We’re Magic. We’re Real. #3 From Sunset to Sunrise. 2021

Addressing questions of memory, race, and colonialism, Jeannette Ehlers is a Danish-Trinidadian experimental artist working across photography, video, installation, sculpture, and performance. 

For Autograph’s commissioning project, Amplify – Stranger in the Village: Afro European Matters, Ehlers created the final chapter of her trilogy We're Magic. We're Real, started in 2020. In this new series of photographs, Ehlers continues to explore hair as an important marker of identity in Pan-African culture, speaking to the interconnectedness of black existence. She uses this simple yet powerful motif to address the transatlantic enslavement trade, and collective resistance to coloniality.

In We're Magic. We're Real #3 (From Sunset to Sunrise), Ehlers evokes notions of ancestral lineages, considering the ecologies of care not only within the African diaspora but also wider implications to the planet. Set within a Danish forest, five black female performers (Ehlers, Julienne Doko, Trine Drechsler, Wanjiku Victoria Seest and Mai Takawira) are conjoined by a constellation of cornrows as a signifier of strength, sisterhood and spirituality. Each image is a symbolic series of performances that poetically describes the relationship between culture and nature, body and landscape, history and the present. With thanks to photographer Christian Brems.