Junior

Junior, a textile doll with wild hair of straw, is seated on an Afro-Asian woven rattan peacock chair. As always, Wiebke Siem’s selection of furniture and other attributes is telling. This throne-like armchair is a piece of ‘colonialist-style’ furniture that has been widely popular in Europe, not least in the hippie-culture of the early 1970s, but is also synonymous with the fight against colonial oppression by people of colour in the United States. At the same time it stands to symbolize the very fight against colonial oppression to people of colour in America, since it featured on a 1960s’ poster of Black Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton. A contemporary example can be found in a poster for the superhero film Black Panther (2018), based on the eponymously titled popular Marvel comic book franchise, in which the hero can be seen sitting on the throne of his homeland Wakanda, the contours of which bare a strong resemblance to the peacock chair.