairs on my skin. A haptic plot. One whose centrifugitive groove threatens and calls into being that other obnoxious, deafening rhythm—the necro-music of capital accumulation and its unyielding melodies of exploitation, expropriation, and individuation. It feels damp in here. Or maybe that's just my mood and its recalibration by this oppressively lowered square-tile ceiling. The modular architectural skin of banal corporate and state violence; here punctuated by its opulent obverse—crystal glass light fixtures filled with a syrupy red-orange fluid (a mixture of palm oil and Courvoisier VS Cognac, we learn). "Blood-stained" might proffer a metaphorically apt but ultimately inadequate description, in so far as these materials and the burdened histories they are made to carry overwhelm language's capacity for literal and figurative signification. But there's more. Part of this installation by Ima-Abasi Okon remains invisible to the viewer's eye. The lowered false ceiling extends halfway across the room making the negative space above it all the more palpable—a black hole, a no-thing space, filled with not all there is, but all there could be. The ceiling has also been smeared with an invisible potion of morphine, insulin, ultrasound gel, and gold; a liquid cue to the medical-industrial violation of racially (un)gendered flesh, which was always already a systemic reinscription of the colonial extraction of sub-Human labor for the manufacture and sale of traded commodities, which was always already a recursive route to the World-founding violence of blackened fungibility and its logistical dependence on the reproductive labors of captive maternals. But there's more. More as in a ruinous surplus, a baroque-inclined stratagem, a compulsive will to adornment, all premised on the cosmo-poetic orientation of another social order, one which precedes and exceeds the scarcity-assumptive enclosures of this World and its propertizing rhythms. More as in eleven stripped air conditioner inverters hung horizontally across the wall, some of which host sound speakers. They emit that aforementioned breeze, and those luxuriant sounds, whose R&B-derived waveforms index the perdurable weight of a serially transmuted catastrophe and the exorbitant materiality of a transhistorical chorus of stolen/ungiven life. Such lives have always made war upon the imperial language, revealing its claims to epistemic mastery as strikingly deficient, while putting its rigid syntaxes to more creative, embodied use (as does Okon with her idiosyncratic verse-titles). What other choice did they have but to transplant (or sample?) the fading memory of those plural continental orders—their irreducibly sonic patterns of semiosis—into the homogenizing one they encountered; this new World order that their transmogrified flesh helped found?

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Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Long Division, II, 2018. Archival Inkjet Print. Courtesy of the artist and NOME.
An irruption must have occurred somewhere, anterior to logics of cause and effect, an insistent previousness, whose impossible presence could only be detected by a Worldless cry, the wretched cry of an irreparable wound which tears a gaping hole in the veil of Universal sense and communicability. The veil owes its very existence to that abyssal cry and to the serially reproduced violence required to both sustain and disavow it. For this reason, there can be no radical transformation of terms, no resolution of this fundamental antagonism, via recourse to the grammatical tools of Transparency: via Rational debate, empathetic demands, or electoral politics. No conciliation is possible. The cry leaves not only mournful traces of loss but generative schisms, syncopated breaks in the uniformizing rhythmic churns of capital. The cry illuminates a sur-reality, changeability as World-ending imperative, constant flight from/under/against/beside capture. And like that, a sentence becomes an equation, then a diagram, then a collage, and back again. And again. I am thinking of a framed work by Kameelah Janan Rasheed. Strange because her work most often takes on sprawling, architectonic forms, with variously sized words, numbers, and lines printed on spatially distributed black, white, and silver surfaces. What do we see in this particular work? "THEBLACK" placed within a long division symbol, appearing with the subscript "(chance." 67 to open The interior,)" and a more concise superscript, "1," which is also a footnote referring to the phrase "how precarious." THEBLACK is being divided by rows of large numbers, ranging from 14,316 to 295,488. A suggestion of multiple divisions occurring at once, a quantum reduction. Yet, this calculative performance is lyrically interrupted by the enigma of THEBLACK, an unassimilable input, one which delimits the threshold between Reason and Unreason. Overwhelmed by the Sisyphean task that confronts it—the formalization of modernity's dangerous supplement—the mathematical operation can do nothing but throw up a series of non-finite outputs: a doubly recurring ellipsis; a perplexing remainder, "Rubbing: contradictions and ambiguities;" and a promising yet cryptic result, "finding further numbers. new means Of sentences. may be established." Rasheed's mathopoetics unsettle the metaphysics of closure and determinacy, the precondition of modern thought, by unleashing blackness's sublime anti-determinacy, which is also to say its ante-determinacy. This entropic, unlocatable object evades the regulatory Law of division, of individuation, of separability, and yet coheres said Law, constitutes its sovereign function, by way of bearing a more terrifying, unsovereign suggestion: matter's immanent generativity, the profuse entanglement of all that there was, is, and will be, the always-incomplete, and thus endlessly reiterative composition that is the Earth. This is the inordinate truth that cries, unrelentingly, from the abyss. A mystic song whose raw materiality spells nothing short of
the obliteration of Man …
the abolition of property …
the withering away of the state …
the end of the World …

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KJ Abudu is a curator, writer, and critic based between New York, London, and Lagos. Informed by anti/post/de-colonial theory, queer theory, African philosophy, and black radical thought, his writings and exhibitions focus on critical art and discursive practices from the global South responding to the world-historical conditions produced by colonial capitalist modernity.

Abudu curated Traces of Ecstasy at the fourth edition of the Lagos Biennial and the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, 2024; Clocking Out: Time Beyond Management, Artists Space and e-flux Screening Room, New York, 2023; and Living with Ghosts, Pace Gallery, London, and the Wallach Art Gallery, New York, 2022. He is the editor of Living with Ghosts: A Reader, Pace Publishing, 2022. Abudu is part of the curatorial team at Swiss Institute (SI), New York, where he has organized exhibitions by Nolan Oswald Dennis (overturns, 2025), Deborah-Joyce Holman (Close-Up, 2025), and Kobby Adi (Cloisters & Instruments, 2024). His writings have appeared in e-flux, Frieze, Mousse, Tate Etc., and numerous other publications and exhibition catalogues.