The Sand and Stars of Timbuktu

The Sand and Stars of Timbuktu

Maxime Banks

G3 Artspace
Parkdale, Victoria  Australia

Opening: Friday 17^th January 2014, 6-8pm
Exhibition: Saturday 18^th January – Wednesday 12^th February 2014

An artist’s poetic navigation through a narrative of place and identity, language and knowledge inspires this multidisciplinary exhibition by Maxime Banks. Her migration story to Australia creates a heightened anxiety of displacement and otherness which informs her work and in this arts installation of visual art, performance, sound and video.

Maxime explores her history as an African American artist living and working in Parkdale and uses the drama of ancient African astronomers as she aligns her history with their history of migration and fragmentation. Her exhibition is a sensory experience encompassing original poetic text written in French, English and Arabic and the rich language of imagery on paper, canvas and textile stirring up the sands of spirituality
and the dust of memory.

The opening night will premiere the short film Banks has created specifically for the exhibition as well as spoken word performance and sound projection. Maxime’s storytelling through art captures her audience and transports them on her journey.

Will this world remember you

Vermillion gape

Take me with vermillion words.
Cleave me.
I can take the weight.
An open violet gape wants to create.
I have enough inside.
I am not closing the cave door.

--le 5 juillet 2009

The violent hours

The violent hours.
Thoughts like tired birds.
To be beloved in this world,
The hungry night.
Redeem what you must do now.
A conscious decadence
Trying to tempt truth to dance with me.
What do i know?
Breathe fearlessly.

-le 7 mai 2009

Asphyxia

wake quivering
wings beating
soundlessly
different voices lock like bulls
sprewing orange glow at raw dusk.

-19 march 2009

...exalted cage

i am early up by grace
sqawkings speaksings piercing each night
just there beyond the pane
my exalted cage

i yearn one voice though
there there up among unseen
my feather friend

i am gratedful to witness the cyclical permutation
as dawn veers her head latterly
the world shifting as darkness distends
the sun's ebbing presence in the heavens reversing.

-le 4 mars 2009

Cleave

To suffer ones death and be reborn is not easy.


to find those things
those things that linger there
still


time lost in histories
to live fully in this world
then banishment complete
left only for mice to read



memory's fascist face
narratives of the child persist
when stories stumble


things turn up telling me
write about me
tell this idea of myself


enlightenment
our mind remembers
a realm of wonderful
and feels the radiance of untruths


i have thieved everything away from you
the grandeur of this life lived
those we need to know most
we know least
all what remains is what was
its pregnant absence

...fire words and cool heat

the sun is rising again
kiss me again with your eyes
yes i am the one
-7 feb 2009



it's a beautiful night
from here to all those stars



fragments
feel the phenomenon
the words coming out of silence



the darkness behind the romanticism

and stones move silently across the world

the idea of stones as travellers
not fixed but erratic
a location of sentiment
broken away from a mother bed
carried centuries away by glacial stares
create whatever needs to happen
mother stone
body of stone enact one place to another
listen imagining dreams
and stones move silently across the world.

-écrit le 6 février 2009