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ARTAFRICA

THE NORTH AMERICAN ISSUE052 FILMING BUT DROWNING GIDEON MENDEL077 BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS MATHIAS CHIROMBO081 EMBRACING DIVERSE VOICES KARLA NIEHAUS 088 REVIEWS FROM NYC, UAE & CAPE TOWN

017 VALERIE KABOV CATEGORICALLY SPEAKING 022 GETTING INTIMATE BETTI-SUE HERTZ031 ZOOMING IN ON AFRICA AFRICA FILM FOCUS 047 MAKING AND UNMAKING DURO OLOWU

T H E N O R T H A M E R I C A N I S S U EJ U L Y 2 0 1 6

ARTAFRICA

Cape Town I Franschhoekwww.ebonycurated.com

Hugh Byrne I Composition D#03 I 2016

ART Add Hugh 2 1 2016/05/10 9:53 AM

6–9 October 2016 Somerset House Strand, London WC2R 1LA 1-54.com

Photo credit: Benjamin Hoffman

One of Nelson Mandela Bay’s greatest cultural treasures, the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum, will have inspired art lovers for 60 years. An exhibition titled YEYETHU, SONKE (THIS BELONGS TO ALL OF US): 60 YEARS OF COLLECTING will open on the Museum’s anniversary.

The Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum offers a variety of cultural and art experiences through exhibitions and public programmes. The Art Museum has a permanent collection of art, supplemented by temporary exhibitions. The collection consists of South African art, British art, Oriental art and international printmaking. The Art Museum provides an excellent range of services for schools and community groups, including guided tours and art workshops.

The Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum’s

60th Anniversary Exhibition YEYETHU, SONKE (THIS BELONGS TO ALL OF US):

60 YEARS OF COLLECTING opens on 22 June, 2016

YEARS

1 Park Drive, Port Elizabeth 6001| T: 041 506 2000 | F: 041 586 [email protected] | www.artmuseum.co.za | Visit our Facebook page

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In April 2016 William Kentridge created a 550m Frieze on an embankment on the Tiber River in Rome. As a seperate collaborative project the artist is working with Jillian Ross, Master Printer at David Krut Workshop on a series of complex woodcuts, of which the first is Mantegna.

Arts on Main, 264 Fox Street, Johannesburg142 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood, JohannesburgMontebello Design Centre, 31 Newlands Avenue, Newlands, Cape Townwww.davidkrut.com l [email protected]

William Kentridge Mantegna

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Takunda Regis Billiat

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Wycliffe Mundopa

Miriro Mwandiambira

Gresham Tapiwa Nyaude

Julio Rizhi

Giles Ryder

Mavis Tauzeni

Lauren Webber

Elise Swain War on War Jan - Feb

Troy Makaza Bound Together Mar - Apr

Julio Rizhi MushongaMay - June

Helen Teede It Is The WithoutJun - Jul

Miriro Mwandiambira Woman Aug - Sept

Takunda Regis Billiat Faith Overload Sept - Oct

Lauren Webber Fafitera Oct - Nov

Thomas Muziyirwa KuwadzanaNov - Dec

2016

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FRAGILE HISTORIES, FUGITIVE L IVES

By Keith Dietrich

By Hannelie Coetzee02.06.16 - 25.06.16

04.08.16 - 27.08.16

ARTAFRICA

Since ART AFRICA’s inception in September last year, our primary focus has been to shape a more comprehensive and well-rounded understanding of artistic practice from Africa and its diaspora, presented by a broader base of global contributors. Concluding our first year of publishing as ART AFRICA, we shift our focus to the U.S., following on from our Sub-Saharan Africa, European, Global South, and MENA region (Middle East and North Africa) focus.

From our very first issue, themed ‘Becoming African,’ questions around definition and labelling have remained at the center of our conversations. In this day and age, what is ‘Africanness’? What effect do these sweeping terms – African, Arab, Global South, and, in this particular issue, African-American – have on the individual agency of artists? How do we, in all of our multiplicity, ground ourselves without being subjected to a ‘global’ art canon that tends to lump us all together under the reductive banner of ‘contemporary African art’?

In this issue we focus on two prominent events on the global annual circuit: EVA International: Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art, curated by Koyo Kouoh, under the title ‘Still (the) Barbarians’ (pp. 026), which critically interrogates questions of nation and migration, community and cosmopolitanism, and the aftermath of colonial violence – highlighting that the need to address these global issues is more urgent now than ever. Secondly, The Armory Show, which hosted a focus exhibition titled ‘African Perspectives’ that received extensive media hype, as evidenced in Valerie Kabov’s review of The Armory Show (‘If I Can Make It There...,’ pp. 044). Here the problematics of unifying all “black art” under one umbrella is evidenced, a “categorical generalisation” that curator Dexter Wimberly (interviewed on pp. 128 of this issue) points out as being problematic.

“I have mixed feelings about art fairs’ current focus on Africa and its diaspora,” said artist ruby onyinyechi amanze in an interview (pp. 094). “I think the visibility it is affording artists like myself is, generally speaking, a positive thing. If that exposure leads to something else – something more globally inclusive and sustainable – then great. But on the other hand, it often feels like its just a passing trend, and artistic trends tend to lack curatorial focus. No one is asking any questions or making any meaningful connections. They’re just lumping us all together.”

So, ‘Categorically Speaking’ (on pp. 022), the Western hype suggests to the new generation of African artists that leaving the continent is the best way to be seen and in so doing, advance their career, effectively damning artists who choose to remain on the continent, where resources and infrastructure are lacking. Successfully addressing this head-on are the emerging African

film festivals, shnit International Shortfilmfestival and the New African Film Festival (USA), who aim to promote artists working within Africa by developing the local industry and taking their films to broader international audiences, to familiarise them with “a continent they hardly know” (‘Zooming in on Africa,’ pp. 058).

In ‘Another Neglected Tradition,’ (pp. 016) Sean O’Toole considers the fact that American institutions are only now starting to address the lack of African-American artists in institutional and museum collections. It is evident that there is still a really long way to go. In this feature he quotes Glenn Ligon in saying that “the institutions that first showed [African-American art] thought that one show was enough. They didn’t invest in their [African American artists] production in the long run, whereas they did invest in the careers of white male artists… When, for example, have you seen two artists of colour have major shows at an institution at the same time?”

The demand for interrogative curatorial considerations that address this is clearly prevalent, as can be seen through the recent shows ‘Embracing Diverse Voices: 90 Years of African-American Art’ (pp. 144) and ‘Senses of Time: Video and Film-Based Works of Africa’ (pp. 138), both of which have actively highlighted the need for public art collections in the USA to become more inclusive.

From South Africa, critic and arts journalist Ashraf Jamal looks at the resurgence of interest in manual photography (Bright Young Things ‘Sarah Schumann and Aidan Tobias: Jurassic / Predigital,’ pp. 104) and the continuing ripple effects of #RhodesMustFall (‘Us and Them, The Killer of the World,’ pp. 068), as does ‘New Monuments’ by Sinazo Chiya (pp. 168). Minnette Vári’s mid-career survey exhibition at the Standard Bank Gallery (Johannesburg) reflects not only an explicit engagement with South Africa’s apartheid history, but a new interrogation into the politics of a globalised image economy.

This year the Goodman Gallery celebrates its 50th anniversary. As part of the feature, we spoke to owner and director Liza Essers (‘50 Years of Contemporary Art from Africa,’ pp. 032), who exposes the rich history of this important institution and the invaluable impact it has had in highlighting South African and African contemporary art practice to the international art world.

It is in this spirit that we look toward the next volume of ART AFRICA and to the new and exciting ways we will facilitate and present engaging conversations from the continent and beyond.

EDITORIAL

- Brendon and Suzette Bell-Roberts, founders and editors-in-chief

ARTAFRICA

FEATURES016 CATEGORICALLY SPEAKING By Valerie Kabov

022 GETTING INTIMATE Houghton Kinsman In Conversation with Betti-Sue Hertz

031 ZOOMING IN ON AFRICA: AFRICAN FILM FESTIVALS shnit International Shortfilmfestival and New African Film Festival

047 MAKING AND UNMAKING Allie Biswas In Conversation with Duro Olowu

052 FILMING BUT DROWNING Gordon Glyn-Jones In Conversation with Gideon Mendel

059 WAYS OF SEEING In Conversation with Claude Chandler

067 A TRIBUTE TO LEILA ALAOUI 1982 - 2016

072 THE EYE OF BAMAKO A Tribute to Malick Sidibé (1936 - 2016)

BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS

077 MATHIAS CHIROMBO: Sacred Spaces

047

CONTENTS

016

077

017

059

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ARTAFRICA

CONTENTS CURATOR'S INSIGHT

081 EMBRACING DIVERSE VOICES: 90 YEARS OF CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN-AMERICAN ART Karla Niehaus at the Kalamazoo Institute of the Arts, Michigan REVIEWS INDEX

089 INSTINCTUAL VOYAGES Nicholas Hlobo at Lehmann Maupin. NYC. By M. Neelika Jayawardance

094 NEW MONUMENTS Commune.1, Cape Town. By Sinazo Chiya

100 RAPACIOUSLY YOURS Frances Goodman at Richard Taittinger Gallery, NYC. By Petra Mason

105 OBLIQUE: THE SO-CALLED FRUITS OF LIFE Abrie Fourie at Fried Contemporary, Pretoria. By Tracy Murinik

109 SELF-DEFINITION THROUGH TIME 'The Time is Out of Joint'/'Between Two Suns in a Sunset' Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE. By Zoltán Somhegyi

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ARTAFRICA

ARTAFRICAMEET THE TEAM

CONTRIBUTORS

ART AFRICA magazine: P.O.Box 16067, Vlaeberg, Cape Town, 8018, South Africa T +27 (0)21 465 9108 / F +27 (0)86 6565931 / [email protected]

www.artafricamagazine.org

ON THE COVER: Whitfield Lovell, Kin LV (The Moral Compass), 2011. Conté on paper and wooden roulette wheel. Collection of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts; Elisabeth Claire Lahti Fund Purchase. © DC Moore Gallery. Courtesy of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts.

CONDITIONS OF ACCEPTANCE

No responsibility can be taken for the quality and accuracy of the reproductions, as this is dependent on the quality of the material supplied. No responsibility can be taken for typographical errors. The publishers reserve the right to refuse and edit material. All prices and specifications are subject to change without notice. The opinions expressed in this publication are not necessarily those of the publisher. No responsibility will be taken for any decision made by the reader as a result of such opinions. COPYRIGHT

Art Africa All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written consent from the publisher. Art Africa does not accept responsibility for unsolicited material. This is a quarterly publication. ISSN 16846133

DEPUTY EDITORSIMONE SCHULTZ

[email protected]

CREATIVE DIRECTORBRENDON [email protected]

STAFF WRITERSMARIE-LOUISE ROUGET (MLR)

SVEN CHRISTIAN (SC)

SUBSCRIPTIONSLEIGH BASSINGTHWAIGHTE

[email protected]

EDITORIAL ASSISTANTSMARIE-LOUISE [email protected]

SVEN [email protected]

EDITOR-AT-LARGEVALERIE KABOV

MIDDLE EAST EDITOR-AT-LARGEDR. ZOLTÁN SOMHEGYI

DESIGN TEAMBRENDON BELL-ROBERTSSIMONE SCHULTZSVEN CHRISTIAN

ADVERTISING & CAMPAIGNSSUZETTE [email protected]

WITH SUPPORT FROM:

Allie Biswas | Gordon Glyn-Jones Houghton Kinsman | M. Neelika JayawardanePetra Mason | Tracy Murinik | Sinazo Chiya

Valerie Kabov | Zoltán Somhegyi

FOUNDERS, PUBLISHERS & EDITORS-IN-CHIEFBRENDON & SUZETTE BELL-ROBERTS

[email protected]

Categorically Speaking

by Valerie Kabov

The terms ‘Africa’ and ‘African diaspora’ appear to sit neatly side by side, certainly when it comes to genre categorisations in contemporary art. Whole institutions are devoted to the very subject, such as MoCADA (Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, New York). In the USA, it is the institutions devoted to African-American art that have taken the lead in engaging with African contemporary art. This makes sense on many easily apprehended levels: shared (racial) history, similar histories of oppression and the struggle against it. While the relationship is very real and important, it defies the ideas of category merge, in which all segments are presented as part of a catchall. Given the pressing and important challenges that contemporary art sectors face on the continent, what is more valuable is a robust conversation recognising the richness and diversity, not just between Africa and the diaspora but also within Africa and within the diaspora. Unity founded on the terms dictated by concerns more to do with the art market and channels of money in the art scene is not a strength. Moreover, allowing others to set the terms and the parameters of the conversation defeats the goals of a genuine, flowering contemporary art scene on the continent, one that is guided by self-determination and focused economic and cultural sustainability.

There are possibly as many (and as varied) African diasporas as there are countries and cultures in Africa. However, it is possible to speak about two very broad categories. The first being the historical diaspora, with a centuries-old throwback to experienced existing exclusively in the diaspora. Culture and identities were (and are) forged through this shared experience, which includes a merging with and contribution to the building of identities in countries of the New World such as the USA, Brazil, the Caribbean and so on.

Culture, history and identity play crucial roles in forging worldviews and – more importantly – in shaping contemporary art practices. In this context, category merge clouds the importance of different concerns that both African and African-American

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FEATURE / AFRICA AND AFRICAN DIASPORAS

Brandon Coley Cox, M-B (G)riot or If Y’all Really Knew, 2014. Handmade paper, string, glitter, acrylic, mica flakes, brown glittery mesh fabric, flashe, acrylic dispersions and powdered tires on gold-coated black linen, 134.6 x 139.7 cm. Image

courtesy of the artist.

artists deal with – especially in the wake of important issues such as the race discourse in the USA – while many African art scenes struggle to lobby their governments to support the arts through establishing international-quality art education, collecting institutions and industry infrastructure.

