A museum inside of a museum and a life inside lifetimes are cocooned within the White Cube Bermondsey’s ‘1965: Malcolm in the Winter: A Translation Exercise’. A characterisation which is wholly appropriate given this exhibition by Gates, freely admits to his engaging “with the methods of care and preservation nurtured in Japanese philosophy and craftsmanship, drawing upon them as a framework to consider the role of art and aesthetics in shaping political, ideological and cultural legacies.” In this sense, he becomes the preserver and protector of an already complicated legacy which is punctuated by tragedy and triumph.
Admittedly, the grouping of architectural interventions, prodigious installations, archival works and new film projects spread out across the gallery makes it easier for observers to decipher this for themselves. But I digress, this art show, which has been partly aroused by Gates’s encounter together with Haruhi Ishitani in the aftermath of his solo exhibition, ‘Afro-Mingei’ (Tokyo, Japan, 2024), is seemingly supposed to be interpreted through numerous personal lenses, not only understood through one.
Both Ei Nagata and his partner, Haruhi Ishitani, were present at Malcolm X’s assassination on the 21st of February 1965, shortly after he spoke to those who had chosen to congregate at an Organization of Afro-American Unity (OOAU) event. Enlivened by this moment, they sought to translate X’s message beyond the US and into Japan, where the Black American campaign for civil freedoms found a rejuvenation in the Japanese left’s fight against the legacy of colonialism and militarism. ‘1965: Malcolm in the Winter: A Translation Exercise’ signals Gates’s first meeting with their archive.
Throughout the exhibition, the artist encounters and interacts with the archive’s transferred, circulated and preserved elements to instigate his own artistic discourse with its gathered narratives. “This project […] helps me ask questions about who I am in relationship to these ideologies”, admits Gates, “how we tell stories about things we believe in, and where art lives in relationship to movements and movement building”. Here, perhaps lies one of the most apparent indications that this exercising of the self is also focused on the exploration and reclamation of a racial struggle which has numerous beginnings, and yet, no individual conclusion. Certain archival characteristics reinforce the notion this exhibition is merely a translation so there can be a continuation. Take, for instance, the archive displayed within the North Galleries, which traces the expansion of events leading up to Malcolm X’s assassination and its fallout, while emphasising Nagata and Ishitani’s partnership with other U.S.-rooted and multinational socialist and Black power organisations of the time.
Simultaneously, editorial testimonies from allied, fringe presses and guerrilla countercultural tabloids report on the activities, detainments and assassinations of leading American socialist leaders. Nevertheless, they also emphasise radical movements and global efforts against social and racial imbalance.
Whilst the show largely hones in on the clashing of the past with the current, there is a tentative progression beyond it. For the most part, Gates’s ongoing Tar Paintings are responsible for this – especially given their introduction of political iconographies and abbreviations for the first time, including those used within the Civil Rights era, the logos and optical lexicon of Black freedom movements such as the Black Panther Party and OOAU. Three of the Tar Paintings are left to stand autonomously along the White Cube’s corridor after being anchored on wooden structures. They are a more contemporary addition to the series, welding together dialect and symbolism with more intentional considerations of pigmentation, scale and magnitude.
Fusion and separation become increasingly present within ‘1965: Malcolm in the Winter: A Translation Exercise’. Ultimately, both conceptualisations belong to an impromptu dialogue, one spoken through words when imagery cannot and imagery when words are found to be lacking. The latter of the two is a language which Black Ads (2025) speaks particularly well, given they are a chorus of seven moving lightbox screens hinged upon the optical dialect of propaganda and advertisement. In doing so, they present visual testimonials plucked from the University of Chicago’s archival library of glass lantern slides, which further cluster into a far-reaching repository encompassing art and architectural history from the Palaeolithic age to the modern era. Pointedly, less than 100 of its 60,000 contributions portray African art, ensuring it is yet another element of the exhibition that’s intended to sit on the consciousnesses of its observers. Nevertheless, Gates makes a subtle effort to fill the silence left by this absence; the aforementioned Black Ads (2025) slides are present alongside archival Japanese text belonging to Ishitani’s archive and representations of Black life lifted from the Johnson Publishing Company archive (JPC). The artist has been interacting with the latter for over a decade within his practice. Ebony magazines from the JPC archive also find a rejuvenated shelf life within the exhibition’s literary installation, Abstract Revolutionary Periodical Superstructure (I stole the Master’s library shelving and filled it with books) (2025). Surprisingly, the steel bookshelf, which the artist rescued from the University of Iowa’s Carnegie Library, emits no groans, no sounds underneath the weight of the lives it carries.
As with every art show, there is a body of work which ransoms the observers gaze and beckons them closer whilst cautioning them not to get too close. That ‘magnum opus’ is A libation in Uncertain Times (2024), sitting in South Gallery II and representing a nod to cultural interaction. Every atom of A libation in Uncertain Times (2024) thrums with this, creating a frenzied kinetic energy that ricochets off the installation’s approximately 1,000 binbo tokkuri. They are ritualistic Japanese sake vessels created in the Edo period (1603-1868) and rendered with family crests. However, Gates’s tokkuri had been founded in partnership with ceramicist Tani Q and is stamped with the name of his Japan-based production company Mon Industries. Malcolm’s Hut (2025) further lifts the veil between the communal and individual domains by seeking influence from customary Japanese tea houses. In essence, Malcolm’s Hut is but one example of Gates’s ability to navigate Black histories whilst using the principles of care and appreciation which are ingrained within the DNA of Japanese culture. The work’s title further reiterates his attempt to excavate, and make apparent, the convergence of blackness within Japan.
The artist’s unspoken doctrine of putting together to take apart and taking apart to put together is pervasive within A Path, East Facing (2025). Particularly as it’s put together a nostalgic passageway imitating the one guided by torii gates, stereotypically harnessed to signify the beginnings of Shinto shrines in Japan. However, it’s the materials that are being used for this exhibited work that perhaps best inform its matter. Gates preferred Azobe wood beams, which are of West African origin and recognised for their spectacular durability. His recovery permeates the material with contemporary importance.
Other signs of life inside the gallery include Huts (2021/25, these resting places further disrupt the stillness of the gallery whilst affirming it as a place designed to be lived through. The housing creations have been built from salvaged pinewood taken during the rejuvenation of New York’s Park Avenue Armory building, further giving them a multidimensional existence. Ultimately, the Huts traverse notions around shelter and artistic and philosophical escapism. There’s an equal amount of persistent contemplation and commemoration within Stoneware Vessels (2022-23) and their unitary forms conjure the soberness of grave markers. Fitting, given their names, commemorate martyred Civil Rights campaigners such as Fred Hampton, and Wharlest Jackson. James Chaney and Samuel Leamon Younge Jr.
Similarly, Nagata and Ishitani’s archive finds an evocative home in Gates’s commitment to Malcolm X. Three freshly conceived productions vitalise the archive using orated passages, archival footage and a haunting rendition by a Japanese shamisen player who reinterprets blues, prayer songs and melodies composed by Gates’s Black Monks musical group. Accompanying it within the North Gallery space is another featured film that centres on Ishitani repeating one of Malcolm X’s last speeches, Prospects for Freedom (1965). Which she translated into Japanese alongside Nagata. In light of the latter’s passing, Ishitani has continued to be a custodian of the archive. “An institution would immediately remove these things from the public, take them down and down into the dungeons of a building to keep them protected”, Gates voices. “But this is activism, These documents want to be active.” Come the 6th of April, this exhibition will be packed up, and another will, inevitably, seize its place, but the impression it will leave behind remains and continues for others.