I dismissed the brown paper bag proffered by the white gallery custodian while being warned I would be filmed. The paper bag was to mask my identity. I wondered, at the alacrity with which the paper bag was offered and worn, if custodian and visitors knew the symbolism in former slave colonies. The brown paper bag is the emblem of colorism used to determine level or lack of privilege based on skin color. Ancestral ire rose up and I was immediately irritated.

“Kara Walker meets Halloween.” That’s the first thought that struck me when I entered.

Walking into Makode Linde’s exhibition at Kulturhuset, Stockholm is like entering a cave of grotesquerie. Blackface in all forms, much of it sloppily done, is used as blunt instruments to bash visitors over the head. I say blunt, because they very quickly lose their edge and the whole show becomes a one-liner. The shock value dissipates quickly and what is left is of not much substance.

I understand the impulse to want to shock people out of complacency. The show however ends up feeling like blackface Tourette’s. I’m not really sure what the artist is trying to say. Or maybe it is just that the message is being subsumed under cheap theatrics.

Perhaps my irritation means Linde has succeeded in a way. Is that enough though? I don’t really buy into the cultural habit where raising questions is more important than creating answers. Questioning is easy. Creating solutions is hard. In today’s society we tend to choose the easy way out.

In his artist statement Linde says he’s pointing out social injustice. The pieces that do this are almost hidden or are drowned out by the scream of the overall installation. In the actual work Linde comes across as merely a clown. And while the jester was the only one with the privilege of making fun of the King and telling him the truth without danger of reprisal, in this show I find it hard to know what the truth is. What is the message behind broken black eggs with monsters (?) in the shape of black hands crawling out? Hollywood B-movie clichés?

The question I’m left with is: although I can buy the (hopefully) ironic use of the “welcome to the jungle” theme and the hegemonic use of “Africa” as a homogenized entity, I can’t help wondering about the artist’s own nightmares. The video piece where the artist, through visual trickery, transforms popular black celebrities into monsters is troubling. Why monsters? Whose monsters? And the question arises as to why a black man is turning his fellow black men and women into monsters…for whom?

Basketball is a recurring theme in the exhibition. One in an installation of basketball shoes with figures resembling those from historical drawings of slave ship plans. Another in the coupling of a chocolate ball (called by the infamous Swedish term) and a basketball that is perplexing. Linde obviously has a problem with basketball. What that problem is remains unstated and undefined. Basketball is one of the tools used by poor black men to pull themselves out of poverty but they are far from alone in this. Football, hockey, any number of sports are used for this same end. So. Why specifically basketball? With the absence of answers to this and all my prior questions, a saddening, perhaps unintentional, picture of a self-loathing artist creeps through.

When Linde is not being a Kara Walker derivative, there are actual moments of artistic excellence among the grotesquerie. The basketball shoes with slave ship figures are well executed even if the motive behind them remains hidden. The Day-Glo painting of the white hand throwing the black figure into the trashcan, as well as that of the wave of black figures overtaking the single white one is striking. The entrance to the exhibition itself is interesting with a gigantic coir welcome mat in the shape of Africa leading into the mouth of a blackface (the only blackface that I think has impact).

I want to support Makode Linde, as one of the few artists of color who, as we say in America, “got over.” But I can’t. I cannot look at Linde’s blackface from anywhere but the inside of my own black face. I cannot hide under a brown paper bag. And the nagging question is: should one man’s ambition supersede the wishes of a whole group? I don’t believe it should.

Makode Linde exhibition, Kulturhuset, Stockholm