CURA.

Over the last two years, Garner has created a deeply powerful body of work that delves into the atrocious history of medical malpractice perpetuated against Black women.

Three exhibitions—two at JTT, New York and another at CAPRI, Düsseldorf—have centred on the, until recently, widely celebrated American physician J. Marion Sims (1813-83), as well as the life stories of Saartjie Baartman (1789-1815), a South African woman exhibited in Victorian freak shows in England; and Henrietta Lacks (1920-51), an African-American woman, whose body, without her consent, has provided the first immortal cell line used in scientific research. Sims—still referred to by the dubiously attributed misnomer of ‘the father of modern gynaecology’—developed several surgical techniques by operating without anaesthetic on enslaved black women, such as Betsey Harris and Anarcha Westcott (c. 1828-unknown). The two-sided sculpture Betsey’s Flag (2019) refers to two women: Betsey, upon whom Sims performed involuntary operations, as well as the white American Betsy Ross (1752-1836), credited with making the first American flag. One side is immediately recognizable, made of 13 stripes and a circle of stars. However, the red, white and blue are replaced by alternating bands of light and dark browns, a muted shadow of Ross’ 1777 flag. Seen up close, the surface discloses more detail: the flag appears to be an exquisite corpse, made of strips of female flesh. Nipples, vulvas, and navels are stapled together, a tribute to the many anonymous Black bodies lost in the Middle Passage, on plantations, and forcibly exerted upon on the operating table. A lurid orange peeks through the incised stars, and seen from the other side, the work’s verso shocks with vivid bright colors, as if a raw wound opened before us—torn fat tissue, bits of muscle, fiber, and gland. Anarcha’s Tomb: Anarcha’s Womb (2019) references Anarcha Westcott, another enslaved woman upon whom Sims performed thirty experimental surgeries. Taking the form of a coffin raised on two trestles, the sculpture could be considered a belated memorial, especially as no graves mark the final resting places for neither Westcott, Harris, nor many of the other figures referenced by Garner. Within the lushly padded casket, its lid slightly raised, we find no corpse but several flesh-colored pieces of silicone, flayed open as if dissected vaginas, each with a pair of forceps forced inside. Somewhere between a horrific bouquet of anthuriums and a group of sacrificial offerings, the sculpture conjures a body that has been abused, disrespected, and lost. The wall-mounted sculpture Henrietta: After the Harvest (2019) similarly memorializes a person whose body has been lost to the past: Henrietta Lacks, who sought treatment at Baltimore’s John Hopkins Hospital for vaginal bleeding, and despite surgery, passed away. Wounded and sore, the sculpture shows a barbed wire-wrapped cervix, affixed with hospital vials and blackened markings symbolizing Lacks’ radium treatment. Despite her passing, Lacks endures till today through the HeLa cells (named after the first letters of her name): an immortal line of cells harvested during her biopsy. The cells have continually been used to test the effects of drugs on cancers, AIDS, as well as for gene mapping.
In April 2018, following calls by activists including Garner, New York City authorities removed Sims’ statue from Central Park—just one of the many monuments commemorating racists who profited from violence and enslavement that have been toppled in recent months across the US and abroad. Together with Kenya (Robinson), Garner recreated the statue using its 3D model and made Skin of Poneros (2017), a silicon cast of the statue—a skin devoid of the body. Before a gathered audience, Garner, together with a group of Black women who served as her body cast models, performed a vesicovaginal fistula closure on Sims’ silicon shadow. Splayed open and probed with an endoscopic camera (with images projected live), Sims’ skin was slit with scalpels, held back with retractors, and preyed open for all to see. Titled Purge, the performance articulated a powerful reversal and an overdue retribution. Describing the event, Garner admitted that “I’m a black woman horrified by these actions and yet I have to show all these actions so that it’s not a situation where people are able to overlook this information anymore.”^[3] By dealing with the gnawing discomfort embodied by a fraught racialized past, Garner is a crucial voice among a younger generation of artists (such as Carolyn Lazard and Sable Elyse Smith) whose work demands a careful estimation and correction of the deeply problematic atrocities inflicted on Black bodies and the ongoing glorification of their white perpetrators.