Even a tiny survey of African-American art practitioners reveals that there is no uniform or necessary connection between historical African diasporan art practice and African contemporary art. For curators like Dexter Wimberly (interviewed on pp. of this issue) engagement with African artists is not based on “ethnic background [but on his interest in] …economics.” He sees that unifying all “black art” under one umbrella is a “categorical generalisation” and a highly problematic one, given the significant differences. For an artist like Leonardo Benzant, whose work is rooted in engaging with and recapturing spirituality and traditions of his forefathers who came to the Caribbean as slaves, Africa is a uniquely rich and historical place that provides an enormous wealth of inspiration, without the need to directly engage with Africa today. For an artist like Brendon Coley Cox, contemporary African art opens up opportunities for learning and inspiration. His view is that African contemporary artists have more freedom of expression, having not been subsumed by the market infrastructure in which he operates as an American. As he said in a recent interview, “Artists who respond to/give nods to certain conditions (European structures) may be presented more in the mainstream.” Cox also comments on the strength of cultural identity and spirituality of artists like El Anatsui, characteristics that are not contingent on issues of identity politics. These important and enriching conversation points will be lost if we don’t value and validate the diverse natures of the two art scenes.

The second broad category is the contemporary African diaspora that has emerged post-colonially and includes the large number of artists currently residing in Europe and North America. Intellectually, however, this diaspora – especially in the first generations – has its own unique emotional and traumatic signifiers, which immediately differentiate the work of diasporan artists from those who remain at home. They go from being part of a majority culture to being part of a minority (with all that entails), from feeling at ease within their society and context to struggling to learn, from responding to their environment to being at one with it, to looking at their past through the lens of the present and looking at their new society as an outsider.

In an article titled ‘African Horizons: Why the Armory Show is focusing on Africa,’ The Economist noted that “Only eight of the fourteen artists (sic: galleries) featured in the special exhibition at the Armory, ‘African Perspectives’ are from galleries in Africa. The rest are based in Paris, London, Berlin and Seattle. To Julia Grosse and Yvette Mutumba, the curators of ‘African Perspectives,’ this was a more accurate way of reflecting the world that many contemporary African artists now inhabit. How to classify someone who is born in Lagos, splits their time between there and Brussels, and does residencies in Hong Kong and New York? Everyone lives more globally now; artists are no exception.”

It should be further noted that three out of the ‘African’ eight were from Cape Town. This is absolutely not the paradigm, which represents the vast majority of artists on the continent. Most do not have independent means to travel and their African passports alone make independent travel difficult, if not impossible, as most visa applications require an invitation to specific projects and some form of sponsorship or endorsement. This paradigm, however, does describe the minority of artists with dual citizenship, independent means and international gallery representation – at least for those who are interested in and able to play along with foreign funding.

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CATEGORICALLY SPEAKING / VALERIE KABOV

In particular, this immediately privileges diasporan artists and artists with the means and opportunity to travel and become diasporic. It also suggests to the new generation of African artists that leaving is the best way to advance your career. Currently thousands of artists living on the continent and choosing to remain on the continent are disadvantaged, if they want to pursue practices not attuned to funding concerns, or don’t have the means or the skills for writing grant applications, or ease of access to the internet – none of which hampers someone living in the diaspora.

In her interview with Studio International, Eva Langret – exhibition manager for Tiwani Contemporary, one of the major Africa-focused galleries in London – made an important point “I think the solution is self-determination in curatorial practices: as more and more exhibitions are produced in Africa, by African curators, the need for the rest of the world to ‘get it right’ will become redundant. But until we get there, there is still work to do.” Ironically she immediately confirmed just how much work there is to be done when, further in the interview, she listed the new generation of African curators who are making the change, all of them resident in the diaspora.

While we celebrate the successes of all Africans everywhere, it is also important to keep sight of the issues that are the major priorities in building up art sectors on the continent, the mandate for achieving which belongs first and foremost to practitioners who live and work there. The push to blend into the international market and art scene creates a blur, in which the available platforms and opportunities serve to amplify diasporan concerns and cultural imperatives over and above those of the entire continent. Once we redress the imbalance, we will have a conversation among peers and a synergy in partnership, which is empowering to all.

Valerie Kabov is an art historian with a focus on cultural policy and cultural economics. Her research, writing and educational practice ranges from interculturality and globalisation, emerging art sectors and sustainability as well as art market analysis. She is the Co-Founder and Director of Education and International Projects at First Floor Gallery Harare, Zimbabwe’s first independent, international, contemporary emerging artist led gallery and educational space.

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“Cox also comments on the strength of cultural identity and spirituality of artists like El Anatsui, characteristics that are not contingent on issues

of identity politics.”


CATEGORICALLY SPEAKING / VALERIE KABOV ARTAFRICA

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Leonardo Benzant, Subterrestrial African Magik, 2016. Oil on canvas, 190.5 x 243.84 cm. Photograph: Chuka Chukuma. Image courtesy of the artist.

CATEGORICALLY SPEAKING / VALERIE KABOV

ARTAFRICA

GETTING INTIMATE

Houghton Kinsman In Conversation with Betti-Sue Hertz, Former Director of Visual Arts at the

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA)

INTERVIEW / BETTI-SUE HERTZ

GETTING INTIMATE / HOUGHTON KINSMAN IN CONVERSATION WITH BETTI-SUE HERTZ 1/9

I first met Betti-Sue Hertz in 2015 at the San Francisco Art Institute. As we awaited a talk by cultural practitioner William Cordova – someone I had worked closely with as an educator at MoCA Miami – I learned of the long collaborative history between the two practitioners. It was heartwarming to hear them catch up, talk about the first exhibition they’d done together and the excitement around Cordova’s recent visit to the Headlands Center for the Arts residency programme in the Bay Area, where Hertz was Interim Director of Programmes. It was this moment that reaffirmed for me the beauty inherent in art, for bringing different people together to share conversations, ideas, and form lifelong friendships.

Some months later, after returning to Cape Town, I once again came across Hertz and her work. This time it was in her capacity as Director of Visual Arts at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), a multi-disciplinary cultural hub in San Francisco. The project concerned was the 2014 ‘Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa’ exhibition, a collaborative programme between YBCA and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). With twenty-five South African artists and over two hundred works, ‘Public Intimacy’ looked at the way “artists imagine present and future possibilities in South Africa,” and offered an honest look at how politics – in a country undergoing continuous change – are ingrained in everyday acts.

I felt that with its particular scope, list of artists and manifold intentions, this project – which included both a symposium and a recently released publication – merited further research. With the opening of the new SFMOMA building across the road from YBCA this May, it was timeous to reach out to Hertz to find out more about the exhibition, its perceived impact and her insights about her own curatorial experiences.

ARTAFRICA

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GETTING INTIMATE / HOUGHTON KINSMAN IN CONVERSATION WITH BETTI-SUE HERTZ

TOP: ‘Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa,’ installation view, February 21 - June 29, 2014, jointly organised by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Photograph: Ian Reeves. Image courtesy of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; BOTTOM: Kemang Wa Lehulere, stills from the performance of The Grass Is Always Greener on the Other Side at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2014. Photograph: Tommy Lau. Image courtesy of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

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Houghton Kinsman: Shall we begin with how the collaboration between SFMOMA and YBCA came about and how it played out?

Betti-Sue Hertz: The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) was closed for three years during the construction of their new building. They were generating programming with other Bay Area arts organisations and museums, as a way to stay active and keep works from their collection on public view. Dominic Willsdon, SFMOMA’s Curator of Education and Public Practice, approached me as Director of Visual Arts at YBCA (located across the street from the SFMOMA) and suggested that we work together to create a curatorial and institutional collaboration. We subsequently embarked on a series of conversations along with Frank Smigiel, SFMOMA’s Associate Curator of Performance and Film. What sparked the interest in putting together ‘Public Intimacy’?

We were in search of an idea that would make sense for both SFMOMA and YBCA. At the time YBCA was committed to threading programmes – with a focus on the Global South – into our schedule across all the disciplines. SFMOMA’s mandate for their off-site ‘On the Go’ programming during the closure, of which ‘Public Intimacy’ would become a part, was to highlight the collection, build partnerships with regional arts institutions, continue serving their existing constituency and cultivate new audiences. With both of these agendas in mind we discussed ideas that could contribute to the complex scholarly and artistic discourses circulating about the Global South. SFMOMA’s



Lindeka Qampi, Yonelisa I, Khayetlitsha, 2013. Image courtesy of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Cameron Platter, Bring Back Lost Lover (installation view), 2014. Image courtesy of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

ARTAFRICA

Senior Curator of Photography, Sandra Phillips, suggested that we take a look at the South African photography collection, a group of very strong works produced since the 1960s by David Goldblatt, Ernest Cole, Santu Mofokeng, Zanele Muholi, Mikhael Subotzky, Jo Ractliffe and others. Viewing these works sparked an idea about the way intimacy had been controlled and monitored in South Africa both before and during apartheid. A question then emerged about how being intimate in public might be changing post-apartheid.

From the departure point of ‘Public Intimacy,’ and with these two particular ideas in mind, how did the curatorial process unfold?

We began by researching the South Africa art scene. We wanted to test our initial remote research against the realities on the ground, and experience the places where the art was being made. So we decided to travel to Johannesburg and Cape Town to meet with artists, art historians and critics, museum directors, curators, and gallerists. We also decided to go to Durban, as we wanted to reach out to artists living outside the two major centers for contemporary art.

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Nicholas Hlobo, Umphanda ongazaliyo, 2008. Installation photograph: Ian Reeves. Images courtesy of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

ARTAFRICA

How valuable was that research trip to South Africa in understanding what was happening in the South African art world?None of us had been to South Africa, so the trip was indispensible for many reasons. We were very excited to meet with artists, visit museums and galleries, as well as universities, cultural centers and clubs. We wanted to get a glimpse into the artists’ world, their studios and social spaces, the rural landscape, the spatial and social structure of the cities, the pulse of the shopping malls and the rhythm of street life. I’m convinced that the project’s success was due, to a large extent, to the excitement and energy we experienced on the ground. To return to the theme of the exhibition, why this specific angle and why a particular focus on everyday life in South Africa?

When we first looked at the photography in SFMOMA’s collection, David Goldblatt’s ‘Particulars’ series (from 1975) stood out. These up-close, tightly cropped photographs reveal intimate views of bodies – both black and white – in the public space of Joubert Park, Johannesburg. Through their record of gesture, style and skin, these intense images expose the complexity of the social codes of behavior and the rules of control that affected the everyday lives of individuals under apartheid.

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Santu Mofokeng, Supplication, Johannesburg—Soweto Line, from the series ‘Train Church,’ 1986. Image courtesy of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

ARTAFRICA

Additionally, we were inspired by Njabulo Ndebele’s 1984 essay The Rediscovery of the Ordinary, in which he writes, “the convention of the spectacular has run its course. Its tendency either to devalue or to ignore interiority…[is] its fundamental weakness.” With this essay, we found our curatorial grounding, bringing to the attention of U.S. audiences a quieter and more personal approach to upending decades of oppression through daily, positive social exchange. This approach also allowed us to further shape the project and to give structural curatorial support to the many artistic voices. We were determined to expand the project to include art forms that had been marginalised by museum culture. While sculpture and painting would still have a role, we wanted to reshape the map of contemporary production. Therefore, we shifted the focus to the triad of photography, performance and publication, each of which proved to have many forward-looking practitioners who are leading voices on the South African cultural scene. It is through this mechanism that ‘Public Intimacy’ was able to achieve its multi-disciplinary and multi-site ambition; which included a group exhibition in YBCA’s galleries, a gallery performance by Kemang Wa Lehulere, a theatrical performance by Athi Patra-Ruga; street performance by Sello Pesa and Vaughn Sadie, with Ntsoana Contemporary Dance Company; a research, archive and library project by Chimurenga that took place at the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library; and education and public programmes.

In addition to this multi-disciplinary and multi-site ambition, I was intrigued by the exhibition’s complex mixture of young and experienced artists. I know you worked closely with William Cordova as a young artist, so do you feel you have a particular penchant for working with young, emerging artists?

It’s funny you should ask that question. I want to work with artists who have clarity of vision, persistence and ambition as a person as well as in their work; when the artist is deeply connected to the larger horizons of the times, able to shift and change their own practice to meet political and

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LEFT: Penny Siopis, work from the series ‘Shame’ (detail), 2002–5; RIGHT: Anton Kannemeyer, Alphabet of Democracy, from the series ‘Alphabet of Democracy,’ 2011. Images courtesy of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

ARTAFRICA

societal changes and also access new theoretical positions or technologies (or both). Just recently, I was pleased to see works I had shown in group exhibitions in the early 2000s at the San Diego Museum of Art in two important solo exhibitions in New York, one of Chinese artist Cao Fei at PS1/MoMA and the other of Mexican artist Silvia Gruner at the Americas Society. That gave me cause to smile. Additionally, on a recent studio visit with the American artist Sarah Oppenheimer, she reminded me that I was the first curator ever to request a studio visit and show her work (in 2000 at the Sculpture Center). So, there are rewards for working with younger artists. And, it isn’t unusual to see their work develop and mature. However, it’s also important to exhibit the work of older artists who may be overlooked for their more mature innovations. For example, in 2008 I organised a solo show of the esteemed California-based artist Eleanor Antin, who is now in her 80s and continues to produce new work as her early work becomes part of the canon. There are many reasons to invest curatorial energy into the work of artists at all stages of their career.

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Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Water- house, Cleaning the Core, Ponte City, Johannesburg, 2008. Image courtesy of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

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Indeed! On the idea of stages, it feels appropriate to ask what your impressions are of ‘Public Intimacy’ now, as you look back at it?

