Black Venus

In Black Venus (2021), Lois is working with her body as a point of connection to unlock the potential for multiplicity and healing. At the center of this video work, Lois is interested in disrupting eurocentric regimes of truth through the figure of Venus. Departing from Saidiya Hartman’s prolific text, Venus in Two Acts, and taking a critical look at familiar images such as Botticelli’s Venus, Lois gazes back at exclusionary archives and the silence it produces. Working with color and energetic frequencies of affect, she gives presence to a black and female body and engages in the act of becoming a plural subject that is marked in time. Black Venus is a commissioned work by MM Praxis in the frame of Ecology of Attention and features music from Berlin and Nairobi based sound artist, KMRU and staging by Nina Kay. Black Venus was created as part of her research into Yeye, which similarly investigates Afro-Diasporic spirituality, motherhood and reckoning with an absence of kin.