Retracing the contours of her figure … slippages begin to appear: Reckoning the limits of the archive with Senam Okudzeto’s Large Reclining Nude

Abstract

Large Reclining Nude (2004) by transnational artist and scholar Senam Okudzeto is an 86-inch by 63-inch acrylic drawing of a nude, black female body released into a bare milieu. At first glance, the figure is grounded as shadows cast across her body hint at the presence of a foundation. However, outside the bounds of the body, Okudzeto resists three-dimensional perspective, calling into question the necessity of mediational signifiers for the orientation of the figure. How are we to read this solitary body after Scenes of Subjection, after Saidiya Hartman recontextualizes black corporeality as social relationality, throwing the “autonomous individual … into crisis?” For this article, the author reads the lone, floating body of Okudzeto’s 2004 Large Reclining Nude for new openings into Hartman’s archival reckoning in Scenes of Subjection. She offers a meditation on the aesthetic techniques evident through the visual aporia of the drawing – irresolvable contradictions in the field of the visible – suggesting Okudzeto offers alternative reading practices that afford reengagement with Hartman’s work.