It’s been more than two years since we opened ‘Public Intimacy’ and looking back I can honestly say that not only was it a powerful and expansive project, it was a successful collaboration between two very different kinds of institutions. Here are some things I learned: there are many people in the Bay Area, who are either from South Africa or who seem to know a lot about the region including some very keen and perceptive scholars; that with some guidance, audiences can make connections and parallels between the social and political issues that have shaped a country on the other side of the globe and its own. Not only as a mirror to our own conditions, but as a way to understand the global impact of local histories. In this comparison we could learn from South Africa. We can see the effects of long-term oppression or the importance of small gestures for overcoming marginalisation. We can identify with the risks that artists take. ‘Public Intimacy’ modeled an expanded vision for cultural exchange, one that has inspired others to reach outside the familiar to the unfamiliar to find not only difference but commonality. It’s outcomes like this that make an exhibition worthwhile. Lastly, to return to your own curatorial practice, what are you working on now and what does the future hold for Betti-Sue Hertz?

Currently, I’m co-organising a multi-platform project – exhibition, public programmes, university seminar, film series, performing arts commissions and archive – on the cultural critic, writer and public intellectual Susan Sontag (1934-2004), which is still in an early stage of development. I recently launched a lecture series at Stanford University based on my ‘Art and Social Criticism’ course and I am curating one of the inaugural exhibitions for the Manetti Schrem Museum of Art, on the campus of the University of California, Davis, which opens in November 2016.

Working between Cape Town and Sacramento, Houghton Kinsman contributes regularly to Highsnobiety, ART AFRICA, Contemporary And, Another Africa and Dazed and Confused magazines. He has worked as the Assistant to the Curator of Education at the Museum of Contemporary Art Miami.

‘Public Intimacy’ was jointly organised by YBCA and SFMOMA, and was on view at YBCA from 21 February - 29 June 2014.

Handspring Puppet Company, Or You Could Kiss Me (still), 2010. Image courtesy of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

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FEATURE / AFRICAN FILM FESTIVALS

ZOOMING INON AFRICA

ART AFRICA reached out to the organisers of two contemporary African film festivals – who are already initiating great change – in order to facilitate a dialogue: where the organisations could pose their own questions to each other to find out more about their respective projects and propitious overlaps.

The New African Film Festival and shnit International Shortfilmfestival work tirelessly to shift the prevailing stereotypes about our diverse continent by putting African films in front of broader audiences: showcasing a wealth of unique narratives and filmmaking talent, and growing the success of African-based auteurs and films, as well as those from the broader African diaspora communities.

The first organisation is the annual New African Film Festival (established in 2005), co-presented by AFI, the Africa World Now Project and afrikafé and held in Maryland, USA Screening mostly to African audiences, the festival has seen a growing interest over the years as members of the broader community are starting to take an interest – embracing an opportunity to watch films they wouldn’t normally see and beginning to adjust their perceptions of a continent they hardly know. The Africa World Now Project, represented by Mwiza Munthali and James Pope, is an educational programme that engages with various initiatives, merging history, culture and politics across the broad spectrum of Africa and its diaspora. afrikafé, represented by Kishere, is a professional network for Africans and ‘friends of Africa,’ facilitating the sharing of ideas and resources, and networking opportunities.

The second group we invited to the conversation is the local chapter of shnit International Shortfilmfestival. shnit is a non-profit, transnational film festival that takes place simultaneously across five continents once a year, with satellite events taking place all year round. Based in Switzerland, the South African base in Cape Town is represented by Sean Drummond (shnit International Coordination Advisor) and Alasdair McCulloch (Festival Manager – South Africa). Their core principle is to build sustainable bridges between filmmakers and audiences, increasing visibility, allowing for filmmakers to develop sustainable careers and enriching over thirty thousand audience members annually across the globe.

What follows is a metaphorical bridging of like minds and the promise of great things to come.

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“... the broader community are starting to take an

interest – embracing an opportunity to watch films

they wouldn’t normally see and beginning to

adjust their perceptions of a continent they hardly

know.”

Filmmaker Sakhumzi Mati taking part in the shnit Realtime Film Competition, 2012. Photograph: Paula Zapata. Courtesy of shnit International Shortfilmfestival.

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‘A Continent They Hardly Know’:Decolonising African Cinema in the States

Sean Drummond and Alasdair McCulloch from shnit International Shortfilmfestival talk to the organisers of the New African Film Festival about the challenges of building an interest in African film in the Global North, with particular focus on the USA.

Sean Drummond and Alasdair McCulloch (shnit International Shortfilmfestival): What are the driving forces and themes behind your programming?

Africa World Now Project and afrikafé: For the New African Film Festival, we would say there isn’t a theme per se, but the main aim is to introduce our audience in the USA to new African films which they would not otherwise come across in our region. We only show films released within the last two years, with exception in the case of the retrospective we did following Ousmane Sembène’s passing in 2007.

We’re not a traditional festival in that we don’t accept filmmakers’ film submissions for competition consideration. Instead, we screen top films showcased at two of the most prominent festivals on the continent, namely FESPACO (Festival panafricain du cinéma et de la télévision de Ouagadougou) and the Zanzibar International Film Festival. FESPACO is the largest film festival in Africa held in Burkina Faso every second year and the Zanzibar International Film Festival is East Africa’s annual art, music and film festival.

Our festival includes dramatic features, shorts and documentaries from Africa. We don’t have a country or regional quota, but we’re adamant about featuring a balanced line-up of films across the continent, as far as possible.

Having said that we eschew themes, we would say that we tend to pay particular attention to movies with social justice as a guiding principle, like Aisha (Tanzania, 2015) or Difret (Ethiopia, 2014), which

Sean Drummond (left) and Alasdair McCulloch (right) with SA jury president Gavin Hood (centre) during the shnit International Shortfilmfestival 2014. Photograph: Monique Odendaal. Courtesy of shnit International Shortfilmfestival.

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are both educational, but at the same time have great storylines, as well as films that spotlight and give context to current socio-political issues, like An African Election (Ghana, 2010) or National Diploma (Democratic Republic of Congo, 2014).

One of the biggest advantages of partnering with an organisation like AFI Silver is access to ready-made resources that come with an already established film institute. This affords us the flexibility to select films based on content and creative merit, and maintain the integrity of this vision.

Africa World Now Project: Overall, the Pan-African context of our work is the mechanism that drives the choices that we make. This serves as the conceptual and philosophical foundation as we

Film stills from Nairobi Half Life, 2012. Image courtesy of The Festival Agency.

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strive to show the vibrancy of every aspect of African and diasporic life. Accordingly, the research in an effort to map and extract the continuities in African and diasporic experiences is important – to show and centre African artistry by providing the spaces to engage in activities that impact on our consciousness. In fact, the ultimate goal is to inspire critical consciousness – ensuring that everything we do inspires a deep-rooted notion of respect of all African life through multimedia platforms, such as film festivals, knowledge exchange sessions and radio. This goal constantly drives us to develop and provide programmes accordingly. So if this could be put into a few words: decolonising art (forms) is our vocation.

What is the appetite like for African film in the U.S.? How do you market and do you see audiences growing? Are you reaching beyond the diasporic communities to U.S. audiences with less of a connection to Africa?

We believe interest in African film (as well as African culture in general) has always been prevalent because there are deep-rooted connections to Africa in USA history. The issue, as we saw it, was access and availability of spaces that could reinforce and strengthen this bond through film. When we founded the festival, the goal was to bring new African films – by African filmmakers – to the nation’s capital to ensure this relationship is constantly reinvigorated.

Film poster and film stills from Aisha, 2015. Courtesy of UZIKWASA, Tanzania.

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In 2014 we had our largest attendance to date at the showing of Half of a Yellow Sun (Nigeria, 2013) and that year we actually had a total of five sold-out shows. We’ve grown steadily and continue to reach new crowds. In fact, 2016 has been our second highest grossing year thus far. While the majority of our audience is African, we also get a significant number of non-Africans and they bring their friends, who bring other friends. Word-of-mouth and the targeted use of social media has been essential in spreading awareness and promoting the festival.

Are you conscious of the perceptions your film selections may give to audiences about the continent and its diasporic communities?

Over the years, we’ve been cautious not to show too many issue-centric films without a balance of entertainment value, particularly with features from South Africa that tend to, more often than not, have apartheid-centred themes.

This balance is essential given that our implicit goal is to invoke, through film, a deeper level of understanding through exposure to the wide range of African life experience. Every issue-centric film should be balanced out by a good drama with heart and humour, or something similar, to create a well-rounded view of the continent and its diasporic communities.

One of the more popular openings that comes immediately to mind was when we opened with Nairobi Half Life (Kenya, 2012) a few years ago, about a young aspiring actor who moves to Nairobi to pursue his dream career. We are very deliberate in selecting our opening night film particularly, as it tends to set the tone for the entire festival. To this day that was probably the best audience reaction of any film we’ve screened because the crowd was fully engaged at every turn and responded with an ovation at the end – that’s the kind of engagement that we hope for.

Film poster and film still from An African Election, 2011. Courtesy of Africa World Now Project.


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What trends have you identified in African cinema? How do African films crossover with more established regional industries and in what ways is African cinema unique?

One trend that seems to be unfolding is an increasing focus on urban Africa and its various complexities. There also seems to be an upcoming youth, or rather young adult, genre development which is evidenced by films like Necktie Youth (South Africa, 2015) and Nairobi Half Life.

In all of these films, it is not necessarily that there is a particular African uniqueness, but rather that there is a shift to now present the genuine story of Africa – the daily struggles, enjoyment of life and dreams – through African eyes and intentionally reversing the stereotypical way the continent is often portrayed on the big screen – showcasing the banal and ordinary that has not been shown before. The filmmaker on the continent is emerging and increasingly becoming the modern-day griot.

In the past, there was not much crossover from African to Western film industries. Although it must be said that there is a long history of association between filmmakers in Francophone Africa with European financiers. As a result, some of those projects and filmmakers are featured in festivals in Europe, particularly France – one thinks of auteurs like Sembène who lived in France where he honed his skills, and he was showcased there. With increasing access to music videos for example, one can clearly notice the influence of the USA in Africa, particularly in the Nollywood film industry/genre. However, as more regions technologically connect in real-time – sharing and distributing culture – Africa will definitely become more influential in the West – we can already see this in fashion.

Film still from Half of a Yellow Sun, 2014. Courtesy of Africa World Now Project.


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What are the most exciting developments you’ve seen in African filmmaking? Where does it need to step up a little more?

The expansion of the number of countries making films and the growing volume of films is exciting. When we started presenting the New African Film Festival in 2004 one noticeable fact was that you could hardly acquire material from countries such as Uganda, Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Tanzania, Gabon and Rwanda, to mention a few. Another exciting development is the expansion in the type of stories portrayed on the screen with more diverse and complex storylines, such as looking at LGBTI communities and branching into the realm of science fiction.

Where the continent can improve in the near future is proper development of the industry: making it more professional so that artists can mature in their craft and earn a livelihood. This would probably mean support from government agencies, the study of the craft in high schools and universities, as well as support from major donors within the continent.

How are African filmmakers taking ownership of their voices, cultures and stories?

The shift from analogue and 35mm cameras to digital cameras has meant that practically anyone can now make a movie. That is quite liberating to aspiring cinematographers everywhere. It


Film still from National Diploma, (2014). Courtesy of Africa World Now Project.


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gives voice to those who were once considered voiceless. Additionally, it allows for diversity of thought, talent and more creativity. This technological advancement has made the financing of filmmaking more manageable, thus increasing the numbers of films made by Africans. The Nigerian film industry perfectly illustrates this trend and so does the emergence of other countries on the continent who traditionally did not have film industries.

Do you face challenges (such as Orientalism of African cinema) when screening content from the African continent in the USA?

This is definitely a challenge. Not only for African films, but films about people of African descent in the USA. In fact, there is still the challenge of casting in local films, as the industry was called out for earlier this year with #OscarsSoWhite. Not to mention, films about Africa from the North American perspective have severely distorted and penetrated the consciousness of most audiences, which includes African descendant audiences. The imperial view of Africa – the dark continent – with populations of savages that must be ‘tamed’ still informs the film industry with an underlying ‘white saviour’ narrative. If it were not for film festivals such as ours, audiences would have no clue about the vibrancy of African film, much less African life. The ‘othering’ of Africa as a product of imperialism and colonialism and its filtering in film is indeed a challenge. However, the yearly increase in festival attendance has shown that we are succeeding in decolonising perceptions once and for all.

Tanya and Bogosi, film still from Necktie Youth, 2015. Courtesy of Hanro Havenga.


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Giving a shnit about African film

Mwiza Munthali and James Pope of Africa World Now Project and Kishere of afrikafé chat to shnit International Shortfilmfestival about their origins, the growth of the short film genre in Africa and their plans for the future. LEFT TO RIGHT: James Pope of Africa World Now Project; Mwiza Munthali

(Africa World Now Project) and Kishere (afrikafé) at the New African Film Festival opening, 11 March 2016. Photograph: Lawrence Green. Courtesy of Time Traveling Media.

Africa World Now Project and afrikafé: How did a couple of young filmmakers convene to organise a festival of this scope? And what was your overall vision?

Sean Drummond and Alasdair McCulloch (shnit International Shortfilmfestival): shnit’s start in Cape Town was modeled on how shnit originally started in Switzerland fourteen years ago. As young filmmakers, we were dissatisfied with local short-film screening platforms and opportunities. We were offered the chance to host shnit in Cape Town and it then started here as a small screening event that has grown over seven years into what it is now: a large, culturally significant festival spanning five days and incorporating hundreds of films. It was a steep learning curve on the mechanics of running a festival, but seven years later we’ve managed to stick to our original ideals (and shnit’s guiding ethos) to uplift and celebrate local programming. We have a small but dedicated local team (mostly volunteers) who are almost all filmmakers themselves. We make it a priority to show the best of the world’s shorts every year – to inspire local filmmakers and to show an expansive selection of South Africa’s best – and endeavor to take these local films abroad. We’ve cemented our place in Cape Town’s annual festival schedule and have the backing of South African film bodies, filmmakers and film-lovers alike.

