BASEL.- For his first solo exhibition in Europe, Troy Montes Michie transforms Kunsthalle Basel into a space shaped by memory, fragments, and unfinished histories. Titled The Jawbone Sings Blue, the exhibition unfolds as a quiet but insistent meditation on visibility, absence, and the ways personal and collective archives survive attempts at erasure.
Michie’s work has long revolved around the archive—not as a stable repository of facts, but as something fragile, incomplete, and deeply human. Family photographs, intimate images, scraps of text, and found materials are gathered and reassembled in a process that recalls scrapbooking. Yet unlike traditional narrative albums, Michie allows gaps to remain. Missing images, blank pages, and interruptions are not treated as problems to solve, but as charged spaces where meaning stays unresolved.
Throughout the exhibition, books, textiles, and sculptural assemblages appear folded, layered, stitched, or suspended, resisting any single reading. Domestic materials—fabric, thread, paper—are carefully reclaimed and repurposed, pointing to the political weight carried by everyday acts of care, labor, desire, and survival. These objects feel personal without becoming nostalgic, intimate without offering comfort.
The exhibition’s title refers to the quijada, a percussion instrument made from an animal’s jawbone and rooted in African musical traditions. Brought to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade, the instrument carries a symbolic connection between life and death. For Michie, the jawbone becomes a metaphor: an object that vibrates with stories that refuse to fall silent, even when history has tried to suppress them.
A key reference for the exhibition is the fragmented archive of sculptor Richmond Barthé, a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Barthé’s incomplete scrapbook—marked by missing photographs and empty pages—resonated deeply with Michie’s own approach. Rather than attempting to restore what has been lost, the artist asks a different question: what does absence itself communicate? In this exhibition, silence becomes as expressive as speech.
Michie’s collages combine family photographs, erotic imagery, drawings, and archival material, addressing questions of intimacy, queerness, race, and representation. Figures often meet the viewer’s gaze directly—neither passive nor exposed—challenging the conditions under which Black bodies have historically been consumed, categorized, or misunderstood. Desire is not erased, but redirected; visibility is not given, but carefully composed.
At the center of the exhibition, an accordion-folded structure stretches through space, suggesting a narrative without offering chronology. Time here feels rhythmic rather than linear. Around it, everyday objects—a shirt, a chair, skeletal frames reminiscent of clothing racks—hover between presence and trace, as if waiting for a body that has just left or has yet to arrive.
The exhibition design reinforces this sense of instability. Visitors catch glimpses of works through thresholds and windows, moving closer and stepping back, their own movement echoing the artist’s acts of cutting, layering, and assembling. Looking becomes an active process rather than a passive one.
Ultimately, The Jawbone Sings Blue does not aim to resolve grief or history. Instead, it holds space for mourning as an ongoing method—a way of staying attentive to what has been silenced, overlooked, or fragmented. In a contemporary moment where Black masculinity is too often framed through fear or simplification, Michie’s work refuses easy legibility. It multiplies perspectives, complicates desire, and insists that absence, too, has a voice.
The result is an exhibition that does not offer closure, but resonance—an experience that lingers, asking viewers not only to look, but to listen.
