Black Men’s Minds by artist and psychotherapist Stephen Rudder is a stream-of-conscious exploration of masculinity,power and culture through lived experience. Presented for the first time in a mental health context, the site-specific installation interweaves spoken word, original footage, and found and archival imagery with a sound score developed from the frequencies of psychotropic medications.

Collaging images and video footage of Ghana and the Cape Coast, the sea, London Bridge and the streets of Brixton, the work draws out symbolic representations of racial trauma, racism and slavery, underlying presences in Black men’s perceptions of themselves and their experiences of the perceptions of Black men from others.

Black Men’s Minds bears testimony to the psychological tensions present in Black men’s minds, voices that are often missing in conversations around mental health. Created with contributions from fifty Black men, the work was developed in response to statistics showing that Black people are four times more likely to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act that their white counterparts, and seventeen times more likely to be diagnosed with a serous mental health condition.

Black Men’s Minds (16’35”) originated as a series of workshops with men led by Rudder and poet Richard Mkoloma. The men created collages and poems – later performed live – through explorations of their lived experiences of mental health and the mental health system, power, masculinity and authority. These and other spoken testimonies form part of the soundtrack to Black Men’s Minds alongside a sound-piece by composer and sound engineer Richard J Edwards derived from tones and scales ‘extracted’ from the chemical equation of psychotropic drug compound. Rudder completed Black Men’s Minds in 2019, before lockdown, and before the George Floyd tragedy and the mass activism that followed.

Image: Black Men’s Minds, 2019 (still) © Stephen Rudder