You started the shnit International Shortfilmfestival chapter in Cape Town with a South African focus and are now thinking of expanding it to the rest of Africa. How do you plan for an authentic, continent-wide festival? Our long-term plans are forming slowly but surely. shnit’s global aim is to build cultural bridges not just in Africa, but between all cultures and peoples around the world. We’re in eight host cities on five continents this year and in October we plan to host smaller satellite screenings in up to three hundred more cities, all showing over the same period. That such vastly different audiences will see the same


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TOP TO BOTTOM: shnit International Shortfilmfestival audience at the Labia Theatre, 2012. Photograph: Carmen Davila. Courtesy of shnit International Shortfilmfestival; shnit International Shortfilmfestival opening night 2013 at the Labia Theatre, Cape Town. Photograph: Mads Nørgaard. Courtesy of shnit International Shortfilmfestival.


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films is a real testament to the power of art in bringing people together.

As for the local chapter, we’ve already spread into other parts of South Africa. Last year we held a limited screening programme focusing predominantly on local work and we’d like to continue that expansion. One of our most important jobs now is to continue building relationships with film makers and film bodies, in order to be able to show more African film and to plant our flag in more screening venues across the continent. shnit has run an office and festival edition in Cairo for four years, with a similar Egyptian focus to our South African focus, and the festival has screened as far away as Nigeria, too. We work closely together so the groundwork has already been laid and one day we may even be able to pull together a dedicated African film competition, like we already have in South Africa and Egypt.

Do you prefer to have particular themes associated with your festival and if so, how has this affected the selection process?

We don’t curate with themes in mind, but prevailing thoughts usually find their way into festival programmes. Often we’ll see that filmmakers who explore similar themes organically inform the direction that the programme takes. Over the last few years, we’ve seen a crop of really powerful, thought-provoking, socially and politically relevant films find their way into the programme. Many films interrogate the status quo and social and political structures, which says a lot about the prevailing mindsets. We also tend to mix it up by screening experimental works, laugh-out-loud comedy and purely entertaining fiction shorts each year.

We feel that we have a responsibility both to art and the audience. We want to entertain and leave


The team at shnit International Shortfilmfestival.


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people inspired – and challenged – and it’s only at well-programmed film festivals that people are taken out of their comfort zones. We want audiences to leave feeling enriched without ever feeling alienated, so it’s about balance. Luckily, shnit’s programming policies (around the world) are solid and built on strong principles of excellence, relevance and inclusion.

Your screenings happen in several urban areas. Does this reflect your key demographic? And if – by extension – most of your audience is educated and affluent, are there plans to expand distribution? We don’t like to limit the target audience, although there’s a tendency for this sort of event and art to exist primarily in the urban centers. For this reason, as our reputation and budget continues to grow, we will continue to partner with various organisations to take films into less-affluent communities. We’re also exploring putting selections from our local line-up onto mainstream TV. We’re pushing in many directions and the aim is to get films seen by the widest possible audiences. For the same reason, there’s also an effort to bring in new artists by looking to film schools for emerging voices. We work with a diverse range of filmmakers to produce films through the festival every year, so we’re actively pursuing expansion at the grassroots industry level.

What are some of the logistical challenges you’ve encountered in planning simultaneous

shnit International Shortfilmfestival Opening Night 2013 at the Labia Theatre, Cape Town. Photograph: Mads Nørgaard. Courtesy of shnit International Shortfilmfestival.


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screenings in cities across the country?

It’s tough enough holding multiple screenings across one city (challenges like staffing, marketing, coordinating film and screening materials and so on), but we also run the risk of dividing or deterring audiences who want to see all the films, but can’t due to overlaps in programming. That being said, we show up to two hundred films, so we have to use multiple venues. Last year we screened in Johannesburg and Cape Town simultaneously for the first time and the team we worked with was great – in fact all the venues we work with make the job a lot easier. They’re all professional, passionate supporters of short film and of local film. In reality, shnit (as a whole) coordinates screenings in so many cities around the world over the two festival weeks, that the challenges are almost second nature by now. Not that it gets easier, but we know what to expect and we have confidence in the great team and network we’ve built over the years. Do you see differences in the short film genre in the African context compared to other parts of the world?

There’s certainly a longer-standing culture of short films in other parts of the world, particularly in Europe and the U.S. where the sheer volume is incredible compared to our output. Each region of the continent has its unique traits and uniquely African themes and their individual storytelling structures lend originality and flare. It would be great to see more films embracing these roots of African storytelling – young filmmakers are influenced by culture outside of the continent and they cut their

shnit International Shortfilmfestival audience at the Labia Theatre, 2012. Photograph: Carmen Davila. Courtesy of shnit International Shortfilmfestival.


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teeth playing on genres and styles from the mainstream global film industry, particularly Hollywood. We believe that short film has the power to break these models of convention and, although we’re seeing it more often, we’d like to see filmmakers continue to challenge themselves. In South Africa, short filmmakers don’t tend to have the confidence in their films that their foreign contemporaries do. South African filmmakers need to be more confident and show their art to the world proudly. Have you seen a growth in short film making since you started the festival seven years ago?

In South Africa, we’ve seen an explosion of short film-based events with more short film-only festivals and festivals that have dedicated short film sections. We have also seen an increase in new film schools across the country. Another new development is the timed short filmmaking competitions, like the 48 Hour Film Project, that have become very popular amongst student and professional filmmakers alike. In 2015, the Made in South Africa Competition saw several films made locally by foreign African nationals and several South African films made in other southern African countries. It appears that local filmmakers have embraced the short film medium for the most part, although we would like to see African short filmmakers build more confidence in their ability to experiment with this style. The general lack of confidence is holding them back from producing authentic, meaningful work that they could proudly show to a global audience (through festivals like shnit).

We can imagine that planning six or seven festivals doesn’t allow much time for anything else. Where do you see yourselves five years from now? Will you still be making films?

Oh yes, we’re filmmakers as much as festival-people, nothing will change that. As the shnit family grows, the workload is spread and that allows everyone involved to grow their filmmaking careers and visions. It demands a lot of time, but the reward is industry growth, which ultimately empowers us all to make art. It’s satisfying, in a way we never expected, to see the connections and networks we’ve seen grow out of shnit. Being tapped into a global festival network like shnit means we’re exposed to a degree of industry-level knowledge that we’re able to bring back, share and ultimately use to benefit the local industry as a whole. So yes, we’re in it for the long haul.

shnit International Shortfilmfestival Opening Night 2015 at the Castle of Good Hope, Cape Town. Photograph: Mads Nørgaard. Courtesy of shnit International Shortfilmfestival.


shnit International Shortfilmfestival opening night 2013 at the Labia Theatre, Cape Town. Photograph: Mads Nørgaard. Courtesy of shnit International Shortfilmfestival.

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FEATURE / DURO OLOWU

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MAKING ANDUNMAKING

Allie Biswas spoke with Lagos-born fashion designer Duro Olowu,who curated the recent exhibition ‘Making & Unmaking’

at the Camden Arts Centre in London.

As someone whose job it is to make clothes, Duro Olowu’s investment in fabric is not exactly unexpected. The London-based fashion designer, who started his line in the city just over ten years ago, is acclaimed for his billowing silk and jacquard garments that articulate his attraction to all manner of prints, from polka dots and roses, to Toile de Jouy and paisley.

The matter of pattern and textiles forms the foundation of ‘Making & Unmaking,’ an exhibition curated by Olowu at the Camden Arts Centre in London, that brings together over fifty international artists working across multiple disciplines. Whilst conveying the designer’s long-standing affinity for cloth, in its various incarnations, as well as the reference points for his own designs, the show is specifically focused on unraveling the significance of woven and printed materials for the artists on display. “The working relationships that artists have with things outside of their known mediums has always been of great interest to me,” explains Olowu. “When researching this, many things came to the fore – in particular, their love of textiles and also pattern.” The ways in which this interest reveals itself in the work is, as the designer suggests, both “fascinating and complicated.” In Cordes Sauvages/Hidden Blue (2014) by Sheila Hicks, the artist has coiled together cotton, wool, linen and silk to create a cluster of tentacle-like forms that disclose weightiness and malleability. Wangechi Mutu’s Panties in a Bunch (2015) is composed of crimson-red cotton that has been scrunched up into uneven balls and attached to what looks like a vertical, white tree branch. Similarly, Compulsory Figures (1996) by Polly Apfelbaum, which consists of multicoloured synthetic velvet squares laid out across the floor, highlights the tangibility of the material. Noticeably, the figure occupies a prominent place in the show, arising in works by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Nobukho Nqaba, Malick Sidibé and Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou. But, as Olowu points out, “only in very few cases is the reference literal, or involves working directly with textiles.”

Other than featuring works by contemporary artists, the exhibition presents rare antique textiles and costumes made by the Yoruba people in Nigeria, as well as the Bushoong

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MAKING AND UNMAKING / ALLIE BISWAS ON DURO OLOWU

Sheila Hicks, Cordes Sauvages / Hidden Blue,

2014. Cotton, wool, linen, silk, bamboo, synthetic,

250 x 70 x 70 cm. Courtesy of the artist and the Camden Arts Centre.

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community from what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These objects assert just how powerful textiles are in reflecting the unique culture from which they arise, encompassing the personal, social and religious. “Many of the artists have a deep curiosity about the geographical origins, usage and legacies associated with these antique and contemporary cloths,” acknowledges Olowu. “Whether through trade or as displays of wealth and status, these textiles somewhat mirror the artworks they are exhibited alongside, in terms of ideas relating to technique and also in relation to the highly individual ‘touch,’ or style, consciously or subconsciously woven into the visual aesthetic of each work by the artisans.” As well as these, Olowu has acquired seldom-seen tapestries by the gifted modernist artist Anni Albers. The designer believes that “the fluidity of the textures, motifs and appliqués of these materials, as well as their timelessness, will guide the eye of the visitor.”

‘Making & Unmaking’ is Olowu's third curatorial enterprise. Salon 94 in New York unveiled his previous projects, both of which provoked the designer to reflect on his wide-ranging inspirations. Candidly titled ‘Material’ (2012) and ‘More Material’ (2014), Olowu found the process of organising these group shows exhilarating. “I included contemporary art with textiles, furniture and jewellery. My idea was to show commonality of purpose and aesthetic strength in these very varied works that would normally not be placed together in a gallery.”

Olowu’s curatorial work granted him exposure under a different guise, as well as praise from those in the field, but it was a talk that the designer gave with Glenn Ligon at Tate Modern in 2014 that

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Anni Albers, Open Letter, 1958. Cotton, 58.4 × 61 cm. © 2016 Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / DACS. Courtesy of the Camden Arts Centre.

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brought about the opportunity to work with Camden Arts Centre. “Jenni Lomax, the Centre’s director, attended. It was the first talk I had done of that nature and I was keen to introduce another side to this renowned artist, who has actually created new work for ‘Making & Unmaking.’ My questions explored Glenn’s impressive body of work, but also his keen interest in things not normally associated with his paintings, such as his love for the Quilts of Gee’s Bend and our shared passion for antique West African woven textiles.” Olowu believes that he was approached because Lomax felt that “the themes and observations from the talk applied to several practices in contemporary art, and these would be appreciated by the Centre’s audience.”

Olowu’s initiative forms part of the artist-curated exhibition series at Camden Arts Centre, which has positioned artists at the core of the institution since inaugurating their programme in the 1960s. He is notably the first fashion designer to have been invited to participate. Considering his curatorial role in comparison to his primary occupation, Olowu remarks that making clothes is less restrictive and owning a label allows the freedom to choose “what I design, how it’s made and how it’s shown.” Becoming the caretaker of an artist’s work, however, is what propels Olowu. “It is a huge responsibility,” he proclaims, “yet it is immensely inspiring and rewarding.”

Allie Biswas is a writer and editor. She is based in London and New York.

’Making & Unmaking: An exhibition curated by Duro Olowu, runs from 19 June - 18 September 2016 at the Camden Arts Centre, London.

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LEFT TO RIGHT AND NEXT PAGE: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Room For A Dozen, 2015. Courtesy of Corvi-Mora, London and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; Alice Neel, Richard with Dog, 1954. © The Estate of Alice Neel. Courtesy the Artist’s Estate and Victoria Miro. Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou, Untitled (‘Musclemen’ series), 2012. Image courtesy of Jack Bell Gallery, London.

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FEATURE / GIDEON MENDEL

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FILMING BUT DROWNING

Gordon Glyn-Jones In Conversation with Gideon Mendel

In the coffee-table-canon of revered South African photographers, a few names regularly float to the surface: Goldblatt, Mthethwa, Oberholzer and so on. With the international recognition for his series ‘Drowning World,’ Gideon Mendel finally edges into their ranks. This year he’s been Shortlisted for the Prix Pictet, won the Jackson Pollock Award and Axis Gallery will host a solo show of his work at 1:54 London. Gordon Glyn-Jones discusses Mendel’s ‘Drowning World’ and his new series ‘Watermarks’ which breathes new life into flood

damaged photographs.

In the coffee-table-canon of revered South African photographers, a few names regularly float to the surface: Goldblatt, Mthethwa, Oberholzer and so on. With the international recognition for his series ‘Drowning World,’ Gideon Mendel finally edges into their ranks. This year he’s been Shortlisted for the Prix Pictet, won the Jackson Pollock Award and Axis Gallery will host a solo show of his work at 1:54 London. Gordon Glyn-Jones discusses Mendel’s ‘Drowning World’ and his new series ‘Watermarks’ which breathes new life into flood damaged photographs.

