Blues music originated in the 19th century Deep South, blending spirituals, work songs and African musical influences to create the sound of a people’s resistance to systemic oppression. Third-generation Oakland artist Adrian L. Burrell’s latest solo show, “Venus Blues,” employs a similar strategy in visual explorations of family narrative.
“Venus Blues” is the second exhibition at 1201 Minnesota St., which opened its state-of-the-art screening room in the Dogpatch earlier this year with Richard Mosse’s “Broken Spectre,” a documentary exploring deforestation in the Amazon.
Burrell’s exhibition utilizes the entire 20,000-square-foot space and includes sculpture, still photography and video to tackle issues at once global and close to home.
Here, Burrell’s family history is seen through the lens of the history of slavery and the continuous epidemic of violence against Black people in the United States, with a focus on the women — or “Venuses” — in Burrell’s bloodline, as far back as his great-great-grandmother, who was born into slavery. She is pictured in the enlarged archival photograph “Alice Smith LA.”
The artist himself was a victim of police violence in 2019, an experience that led him to question his sense of home and belonging in the United States.
The centerpiece of “Venus Blues” is the 17-minute multichannel film “The Saints Step in Kongo Time,” a layered and personal examination of the history of violence against Black people from Africa to the Americas.
The film cuts between archival, performance and documentary audio and video footage, shot in the Bay Area, Louisiana and Senegal, touching on moments from the artist’s family history.
Poetic images illustrate cyclical historical patterns of catastrophe within the Black community — ripples in a river, circular tire marks from a sideshow. The longest exchange in the film is between Burrell and his late grandmother, Therether Lewis.
