- The Great Camouflage
November 6th, 2025 — April 26th, 2025
Boz Deseo Garden’s piece après-coup 2 of 1,400 references historical residues — specifically iron bars from the Portuguese slave ship São José Paquete D’Africa, recovered off South Africa in 2015 — symbolizing racialized materiality and the long suppression of anti-Black histories. The French term après-coup, meaning “deferred action,” borrows from psychoanalytic theory to suggest that traumatic or significant experiences acquire meaning over time through re-interpretation. The piece urges viewers to question linear notions of history and time, showing how repressed histories resurface in ways that are often misunderstood or distorted. It reflects on collective memory, historical repression, and the complexity of historical narratives.
“So, far from contradicting, diminishing, or diverting our revolutionary feeling for life, surrealism shored it up. It nourished in us an impatient strength, endlessly sustaining this massive army of negations.
And then I think also to tomorrow.”
— Suzanne Césaire
Rockbund Art Museum presents The Great Camouflage, an exhibition brings together sixteen contemporary artists and groups working across film, video, painting, and textiles, alongside archival and research-based practices, to explore the material and aesthetic circulations of transnational Black radical thought and the limits of revolutionary politics. Drawing on Suzanne Césaire’s call to sustain an “army of negations,” the exhibition situates contemporary artistic practice within the afterlives of revolutionary movements.
The Caribbean writer Suzanne Césaire (1913-1966) appears as a central figure, whose writings on dissent give the exhibition its title. Her poetic and theoretical work offered surrealism as an urgent artistic, intellectual, and political intervention. She explored how colonial mimicry and imposed Western frameworks could be reworked into radical, emancipatory modes of creation. As Césaire observes in her important essay The Great Camouflage, her island’s natural beauty camouflages its harsh realities of colonial violence. The artists in this exhibition engage in forms of aesthetic labor that reveal how beauty, image, and surface are bound to political struggle and historical displacement. Drawing from traditions of Negritude and Surrealism—where poetry, image, and dream became tools of resistance—they use aesthetics itself as camouflage: a means of circulating awareness, mobilizing influence, and uncovering what power works to conceal.
In parallel, this exhibition presents Black feminist revolutionary figures whose lives intersected across decades, creating networks of dialogue, solidarity, and artistic-political experimentation that spanned continents and generations. Amy Ashwood Garvey (1897-1969) cultivated Pan-African salons and grassroots networks that became vital spaces of aesthetic and political experimentation. Eslanda Robeson (1895-1965) navigated Hollywood, diplomatic, and Pan-African circuits, producing cultural and political work that traversed borders. Shirley Graham Du Bois (1896-1977) brought operatic, televisual, and literary forms into her internationalist activism. Grace Lee Boggs (1915–2015) extended feminist solidarity and community-based, Third Worldist organizing into collective forms of care, knowledge production, and activism.
These historical figures and their legacies are situated alongside the broader geopolitical entanglements of the mid-twentieth century, an era characterized by struggles between competing developmental models in a "stalemated Cold War world". W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), a foundational figure in global African-American thought, traveled to Mao Zedong’s (1893-1976) China in 1959 and again in 1962. Du Bois met a revolutionary horizon that offered Black radicals a "colored" or Third World, Marxist model, which inspired belief in revolutionary action without waiting for favorable "objective conditions". Mao’s China later formalized its support for the African-American struggle in statements issued in 1963 and 1968. The iconic 1959 handshake photograph of Du Bois and Mao was staged by the Chinese writer and political figure Guo Moruo (1892-1978), mediating the symbolic and material conditions of this encounter as part of an ongoing cultural imaginary of radical solidarity. Concurrently, Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972), the first president of a newly liberated Ghana, cultivated Afro-Asian Third Worldist solidarities. These connections illuminate the ambitions, tensions, and limitations of international anti-Imperial projects, revealing the fragility and resilience of transnational networks under global patriarchal geopolitical pressures.
The Great Camouflage focuses on video, textile, and theatrical languages to extend these inquiries into political and aesthetic worlds—both historical and fictional. Textiles act as migratory materials, as both medium and metaphor, tracing the tactile inscription of global Black and Asian radical imaginaries, diasporic movements of labor, memory, and solidarity, while reflecting on the racialized and classed infrastructures and the “army of negations” that await these inscriptions. As the title suggests, the exhibition prompts reflection on the material conditions of racialized life and the transmission of insurgent knowledge across generations.
The exhibition emerges from X Zhu-Nowell’s curatorial invitation to center artists from marginal and diverse origins at the Rockbund Art Museum, where they are Executive Director and Chief Curator. Their tenure is marked by an immersion in the figure of the foreign traveler in China. The exhibition is developed in close intellectual and curatorial dialogue with artist and writer Kandis Williams, founder of Cassandra Press, a platform where contemporary artistic practices are read alongside the afterlives of radical politics and Black feminist thought. Together, they frame the exhibition as a space of oscillation—recognizing how revolutionary stages have been disrupted, fragmented, and reconfigured by imperialism.
Artists: Boz Deseo Garden, Bhenji Ra, Renée Green, Hao Jingban, Hao Liang, Onyeka Igwe, Euridice Zaituna Kala, Eric N. Mack, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Pope.L, Cauleen Smith, Christine Tien Wang, Wang Tuo, Charlotte Zhang, Cassandra Press, and 44 Monthly.