In photographic critique, each discipline traditionally has its own rules: ‘documentarists don’t influence outcomes;’ ‘true art photographers avoid pushing one agenda too heavily.’ However, London-based Gideon Mendel has made a career of knitting the lines between documentarist, portraitist, activist and more recently, archivist, curator, and even abstract expressionist.

“I cut my teeth as a young ‘struggle photographer’ in South Africa in the 80s and in some ways we were very lucky,” he asserts. “There was no moral ambiguity, all we had to do was turn up and record what was happening and our consciences were clear.” Since then, he has gone from documenter to longtime crusader. In addition to his activist work on global warming, Mendel has been deeply involved with the Treatment Action Campaign and the battle for the disambiguation of treatment, particularly in Africa.

FILMING BUT DROWNING / GORDON GLYN-JONES IN CONVERSATION WITH GIDEON MENDEL

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Gideon Mendel, J.B. Singh, Jawahar Nagar, Srinagar, Kashmir, India. October 2014. All images courtesy of the artist.

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“It’s been said that my work on HIV and AIDS was the end of me as a photojournalist. I lost any kind of objectivity and became committed to that particular fight. I also found the black and white photojournalistic style no longer worked as an activist’s tool and thus I transitioned to colour in 2000.”

To some extent, he began directing the narrative and locations rather than simply being there to capture the moment. Thus he subtly created his own unique space, straddling photojournalism, activism and art. “For a long time, people and galleries struggled with my work because it was difficult to pigeonhole,” he reflects. “Increasingly I am attracted to the complexity of narrative and ideas which work in an art context; I am not ashamed of that. I also vigorously interpose the images where they can impact and affect change; a recent example would be twenty large billboards erected by Artists4ClimateParis2015 in protest at the Paris Climate Change Conference (COP21). I don’t feel the need to turn my back on one area to be more effective in another.”

For the ‘Drowning World’ project, Mendel travelled to a range of countries in the aftermath of devastating floods. His portraits, which often feature people waist-deep in water, have a peculiar stillness to them; whilst the subject’s worlds have turned into a dystopian hell, they gaze out sedately as if posing for a traditional portrait. It’s this mildly interrogative gaze that draws you in, rather than what, in less subtle hands, might become some archetype of suffering.



Gideon Mendel at work, Assam, India, October 2014. Photograph: Ravi Mishra.

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It was whilst working on this project that Mendel discovered the DNA of ‘Watermarks,’ which throws curator, archivist and (some might say) even abstract-expressionist into the mix. For this series, he has discovered that in the aftermath of floods, many uniquely personal snapshots are discarded, considered ruined. Mendel saves them, makes scans and reprints them large on textured archival paper. The resulting images are enflamed with colour and painterly texture, but leave a trace of the original snapshot to anchor the back-story and remind us of what they once were. In the large printed versions, the tension between the two delivers a memorable, visceral punch.

“I was shooting in Haiti (in 2008) and the town of Gonaïves was cut off, so we were flown in on a UN helicopter. I use old-fashioned Roliflexes and by some cruel lick of fate both my cameras went into the water that day. I dried out the cameras and tried to shoot again, but the humidity in the lens had affected the film. When I processed it, the results were really quite interesting. There was something poignant in that moment; in a minor way the flood had punished me, but also offered the promise of something renewed and special as well.”

Then one day, after a massive clean-up in Australia, he noticed a pile of discarded photos and saw similar effects to those he’d noticed on the film. He went home, scanned and printed some of them in large format and realised how powerful they were.



Gideon Mendel, From the home of Muskan and Javed Ahmed (1), Mahjoor Nagar, Srinagar, Kashmir, India. September 2014.

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“The challenge, of course, is that I am no longer the photographer, so where does that leave me? On some level it’s about letting go of that control. It’s completely different from editing photographs; I find the images quite moving and emotional. Even the process of going from scan to blowup is quite a revelation, I see more and more.”

Another issue is the provenance. The photographs are mostly set to be thrown away, so they are given another life in some sense. However, he still has to consider permissions and consent. Mendel has bonded with the owners of some of the photographs, like the graduation shot of the young girl in Colombia who he met whilst photographing in her home. He helped her save some of her other photographs, but it was in fact a neighbour who overheard what they were doing and supplied the graduation shot.

“People look at my website on their phones and it self-perpetuates, but basically if I am in contact with the people, then the images are returned and permissions sought. Otherwise I label them as ‘found objects’ and they remain anonymous.”

On the one hand, it is easy to get caught up in the heady power of the images, but equally as effective is the fact that before the tragedy they were simply part of people’s lives, now washed away, which gives them a bifurcated emotional edge. “It’s an archaeology of memory, a loss of personal and community memory as a result of flooding and climate

TOP TO BOTTOM: Gideon Mendel, From the home of Tarajul Islam (1), Chandanbaisa Village, Sariakandi Upazila, Bogra District, Bangladesh. September 2015; Gideon Mendel, Found amidst wreckage, Tacloban, The Philippines. November 2013.



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change,” says Mendel. “It reflects on the threat of the loss of these precious memories; it does record a moment, a significant moment of some sort.”

One of the most compelling and profound aspects of Mendel’s oeuvre is that his projects are sustained for years and years (he has worked on the subject of HIV for eighteen years). Although the ‘Watermarks’ series is a curatorial challenge within a gallery context, he continues to travel around the world capturing the ‘Drowning World’ victims. He has evolved his own unique video language in the ‘Water Chapters’ series, which introduces sounds and context that are missing in the ‘Drowning World’ portraits. He has plans to build a large, new five-screen video installation to simultaneously show ‘Water Chapters’ with ‘Drowning World’ at the Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University in October.

I finally asked Mendel what sustains his interest for such long periods. What continues to draw him back to the water?

“There’s something about the colour and the light, and the fact that things aren’t the way they are meant to be. I find it a very compelling place to photograph, standing in the water with these people. Each new one I film deepens the project and deepens my understanding of what’s actually happening.”

Gordon Glyn-Jones is an artist and writer who lives and works in London. He is a passionate advocate in the growth of Southern African and diaspora art globally. (www gordonglynjones.com)



Gideon Mendel, Found on Goburra Street in Rocklea (9), Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, January 2011.

Info and forthcoming exhibitions:

Broad Museum, Michigan State University:14 May - 16 October 2016

Axis Gallery at 1:54 London, October 2016

Estuary Festival, The Thames Estuary:17 September - 2 October 2016

‘Drowning World’ will show at the Wits Art Museum (WAM) from 21 February - 2 April 2017. This will be the first time that the work will be seen in South Africa.

Gideon Mendel, Florence Abraham, Igbogene, Bayelsa State, Nigeria. November 2012. Image courtesy of the artist.

WAYS OF SEEINGIn Conversation with Claude Chandler

Claude Chandler’s latest show, ‘Ways of Seeing’ (set to open in August 2016) bears a strong resemblance to the work he began with his solo exhibition ‘Binary Transcendence’ that took place at Worldart gallery in Cape Town in August 2015. Dabbling in the intangible realm of binary code and attempting to manifest through paint the digital lives we weave for ourselves daily, Chandler’s work explores the nature of creating identities, as well as the visual consumption of – the ‘ways of seeing’ – these identities

that are simultaneously true and untrue.

INTERVIEW / CLAUDE CHANDLER

PREVIOUS PAGE AND THIS PAGE: Claude Chandler, detail of Quixotic, 2015. Acrylic on canvas, 150 x 100 cm; Claude Chandler, Typeface, 2015. Acrylic on canvas, 150 x 100 cm. Images courtesy of Worldart, Cape Town.

ARTAFRICA3/8WAYS OF SEEING / IN CONVERSATION WITH CLAUDE CHANDLER

ART AFRICA: Your work has been described as ‘pop-urban’ or ‘urban-pop,’ what does that label mean to you and do you identify with it?

Claude Chandler: I definitely identify with the label ‘pop-urban.’ When I hear the word ‘pop,’ ideas such as mass production, repetition and advertising come to mind. These terms manifest in my painting process. My brush is the ‘stamp,’ and the formula used to create the portrait has an industrial method to it. The constant repetition of a word takes on a mass production quality until all the printing or stamping forms an image. My work has often revolved around social network platforms and the online persona, and in many ways this involves advertising and plastic realities. Qualities of the ‘urban’ do resonate in my work: the stamping process can reflect construction and mechanisation. A graffiti aspect also emerges, in the use of colour and in the sense that words are read as images.

Your practice involves using binary code to create portraits and you’ve said that “in its primal core, all internet information and imagery is nothing more than 1s and 0s (binary code). Digital media in reality is a sort of magic…” How did you come to use binary code as a ‘medium’?

My technique has been described as reminiscent of binary code. When constructing the portrait, the

Claude Chandler, detail of Augment, 2015. Acrylic on canvas, 150 x 100 cm. Courtesy of Worldart, Cape Town.

Claude Chandler, detail of Exalt 1, 2015. Acrylic on canvas, 150 x 100 cm. Courtesy of Worldart, Cape Town.

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conventional process of paintbrush to canvas is eliminated. I make a stamp by using foam letter cut-outs and then assemble a name or word which has some connection with my subject. I continuously stamp and layer the print to form a face. The process might seem mechanical, however the formation of the image is actually very organic because I cannot dictate exactly how the stamps form the portrait. When the image finally emerges, it’s transformed in a coded and industrialised web of paint.

My ‘trademark’ stamp style was a mutation of techniques I had been experimenting with over the years. Despite being trained as a traditional painter, I always loved the idea of industrialising the painting process and using mechanical tools. I experimented with window squeegees, Lego, printing and various other tools and methods to apply paint to canvas. In 2010 I took part in a group show titled ‘Online,’ for which I combined my love of computers (coding) and industrial paint application – resulting in the use of stamps reading 1s and 0s (binary code) as the main tool in constructing my painting. The idea of using binary code to create paintings grew from there, and later on I began to use letters and words.

What is it about portraiture that appeals to you?

Portraiture is the cornerstone of my creative journey. I started my art career with portraiture in 2005. It enabled me to grow and branch out as an artist over the years. The subject keeps me focused, motivated and confident. Portraiture has also played a prominent role throughout the history and evolution of art. I enjoy it as a means to engage with modern dialogue, after all, portraiture has gone through a huge metamorphosis with the ‘selfie’ phenomenon and social media, making it an important topic when discussing new ways in which people see each other.

In your artist statement you say your

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WAYS OF SEEING / IN CONVERSATION WITH CLAUDE CHANDLER

Claude Chandler, detail of Ersatz, 2015. Acrylic on canvas, 150 x 100 cm. Image courtesy of Worldart, Cape Town.

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process is “to modernise the traditional portrait by mechanically etching it into text. The digitised rendition transforms and re-invents the subject.” What is the relationship between image and text in your work? In what way is the subject ‘re-invented’?

Technology has enabled us to constantly take photos of ourselves. This mass reproduction of oneself has transformed the humble portrait into a brand. This concept is related to the functions of advertising (and pop art). Repetition is a device often used in advertising and, especially in the digital realm, has transformed the function of an image. The portrait has mutated into a product of lifestyle and desire. My technique exaggerates this emphasis on repetition – it is the key process to my painting style, the mass duplication of a word to form a 2D image.

The word itself is also important. Being repeatedly bombarded by the word alters the way you perceive the image (as well as the word). By stamping the word in multiple layers it becomes distorted and, in a way, loses its meaning.

You have listed Chuck Close and Francis Bacon as major influences on your work. Can you tell us more about how they have influenced your work?

Chuck Close is a key influence of mine. As I mentioned, I am very interested in the industrialisation of the painting process, which Close has almost perfected. His pixilated interpretation of images resonates with what I strive to achieve. I find that with portraiture, scale also plays an important role. Making use of a large canvas elevates the subject from being a mere study. Francis Bacon is also a guilty pleasure (like real bacon). The fascination is definitely connected to the way he handles flesh, and how he transforms it. In my practice I also attempt to transform the flesh and to elevate and focus the subject.

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Claude Chandler, detail of Analog, 2015. Acrylic on canvas, 150 x 100 cm. Images courtesy of Worldart, Cape Town.

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Please tell us more about Untitled studios, how does working with and around other creative people affect your practice?

Untitled is a creative collective. It consists of seven semi-private studio spaces occupied by different artists. About every three months we hold small exhibitions curated by the resident artists or guest curators. Most importantly, I think, working at a studio allows an artist (or any other creative) to create work-life balance. It allows one to set working hours and a routine. To be disciplined, focused and just work, is a winning formula. Chuck Close once said, “Inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us show up and get to work.” I really enjoy working with other artists. They can either be a fresh pair of eyes or the harsh critic you need to plant you back on earth. We motivate and push one another and are there to pat each other on the back when magic is achieved.

Your upcoming exhibition (at Worldart Gallery in Cape Town) ‘Ways of Seeing’ is a “re-imagination of the digital world.” How does your portraiture ‘reimagine the digital world’?

The title for this exhibition refers to John Berger’s 1970s BBC series Ways of Seeing.

While watching the series, I realised that many of the ideas presented by Berger could be linked to the digital and virtual ‘ways in which we see’ the world today. My work constantly revolves around the theme of digital and virtual experiences. My concern is that the ‘way we see’ and interact with each other today is mostly via the virtual world, through screens. In the exhibition I explore the relationship between the viewer and the subject. I’m trying to mimic the same interaction a viewer would have while looking at an individual on a social media page through a computer screen. It can be interpreted as spying or voyeurism but it isn’t, because we present ourselves virtually specifically to be looked at. We create certain ‘looks’ for ourselves on social media; we plan how we want the world to see us.

