Lindsay Seers

Doug Fishbone’s Leisure Land Golf | New Art Exchange, 39-41 Gregory Boulevard, Nottingham

2nd April - 19th June 2016

New Art Exchange, Nottingham

Materials: wood, fibreglass, artex, cloth, paint, LED lights, astro turf, metal.
 

Golf holes by artists: Lindsay Seers, John Akomfrah, Ellie Harrison, Candice Jacobs, Hetain Patel, Yara El-Sherbini, Yinka Shonibare, Eyal Weizman and Doug Fishbone.

Lindsay Seers’ golf hole (originally conceived of for the Venice Biennale 2015) features a figurehead upside down and pregnant being attacked by two enormous snakes. It is a clear critique of British colonialism past through the specifics of individual biographies. The figure is Princess Salme (b.1844), daughter of a Circassian concubine in the Sultan of Zanzibar's harem. Circassian women were considered, at this time, to be the most beautiful women in the world, hence they were highly prized as wives. The beauty and character of her mother gave Princess Salme a strong position in the family of the sultan of Zanzibar and Oman (Sayyid Said bin Sultan Al-Busaid) and levels of freedom, which she expresses clearly in her autobiography.

Her autobiography deriding western notions of the constraints of eastern women is still banned in Oman to this day. Her conversion to Catholicism is perhaps a principle reason for the censorship of her book in Oman.

Salme became pregnant by a German merchant and awaiting her fate under house arrest she was consequently smuggled out of Africa by a British sea captain to Europe (1866). During her life in Europe Salme (who became Emily Ruete) was used as a pawn by both the British and German's in the carving up of East Africa.

The golf ball's journey up a steep ramp, over a painting of an anamorphic British naval captain, winds its way through the snake’s entangled bodies. When the red ball is finally spat out, it bounces off a rock painted with an image of a 'Circassian Beauty' (from PT Barnum's freak show).  You should be able to score a hole in one – you may win, but at what price? Perhaps an horrific legacy that can not be re-written but needs to be addressed.