Jeannette Ehlers presents her first UK show, Whip It Good: Spinning From History’s Filthy Mind at Rivington Place Gallery in London. This Danish-Trinidadian artist creates works intimately dwelling in the realm of performance art, dance and video. For this show, Ehlers composed seven in-situ live events following the current seven-week exhibition. Ehlers’ performances each gradually shaped the content of the show, generating an outcome of seven ‘action’ paintings.

The portrait, large-scale canvases stand erected and powerful as we follow sudden black incisions running in all directions, our eyes re-creating a sharp movement that once was. These seven paintings were created on individual evenings of this seven-week long process. The artist, dressed in white minimalistic attire, her skin covered in white line work paint, smeared a whip in charcoal powder and whipped the white canvas, creating a dialogue between past and present. Ehlers then gave the viewers who witnessed this event the opportunity to personally interact with the work as she passed the whip on to them.

Ehlers’ motivation for this piece was closely driven by her family’s historical past. This inspection into personal heritage runs from intimate to public as she gives ‘others’ the chance to express their emotions. Ehlers origins are charged with the affliction brought by colonialism and triangular slave trade; thus the work stems from an autobiographical perspective and shifts into a universal collective communal action. The pain of the baggage she carries becomes a conjoint effort to understand ‘our’ past on a broader scale and to work together, reconciling with our present.

The whip, as power, as supremacy or even as order dictator, is given to its ‘prey’ to regain control, switching roles and going from aggressed to aggressor. This seemingly ‘negative’ action constitutes a necessary emotional and psychological process in making peace with past trauma. Along with this work, a looped video-projection entitled Waves (2009) presents us with a hypnotic close up of tumultuous waves crashing and rolling endlessly accompanied by the loud rumbling noise of water. The contrast and colour of the video is enhanced, creating dark zones, similar to a painful blood bath. Filmed in the Atlantic, retracing the Middle Passage, discerning the paths of her ancestors, Ehlers focuses our attention on the idea of meditation within laborious journeys of violence.

For the last work in this show, The Invisible Empire (2010), Ehlers continues to engage with the boundaries between history and emotions by exposing the traumatic memories of an elderly migrant using her father as the protagonist of a sculptural video-installation. The video is washed out, her father appears in white, glowing, moving in slow motion as he narrates a childhood of horror, when ‘the men’ made him an orphan, killing his father and making his mother disappear behind ‘the hut’.

Ehlers’ work reveals the hidden baggage of history laying deep within the individual, shaping up who we are. She digs within personal archives to bring up this ‘invisible empire’ that constitutes her family’s past and touches upon the history of one too many others. We carry the weight of our background, whether we experienced it at first hand or not. Through the pain of uprootedness and the blood-ridden tragedy of slave trade, Ehlers exposes these imperceptible traces, invisible to the naked eye, to our present realities. This unsettling and seemingly indiscernible past is in fact, what becomes the most powerfully palpable weapon to Ehlers’ practice.