In this solo show I literally interpret the title, by exploring different ‘ways of seeing.’ There are so many different synonyms just for the word ‘see.’ Every synonym refers to a slightly different, nuanced ‘way of seeing.’ ‘Look,’ ‘glance,’ ‘stare,’ ‘glare’ and ‘gaze’ are all ‘ways of seeing,’ but each pertains to a completely different set of situations, emotions and interactions. In my new body of work, I use a few of these words to describe a certain ‘way of seeing.’ I am exploring one branch of the theme of digital and virtual experiences that my work generally revolves around.

And finally, where to from here? What can we look forward to seeing from you in the future?

I am very excited to be moving to East Side Studios in Woodstock and will be working among artists such as Vanessa Berlein, Kilmany-Jo Liversage and Frans Smit, all artists whom I greatly admire and respect

I’m hoping to do some overseas traveling, and possibly a residency. Other than that you will find me working and pushing myself in the studio, continuing to explore different aspects of the themes I have been working with so far. I plan to (hopefully) take part in far more exhibitions and art fairs next year.

‘Ways of Seeing’ will run from the 4th - 26th August 2016 at Worldart, Cape Town.



Claude Chandler, detail of Mimesis, 2015. Acrylic on canvas, 150 x 100 cm. Courtesy of Worldart, Cape Town.

ARTAFRICA1/5 ARTAFRICAA HOMAGE TO LEILA ALAOUI / STAFF WRITER (MLR)

A Homage to Leila Alaoui1982 - 2016

Leila Alaoui, Souk de Bouhmia, from ‘Les Marocains’ series, 2010. Image © Leila Alaoui. Image cour-tesy of the Fondation Leila Alaoui.

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The Biennale des photographes du monde arabe contemporain, held in Paris, opened two days before the attacks in the capital on Friday the 13th of November, 2015. As photographer Leila Alaoui said at the time of her involvement in the biennale, “Given what happened last week, there’s a lot to be done to show that the Arab world is not just an Islamic State. This biennale plays an even more important role now. What is great is that for the first time you’re not seeing clichés of the Arab world but the diversity.”

Nobody could predict that only two months later, Alaoui herself would fall victim to Islamic terrorism on a trip to Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, on assignment for Amnesty International. She was in the process of putting together a photography project for a women’s rights campaign titled ‘My Body, My Rights’ that focuses on sexual and reproductive rights. Her untimely death is a sad indictment on the state of the world under the threat of radical Islam, as well as a rallying cry for those who continue to live and work under these dangerous conditions in order to bring about change. Alaoui’s work championed the multiplicity of an ‘Arab world’ and plural Arab identities that are at odds with terrorism – the ‘Arab world’ has so much more to show for itself.Alaoui came from a Franco-Moroccan family, growing up between Paris and Marrakech, attending university in New York and finally settling in Beirut. With this myriad of influences (cultural, geographic, political), she developed a strong focus on the themes of displacement and migration. “Throughout my adolescence in Morocco, stories of

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Leila Alaoui, Untitled, from ‘Natreen’ series, 2013. Image © Leila Alaoui. Image courtesy of the Fondation Leila Alaoui.

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migrants drowning at sea became regular on the news,” Alaoui explained in an interview with Al Jazeera in July 2015. “In my eyes, these stories were constant reminders of deep-rooted social injustice.” This keen interest to give voice to those on the margins of society provided inspiration for multiple photo and film series showing the immigrant experience from all angles. For example, ‘No Pasara’ focuses on Moroccan youth known as Harragas (‘the burners’) who are willing to do anything for a better life over the Mediterranean, while L’Île du Diable, a six-minute video about retired factory workers on the outskirts of Paris, highlights the collective pitfalls of the immigrant experience once they’ve arrived in the promised land – defined by crises of identity, the difficulties of integration and a near constant pursuit of human dignity.

While studying in the United States, Alaoui became inspired by the portraiture of the American photographers Richard Avedon and Robert Frank. In 2010, Alaoui set out to recreate Frank’s ‘The Americans’ series with her own focus on Moroccan people. In what she described as a kind of ‘cultural road trip,’ to capture and preserve disappearing traditions in an increasingly modernised world, Alaoui immortalised her subjects with the depth of documentary storytelling and the sophistication of Fine Art. Alaoui took a

Leila Alaoui, Untitled, from ‘No Pasara’ series, 2008. Image © Leila Alaoui. Image courtesy of the Fondation Leila Alaoui.

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mobile studio to villages across multiple regions of the country and would photograph the people she met there only once she had spent a few days and gained their trust. In an interview with The Guardian in 2010, Alaoui explained, “Moroccans have the most complicated relationship to photography among Arabs because they are very apprehensive due to superstition. They are also tired of tourism, so there is a sort of rejection of the camera.” Her most critically acclaimed series, ‘The Moroccans’ was shown at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, in late 2015 as part of the inaugural Biennale des photographes du monde arabe contemporain, that focused on photography of and from the vast ‘Arab world.’

Leila Alaoui dedicated her life to the meaningful, honest and nuanced portrayal of her subjects in photographs that captured their singularity in a global culture of visual consumption. In a world where images come and go, her photographs give pause and demand reflection on the lives that are lived on the edge of the world. Some of her final photographs taken in Burkina Faso have been released to the public and beautifully illustrate her knack for giving autonomy to the disenfranchised (eschewing the victim narrative). As Dan Bilefsky of The New York Times wrote, “She was fighting to give life to those forgotten by society, to homeless people, to migrants, deploying one weapon: photography.”

5/5A HOMAGE TO LEILA ALAOUI / STAFF WRITER (MLR)

LEFT TO RIGHT: Leila Alaoui, Untitled, from ‘No Pasara’ series, 2008; Leila Alaoui, Untitled, from ‘Natreen’ series, 2013. All images © Leila Alaoui. All images courtesy of the Fondation Leila Alaoui.

THE EYE OF BAMAKO

1936 - 2016

A Tribute to Malick Sidibé

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Mali gained its independence in 1960, but photographer Malick Sidibé (1936-2016) maintained that music was the real revolution of the era. Across the capital of Bamako, young men and women went out of their way to energetically and radically redefine themselves by embracing world youth culture, especially rock ‘n roll music, fashion and more liberal attitudes. In an interview with The Guardian in 2010, Sidibé explained, “We were entering a new era, and people wanted to dance. Music freed us.” At this time, Sidibé emerged as the ‘eye of Bamako,’ capturing the youthful exuberance of his compatriots on his Kodak Brownie (crucially equipped with a flash) as they danced up close to each other, wore bell-bottom trousers, rode motorbikes or posed with their Jimi Hendrix records. In so doing, Sidibé produced images of an Africa that hitherto did not ‘exist’ in the eyes of the West.

Sidibé began as an apprentice to the French society photographer, Gérard Guillat, before striking out on his own, moving away from the lavish colonial balls and official dinners and turning his gaze instead to the postcolonial Malian people. While also taking on jobs like weddings and christenings, he would bounce from party to party across the capital every weekend, taking hundreds of stills and developing them late into the night for his subjects to view and purchase. Taking inspiration from international photographers like Andy Warhol and Richard Avedon, Sidibé framed his subjects like musicians and rock ‘n roll stars in magazines and on album covers, and his subjects were overjoyed to see themselves so groovily framed in classic black and white. Allegedly, some of his more eccentric subjects would totally re-invent themselves with new, outlandish outfits and hairdos weekly to get his attention.

In 1962, he opened Studio Malick in the vibrant neighbourhood of Bagadadji in Bamako. From the 1970s, he focused primarily on studio portraiture that continued to highlight the spirit of modernity in Mali. His subjects would bring their most prized possessions to be photographed with for posterity, from motorcycles, guitars and records to livestock, always adopting fashionable clothes,

LEFT TO RIGHT: Malick Sidibé, Amis des espagnols, 1968. © Malick Sidibé; Malick Sidibé, Nuit de Noël (Happy Club), 1963. © Malick Sidibé. Images courtesy of Galerie MAGNIN-A, Paris.

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accessories, hairstyles and poses coordinated by Sidibé to best capture their individual personalities. His photographs so perfectly captured his subject’s likenesses that Sidibé remarked that they would even wear perfume so that viewers of the photographs would be able to smell them – adding an extra layer to the ‘realness’ of their portraits.

Most often to be found seated outside his studio, drinking tea with his neighbours, Sidibé’s workspace became a popular pilgrimage spot open to photography lovers from across the globe. Despite his popularity, his photographs were never intended for the privileged and cost less than 25c (U.S.) for a print. He is even said to have given negatives away to first time visitors from as far away as Zurich and New York – a testament to his legendary kindness and joie de vivre.


Malick Sidibé, Les jeunes bergers peulhs, 1972, © Malick Sidibé. Image courtesy of Galerie MAGNIN-A, Paris.

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Malick Sidibé, Regardez-moi!, 1962. © Malick Sidibé. Courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery New York.

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Over the years the word spread, leading to prestigious collaborations and a host of international awards. In 2009, he did a fashion shoot in Studio Malick for the New York Times, alongside Fashion Editor Andreas Kokkino. In 2007, Sidibé was given the Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale, becoming the first photographer and first African to receive this accolade. He also received the ICP Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2008 and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography in 2003.

Today, Sidibé’s musical inspiration has come full circle and his unique style has been referenced by musicians in fashion shoots, on album covers and in music videos, like Janet Jackson’s Got ‘til It’s Gone (1997) and Malian singer Inna Modja’s Tombouctou (2015) that was filmed in his iconic studio. Tombouctou is a defiant battle cry, denouncing ongoing terrorist violence in northern Mali – a contemporary tribute to the power and beauty of Malian youth.

His last solo show closed on the 23rd of April at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City. The exhibition focused primarily on Sidibé’s lesser known works and his recent series ‘Vue de dos,’ highlighting the beauty and sensuality of women’s bare backs and shoulders – taboo subject matter in predominantly Muslim Mali.

Sidibé died on the 14th of April 2016 due to complications caused by diabetes. Mali’s Culture Minister N’Diaye Ramatoulaye Diallo said in an interview with The Guardian, “It’s a great loss for Mali. He was part of our cultural heritage. The whole of Mali is in mourning.”


LEFT TO RIGHT: Malick Sidibé, Combat des amis avec pierres, 1976. © Malick Sidibé; Malick Sidibé, Toute la famille à moto, 1962. © Malick Sidibé. All images courtesy of Galerie MAGNIN-A, Paris.

SACRED SPACES

Mathias Chirombo

“Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness.”

- Mark Rothko

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BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS

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There’s something incredibly captivating about Mathias Chirombo’s work. Standing up close to his large scale painting Death of the Mermaid III (2013), I am struck by an overwhelming sense of silence. This world – deep, pulsating, blue – stretches out around me, pulling me in. Spellbound, I take a step back, curious as to how I got here. Interestingly, it is the work and words of Mark Rothko that I am inclined to fall back on.

“I paint large pictures because I want to create a state of intimacy,” Rothko said. “To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside the experience. Paint the larger picture and you are in it. It takes you with it. It isn’t something you control.” Rothko’s paintings, much like Chirombo’s work, were intended to be an experience. He wanted his viewers to immerse themselves, and in so doing, to illicit a sense of emotional and spiritual exhilaration. “The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them,” he told the writer and critic Selden Rodman at a chance meeting in 1956.

For Rothko, it was not so much the form that mattered as the experience in-and-of itself, for which the painting was simply a vessel. It is for this reason – and the more obvious rectangular compositions of his work – that so many writers refer to his paintings as doors, windows or even “the gates of heaven and hell.”As a Zimbabwean artist of Shona heritage, Mathias Chirombo’s paintings function in much the same way. “I wanted to share with everyone else what I could feel and see,” he explains. “The images are meant for people to experience a captured pause in an ongoing dream, like you are traveling through motionless time, a space of spirituality, a space which the body cannot travel.”

PREVIOUS PAGE AND THIS PAGE: Mathias Chirombo, Rising of the Ancestors, 2012. Mixed paints on canvas. 160 x 100cm; Mathias Chirombo, Death of the Mermaid III, 2013. Oil, mixed paintings and stitching on canvas, 240 x 150 cm. Images courtesy of the artist.

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In Shona culture it is believed that when a person dies, their spirit continues to live on in a separate but parallel world. “In this world the deceased, our ancestors, are ever-present,” he tells me. “They provide care and protection for their living families, who can consult with them for guidance and support.” In this sense, the act of painting serves as a medium through which the artist engages his own spirituality, transforming the canvas into an active, transcendental site. Once complete, the canvas becomes a repository that can be returned to again and again, like a meditative time capsule. And it is here that Chirombo’s work takes on a life of its own.

For Rothko, “the exhilarated tragic experience” was the only source of art. He wanted people to feel what he felt at the time of the painting. Emotion itself being the spiritual experience. This is reflected in Rothko’s minimalist aesthetic considerations – large, flat blocks of colour that speak to the formless, internal obscurity of the heart. Whilst transcendental in its own right, Rothko’s world is isolated to the realm of the individual. Just google ‘Mark Rothko Exhibition.’ What you’ll find is an assortment of images of people standing on their own, or sitting in quiet contemplation on a bench beneath a work.

Chirombo’s practice, on the other hand, lives somewhere between the viewer and the work. Born from a philosophy of co-habitation – between the living, the dead, animals, land and all other aspects of nature – Chirombo’s canvases are littered with familiar fragments and distorted, dreamlike variations of the external world. You want to explore it, to make sense of it. In this way, his work draws you in, inviting you to wonder, and to get lost.

In Death of the Mermaid III we’re lured in, not only by the scale of the piece, but by Chirombo’s masterly articulation of composition. Pulled along a current of colour and contour, your eye is guided

SACRED SPACES: MATHIAS CHIROMBO / STAFF WRITER (SC)

Mathias Chirombo, Now that we are here, what would you like to ask?, 2013. Printmaking ink, emulsion, fabric paint, liquin, linseed oil and oil on canvas. 160 x 100cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

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to a central, monolithic ‘castle-in-the-sky’ that sits on the horizon line, and then to the right, where a foregrounded form (no doubt the mermaid) peers back at you. The mermaid, a notorious temptress the world over, stands to the side like a gatekeeper addressing the viewer. Held at a slight angle, her head gestures back toward the monolithic structure at the centre of the image. The viewer, however, is held by her gaze, trapped like a deer in the headlights in a roundabout triangle between yourself, the ‘castle-in-the-sky’ and the mermaid. In addition to this is the thin baptismal run of red that falls from the top of the canvas onto the mermaid, and it is here that we become conscious of the punchline. It is the only line in the entire image (apart from the mermaid’s gaze) that alludes to an alternate world beyond the canvas, a world that you as the viewer are inextricably linked.

Chirombo’s work is constantly shifting the parameters of this boundary. Where one might be drawn into the large, spacious world of Death of the Mermaid III, other more compact works, such as Now that we are here, what would you like to ask? (2013) offer up a multitude of weird and wonderful biomorphic incarnations. These forms protrude out of the landscape like ancient eels from a reef, barely distinguishable from one another. In addition to this is the strange sense of urgency created by the landscape: a tide of volcanic, blood red sludge that threatens to engulf everything in its path. Similarly, in a work titled Sacred Spaces, a rocky landscape rolls out beneath a thunderous sky. At the centre of the image a circular cluster of rocks glow like coals. The effect is somewhat frightening, yet unavoidably compelling. As if whatever lurks within these incomprehensible spaces is about to come crashing into our own reality.

SACRED SPACES: MATHIAS CHIROMBO / STAFF WRITER (SC)

Mathias Chirombo, Sacred Spaces, 2010. Oil on canvas. 200 x 150cm. Images courtesy of the artist.

ARTAFRICAEMBRACING DIVERSE VOICES: 90 YEARS OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN ART / KARLA NIEHAUS 1/7

‘Embracing Diverse Voices’ explores the wealth of experience and artistic expression among American artists of African descent over the past ninety years. The works demonstrate as wide a range of stylistic approaches and viewpoints as one would expect of any group of Americans. While some works offer a glimpse of an artist’s personal vision, others speak out as bold political and social calls to action. Works in the exhibition were drawn exclusively from the collection of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts (KIA), Michigan.

Common among these works – from James Van Der Zee’s Harlem Renaissance portraits counteracting mainstream stereotypes, to Lorna Simpson’s and Whitfield Lovell’s 21st-century critiques of societal perceptions – is the complex, but fundamental, expression of identity. Within our diverse nation comprised of diasporas and immigrants, personal and cultural identity is an archetypal American issue. In this exhibition, we see individuals defining themselves through such varied factors as race, gender, culture, history and social status.

For some artists, the investigation of identity may involve tracing roots and reclaiming a connection to African culture, drawing forms and themes from African art. In Mecklenburg Autumn, Romare Bearden merges African and American heritage in the figure of the quilt maker. While the image evokes scenes from his childhood in North Carolina, the masked face references early 20th-century modernists, but also suggests the collective memory of Africa perpetuated through the work of anonymous ‘folk’ artists. Working in an abstract and Impressionistic (European/American-based) style, Richard Mayhew

ARTAFRICA

The Expression of Identity

Associate Curator Karla Niehaus on 'Embracing Diverse Voices: 90 Years of African-American Art'

Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Michigan

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Whitfield Lovell, Kin LV (The Moral Compass), 2011. Conté on paper and wooden roulette wheel. Collection of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts; Elisabeth Claire Lahti Fund Purchase. © DC Moore Gallery. Courtesy of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts.

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connects his form of abstraction to his Native American and African roots – specifically to these cultures’ spiritual sensitivity to landscape. He draws upon remembered landscapes, aiming to bring “the essence of the inner soul” to his canvas through evocative colour combinations. In her imagined portrait of Marie Laveau, artist Renée Stout uses her own likeness to envision the legendary 19th-century New Orleans ‘queen’ of Voodoo. Creole women involved in this spiritual practice, derived from spiritual traditions of enslaved West Africans, wielded great influence. Merging identities, the artist associates herself with Marie Laveau’s mesmerising power and mystery.

More explicitly referencing social and political issues, African-American photographers have documented significant moments in American history, along with the aspirations and struggles that united their communities. In the 1950s and 60s, Ernest Withers was one of the first news photographers documenting early civil rights conflicts in the American South. He also captured memorable images of African-American music icons such as Lionel Hampton and B.B. King. As a student at Texas Southern University, Earlie Hudnall, Jr. was inspired to immerse himself in local African-American communities. By his stance and dress, the Hip Hop, Galveston, Texas teen confidently projects an identity unmistakably derived from the music and youth culture of his time and place.

Writer and activist June Jordan wrote, “Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?” Throughout the past century, artists have forged unique personal styles in answer to this question, resulting in the diversity of voices expressed in this exhibition. African-American artists offer valuable perspectives that deserve to be more substantially represented within the canon of American art.

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EMBRACING DIVERSE VOICES: 90 YEARS OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN ART / KARLA NIEHAUS

TOP TO BOTTOM: Ernest C. Withers, Young Woman Receives Voter Registration Card, 1960. Gelatin silver print. Collection of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts; Gift of Ronda Stryker. © Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, NY; James Van Der Zee, Dancer, Harlem, 1925. Gelatin silver print. Collection of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. © Donna Van der Zee. All images courtesy of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts.

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ART AFRICA: Encompassing painting, photography, sculpture and prints, the exhibition features close to sixty works by twenty-five of the most prominent African-American artists of the last century. With specific reference to the artists involved, can you talk a bit more about the title of the exhibition, ‘Embracing Diverse Voices’?

KARLA NIEHUS: Racial issues continue to present a critical challenge to American society. We must find ways for individuals to attain understanding that transcends stereotypes, if we hope to embrace the diversity that characterises our nation. Part of this process involves listening to voices and viewpoints born of American experiences that reflect this diversity. The voices of African-American artists have been overlooked in many mainstream American museums, often focused on the traditional white, male canon. This exhibition attempts to reveal a broad diversity of expression that reveals both individuality and universality. Some of the artists included in this exhibition overtly address social and political issues, while others explore more personal, introspective pursuits. Some artists explicitly claim their African roots through visual references, while other artists find expression within mainstream styles. This exhibition of works spanning a century demonstrates that the ideas and the visual forms they take are as varied as the artists themselves. The exhibition deals, in a large way, with the complex theme of identity.


Jacob Lawrence, Legend of John Brown #11: John Brown took to guerrilla warfare, 1978. Colour screenprint. Collection of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts; Gift of an anonymous donor. 2008.15.11 © Artists Rights Society, Inc. Courtesy of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts.

Romare Bearden, Mecklenburg Autumn, 1979. Lithograph. Collection of the

Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. © VAGA. Image courtesy of the

Kalamazoo Institute of Arts.

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CURATOR'S INSIGHT

Can you tell us more about how this theme is addressed in the show?

Within our diverse nation comprised of diasporas and immigrants, personal and cultural identity is an archetypal American issue. In this exhibition, artists define themselves and their subjects through such varied factors as race, gender, culture, history and social status. For example, portrait photographer James Van Der Zee documented his New York City neighborhood in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 30s. Emphasising residents’ beauty, sophistication, pride, prosperity and dignity, Van Der Zee’s images asserted black identities that combatted the racial stereotypes circulating at the time. Elizabeth Catlett’s Madonna portrays the African-American woman as a guardian and protector: strong, yet sensitive. The specific identities of the subjects in Whitfield Lovell’s ‘Kin’ series are unknown, having been taken from anonymous snapshots, passport photos and police mugshots. Pairing anonymous portraits with found objects, the artist spotlights the process of making assumptions about individuals’ characters and circumstances in the absence of full understanding.


LEFT TO RIGHT: Earlie Hudnall, Jr., Hip Hop, Galveston, Texas, 1993. Gelatin silver print. Collection of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. © Earlie Hudnall, Jr.; Elizabeth Catlett, Madonna, 1982, lithograph. Collection of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts; Permanent Collection Fund Purchase. 2008. © VAGA. Images courtesy of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts.

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You organised the exhibition in 2009 and, over the past seven years, it has traveled to several venues from California to Texas and North Carolina. Why do you think this exhibition has been highly sought after by museums?

Institutions across the country are interested in showing and collecting work that more fully reflects their communities. As reported in the New York Times last November, some American museums have begun to recognise – and attempt to rectify – the underrepresentation of African-American artists in their collections. Important and talented black artists, long overlooked, are finally being more broadly appreciated and highly sought after. Works by African-American artists have been part of the KIA’s collection since 1970, and around 2000 the KIA began a concerted effort to actively develop this part of its collection. This exhibition has appealed to institutions across the country for a variety of reasons. In some cases, the exhibition has traveled to institutions already focused on African-American artists. For other institutions, the exhibition may have helped reach out to new audiences. Visitors of all backgrounds are likely to encounter viewpoints with which they can identify, but also ideas that challenge their perspectives. Issues addressed by work in this exhibition offer a museum the opportunity to serve as a forum for productive community discussion.

‘Embracing Diverse Voices: 90 Years of African American Art’ ran from 17 January - 20 March 2016 at the Tyler Museum of Art, Texas, USA.

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Charles Henry Alston, Untitled (Couple), ca. 1945-1950. Oil on canvas. Collection of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts; Purchase: Acquired through the generosity of an anonymous donor. 2010.29 © Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, NY. Courtesy of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts.

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109 Self-definition Through Time

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Frances Goodman, Medusa, 2013-2014. Acrylic nails, foam, metal, 160 x 100 x 70 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Richard Taittinger Gallery, New York.

Instinctual VoyagesNicholas Hlobo at Lehmann Maupin, NYC

by M. Neelika Jayawardane

Nicholas Hlobo installation view, Lehmann Maupin, 201 Chrystie Street, New York February 24 - April 17, 2016. Photograph: Max Yawney. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.

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When I saw South African artist Nicholas Hlobo’s first solo show, ‘Izele,’ at Michael Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town in 2006, I knew immediately that his work was directed by some remarkable creative impulse – it was a leap into something completely different. Rather than addressing political concerns in the aftermath of apartheid in an obvious manner, his sculptures gave pause. They gestured towards the ways in which the social and historical imperatives to which our lives are coupled – sexuality and gender expectations, and the ethnicities to which we have been tied – weigh in insistently, despite our wishes to make departures from these dictates and to fashion ourselves into the future.

Ten years later, Hlobo’s new work is showing in Manhattan, at Lehmann Maupin’s second location situated on the Lower East Side’s gentrifying northern border. The canvas at the entrance of the gallery, Umkhokeli, makes explicit the erotic narrative running through the works. Umkhokeli roughly translates to ‘leader’ or ‘master.’ Here, Hlobo has sewn a leather flagpole holster – a found object – to a leather piece that looks like a crotch-cover and attached two loops of leather belts (complete with buckles). The story here is playfully – but unmistakably – sexual. The dark brown, weathered pieces of leather conjure up the shape of a strap-on dildo or a holster built to accentuate the masculinity of the phallus. But they are embroidered on to the canvas using delicate, pastel-coloured silk. There’s

INSTINCTUAL VOYAGES / M. NEELIKA JAYAWARDANE

LEFT TO RIGHT: Nicholas Hlobo, Umkhokeli, 2016. Ribbons, leather and metal on Belgian canvas, 150 x 100 x 10.8 cm; Nicholas Hlobo, Intili, 2016. Ribbons and leather on Belgian linen canvas, 150 x 100 x 5 cm. All photographs: Anthea Pokroy. Images courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.

Nicholas Hlobo, Igqabhuk ‘imiphunga, 2016. Ribbons and leather on Belgian linen canvas, 120 x 90 x 5 cm. Photograph: Anthea Pokroy. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.

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definitely a joke in there somewhere – among all the leather and delicate embroidery – suggesting the vulnerability of such accentuated masculinity and the feminine impulse that holds all that phallic ‘stuff ’ consisting, as this piece suggests, of nothing but stuffing and old skin.

The sculptural work on show features found vegetal objects combined with inorganic materials: two hollowed-out tree trunks, joined to sections of leather stretched over wire frames, sculpted to look like the stylised, curlicued prow and stern of seafaring ships. Lengths of leather tubes, stuffed and sewn together to make potent, sensual, gourd-and-vine like objects, spill out of other hollows in the tree trunks. Hlobo joins these disparate items together using lengths of silk ribbon and strong metal wire. The leather tubing gives the impression of something large and unraveling, something that was once contained tidily and sealed off, but has now spilled out like intestines and organs from an open abdomen. We don’t see the violent moment of excision, only the aftermath.

Hlobo’s works on canvas are ethereal conversations about what it means to be directed – much like seafaring eels – by the dictates of a generative impulse so overwhelming that one may defy what appears sensible and reasonable to others. It might seem odd that Hlobo is drawn to the metaphor presented by the life cycle of eels. Although eels spend their entire adult lives in freshwater rivers, at a certain moment in their lives they receive a signal that compels them to take a leap of faith. They swim as far as 2400 hundred kilometres to breeding grounds in saltwater seas, where they began their lives, and once they have fulfilled their procreative duty, they die. The North American eel (Anguilla rostrata), for instance, travels from rivers in the Northeast United States and – skirting modern obstacles like dams and polluted waters – swims to the Sargasso Sea to breed. Their elegant bodies roll in sine waves, moving through the water like ribbon streamers, directed and focused on fulfilling their desire, on meeting their ultimate and final goal: to generate new life and to leave their decaying bodies in order to create nourishment for new life.

The animals’ instinctual determination to return to the ocean resonates with Hlobo, who is similarly driven by generative impulses that propel him. As an artist, and as a gay man, he too abandoned what was expected and familiar for a man instructed in the Xhosa traditions of masculinity. This work is an expression of his own voyage, driven by subconscious impulses. One large, white canvas encapsulates

Nicholas Hlobo, Ikroti, 2016. Wood, leather, and ribbon, 75 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.

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Hlobo’s concept and inspiration for this project: the migratory impulses of eels. Here, small, uneven lengths of leather – each stuffed with soft inserts to give a three-dimensional effect – are sewn into the body of the ‘painting,’ using neat, evenly spaced silk ribbon. Hlobo uses multihued silk ribbons: pale blue, forest-green, ochre-yellow, yellow as pale as beaten egg yolks, and even bright red. The ribbon works in and out of neatly punched, circular holes that follow the uneven contours of the ‘eels.’ This line of ribbon secures the eel-forms to the body of the canvas, accentuating their shape and three-dimensionality. More ribbons of embroidery – mirroring the ribbons that trace the outline of the eel-forms – wind along the non-linear trajectories that these bodies might have followed as they swam towards their meeting place.

From a distance, the effect of the three-dimensional eel-forms and embroidered ribbon-work is that of looking at a still from a nature film, where we see the dance of mating bodies, ejaculating sperm and eggs into water.

It is a moment of fulfilment.

M. Neelika Jayawardane is associate professor of English at the State University of New York-Oswego, and an Honorary Research Associate at the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA), University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa). She is Culture and Arts Editor at Africa is a Country, a web magazine of African political and cultural affairs, and is currently working on two book projects. Jayawardane was born in Sri Lanka, grew up in the Copperbelt Province in Zambia, and completed her university education in the United States.

Nicholas Hlobo’s ‘Instinctual Voyages’ was on at Lehmann Maupin, NYC from 24 February – 17 April 2016.

Nicholas Hlobo, Idabi, 2016. Ribbons and leather on cotton canvas, 159.4 x 250.2 x 13.7 cm. Photograph: Max Yawney. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.

ARTAFRICA

NEW MONUMENTS

Commune.1 in Cape Town

by Sinazo Chiya

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Comprised of sixteen different artists – with sixteen different voices – ‘New Monuments’ is somewhat irreducible. But this makes sense, since this exhibition attempts to craft, out of cloth, stone and even ashes, an articulation of where we are now, a place we can identify only by its newness, a place we have yet to name.

Set on three rows of five plinths occupying most of the main floor, the show dislocates the norms of space. The viewer has to choose between being pressed to the sides and being amongst the work. All of the pieces are visible; set on different levels, nothing is overshadowed. There is no hierarchy, the viewer’s subjectivity is the sole custodian of significance. ‘New Monuments’ is a revivification of personal resonance as the chief criteria for success. Subsequently, honest critique can only be achieved by analysing the spectrum of utterances, by evaluating the measurable distances between the work. For instance, consider the distance between Takunda Billiat’s Faith Overboard and Siwa Mgoboza’s Live and Let Live: Libertina Leading the Beings. The former presents a personal narrative, a rebellion against a religion that is organised even in its alienation. A book suggestive of the Bible is rendered not historic but prehistoric. Created from a black, viscous lacquer it appears to be formulated by the last vestiges of some primordial ooze. Nothing progressive could possibly come of it. Mgoboza, by contrast, is buoyant; Libertina is lithe without wilting. The fabric on the stand says “made in South Africa, printed by da gama textiles,” yet the work’s title references Delacroix and so the figure becomes an art historical product, stamped by the colony and cultural imperialism. Secular and allegorical, the work signals an inward battle as fraught as the external revolution it is trying to lead. One is a meditation on a personal struggle, the other is colourful political satire.

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THIS PAGE AND THE PREVIOUS PAGE: ‘New Monuments’ installation view at Commune.1, Cape Town; Brett Sieler, Untitled (Two Street Lights Facing Another (Hug)), 2016. Brass and silver, 15 x 15 x 18 cm. Images courtesy of Commune.1.

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TOP TO BOTTOM: Jacob van Schalkwyk, Monument for things that disappear, 2016. Patinated bronze, 2.5 x ø7 cm. Edition of 5; Lungiswa Gqunta, What’s this monument thing?!, 2016. Cement, glass bottles, bed sheets and found fabric 130 x 63 x 63 cm. Images courtesy of Commune.1.

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Another telling chasm lies between Lungiswa Gqunta’s What’s this monument thing? and Jacob Van Schalkwyk’s Monument for things that disappear. The former is placed to the side of the plinth (not the center), occupying the periphery. Made out of immortal material to represent diminishing, it highlights the difference between being and meaning. However, central to this work is its tenderness. It will outlast us, we who are constantly disappearing, but it celebrates us with its permanence. Gqunta, on the other hand, offers an explosive sense of waiting. Composed of unignited molotov cocktails underneath an empty plinth, the anatomy of the work is scant, but the conceptual underpinning is corpulent. Subverted and divested of its function, the plinth is reconstructed as a place that can be destroyed in the pursuit of a truer kind of truth. What is underneath it is infinitely more powerful than what could be on top of it. All the potentiality lies in the possibility of its destruction. While both alter the plinth, one is the site for tenderness and the other for a pregnant anger. The plinth does not dictate the story, it’s an accessory to it.

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Takunda Billiat, Faith Overboard II, 2016. Fibreglass and acrylic paint, 42 x 35 x 35 cm. Image courtesy of Commune.1.

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Siwa Mgoboza, Live and Let Live: Libertina Leading the Beings, 2016. Isishweshwe (Three Cats Cotton), mannequin, tulle, cotton thread, plastic dolls and pine, 64 x 46 x 40 cm. Image courtesy of Commune.1.

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From Marlene Steyn’s dripping kitsch to Martin Wilson’s ashen bastion; across Bronwyn Katz’s mineral-based meditations to Isabel Mertz’s wooden minimalism and Brett Seiler’s crumpled bronze hug, everything matters. Olivié Keck’s Deep Dreamer is at home beside Rory Emmett’s technicolour Some other ou. This show therefore becomes a model for a kind of history in which memorials and monuments can be erected for the smallest and most personal of narratives. Things that used to appear iron-clad, because of bronze castings, fall apart. This is not the space for emperors and heads of state, it is a place for personal deities. The plinth is not a place for worship, it is the site for a virtuous selfishness.

‘New Monuments’ is an exercise in self-determination by those who, like us, were taught to revere the various gods around them. Enshrining humour and pathos, the show redefines the tradition of memorialising. Everything counts, everything has within it the capacity to be momentous. How we used to be is highlighted and razed with lowered plinths. Since we are in a state of becoming, everything is new, and so we need new monuments.

Sinazo Chiya is a Cape Town based writer. Her concern is with art as a social hieroglyph.

‘New Monuments’ showed at Commune.1 in Cape Town from 6 - 23 April 2016.

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LEFT TO RIGHT: Rory Emmett, Some other ou, 2016. Oil paint and found objects, 34 x 10 x 10 cm; Olivie Keck, Deep Dreamer, 2015. Glazed stoneware ceramic, 40 x 23 x 20 cm. Images courtesy of Commune.1.

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Rapaciously YoursFrances Goodman at Richard Taittinger Gallery, New York

by Petra Mason

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Downtown in New York’s once gritty (but still grubby) Lower East Side, champagne royalty Richard Taittinger has opened a five-thousand-square-foot gallery space in a former music hall. While some of the miniature neighbouring gallery spaces resemble neat broom closets, Taittinger’s spot boasts twenty-foot ceilings and can accommodate monumental artworks.

Where once-upon-a-time bawdy vaudeville acts with can-can girls kicked, Johannesburg-based Frances Goodman – the only female artist on the gallery’s line-up – installed her first major U.S. show, ‘Rapaciously Yours,’ just days before The Armory Show opened far further uptown, on the West Side.

By reworking materials that typically signify a glossy version of her gender, for this exhibition Goodman works mostly with acrylic (false) nails as her medium and raids the beauty parlor for materials. The pair of giant ‘stiletto’ nail-shaped warrior shields remind me of Ndebele paintwork patterns and would fit perfectly in Nicki Minaj’s crib. The boys don’t escape her one-two punch either as she works over stereotypical masculine materials: car hoods and back seats embellished with gag-worthy misogynistic comments we’ve all heard too often and in too many languages.

All alone in the back room, her wedding installation The Dream (an edition of two) unfolds. The frothy, soft sculptural piece – comprising worn wedding dresses, beadwork, hand embroidery and sound installation – hangs from floor to ceiling: a pile of ruined expectations, haunted by the ghosts

RAPACIOUSLY YOURS / PETRA MASON

PREVIOUS PAGE AND THIS PAGE: Frances Goodman, Lick It, 2016. False nails, resin, foam, 168 x 80 x 65 cm; Frances Goodman, The Dream, 2010-2016. Silk, lace, organza, satin, beads, embroidery thread, sound installation. Dimensions variable, Edition 2/2. Images courtesy of the artist and Richard Taittinger Gallery, New York.

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Frances Goodman, Medusa, 2013-2014. Acrylic nails, foam, metal, 160 x 100 x 70 cm; Frances Goodman, Lick my Lollipop, 2016. Resin, fiberglass, metal, enamel, 205 x 70 x 40 cm; Frances Goodman, Skin on Skin, 2012. Faux pearls, leather car seats, 137 x 124 x 10 cm, National Museum of African Art – a Smithsonian Institution. All images courtesy of the artist and Richard Taittinger Gallery, New York.


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of modern-day Miss Havishams. The wedding gowns mushroom into a cloud of organza, eggshell whites and pale pinks, heavy with longing and broken dreams.

Goodman explains: “During the course of our lives we are fed a lot of notions about love and marriage. Phrases like ‘dream man,’ ‘dream wedding,’ ‘dream dress’ and ‘dream day’ are channeled towards women in particular. So marriage and weddings are ‘The Dream’ we are taught to aspire to. I also wanted the installation itself to have a dreamlike quality: a haziness, a softness, a space of suspended belief and reality.”

The sound installation features recognisably South African accents – all women’s voices – speaking openly, echoing global sentiments and universal commentary on the state of the modern bride. The voices speak about how today’s cookie-cutter mythology of marriage eerily echoes what might have been said in the 1950s, at the height of the American Dream and before ‘Sex and the Single Girl,’ which is where the rest of the artist’s narrative takes off.

While it’s hardly news that most media is viewed through the male perspective and written by men, nailing the ‘female gaze’ is a lot more complex. We battle visual debris and mixed messages daily via social media. A quick scan of my feed: South African artist Lady $kollie has Instagrammed her green ‘pro nails’ grabbing Jalapeño hot sauce (referencing Beyoncé’s Formation lyrics) and is, amusingly, also ‘honouring’ ex-stripper Blac Chyna for her engagement to a Kardashian. Elsewhere I read that Beyoncé is a feminist – because she kicks ass in short shorts – but I thought she told “Single Ladies (to) (Put A Ring On It)”?

THIS PAGE AND THE NEXT PAGE: Installation view of Frances Goodman's 'Rapaciously Yours' at the Richard Taittinger Gallery; Frances Goodman, Violaceous, 2015. Acrylic, nails, glue, polyurethane. All images courtesy of the artist and Richard Taittinger Gallery, New York


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For Goodman, this confusion is her playground. She even gets to stick her tongue out at Miley Cyrus, who trotted past the gallery and snapped, then Instagrammed, a gigantic tongue made from false nails titled Lick It., Cyrus’ post racked up more than two hundred and fifty thousand ‘likes.’ As Goodman told me over bagels for breakfast in New York recently, “What I like about the story is that when I was thinking about the tongue piece (and getting inspiration for it) I referred to [Cyrus’] music videos and her iconic tongue pictures, so I guess she was looking at me looking at her.”

Adding to the cartoonish appeal, Goodman even looks like Archie’s Veronica (from the Archie Comics book series), but in her case women are her best friends and she’s certainly not competing for Archie’s attention. She’s too busy in her studio and too busy being strategic – how else does one get a New York exhibition?

“After doing a number of residencies in the New York area I built up a network of people who are supportive and appreciative of my work. While upstate at Art Omi I met a curator who really loved The Dream and thought it should be exhibited in New York. She introduced me to the Richard Taittinger Gallery.”

As for its future, so far The Dream is fulfilling its promise of ‘happily ever after.’ The second edition was purchased by the 21st Century Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, and the first will soon travel to Angola as part of the Sindika Dokola Foundation.

Petra Mason is a cultural historian based in New York and Miami (www.petramason.com; Instagram: @petra_mason; Twitter: @PetraMason).

‘Rapaciously Yours’ by Frances Goodman ran from 26 February – 16 April 2016 at Richard Taittinger Gallery, New York.


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OBLIQUE:The so-called fruits of life

Abrie Fourie at Fried Contemporary, Pretoria

by Tracy Murinik

Abrie Fourie, Corridor, Steinbächle, Ilshofen, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany, 2010. Hand printed black & white photograph on Baryta paper, 30 x 30 cm. Image courtesy the artist, Fried Contemporary Pretoria and SMAC Gallery Cape Town.

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Oblique: angle; thought; observation; reference; inference; narrative. Image. Soundtrack. Film. Commentary. Proposition. Imaginary.

When the act of reading confronts the act oflooking.

Interpretation: a projected search for meaning.

In addition to a tightly edited selection of photographs in Abrie Fourie’s recent Pretoria-based iteration of ‘OBLIQUE: The so-called fruits of life’ – his ongoing project since 2011 – at Fried Contemporary, there are several other narratives that Fourie brings into this exhibition that both inform and reflect upon the works on show.

These include short excerpts as wall texts/artworks from Ivan Vladislavićs The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories, of which three stories are reprinted in Fourie’s 2011 ‘OBLIQUE’ catalogue. On one wall, for example: “The new perspective changes my sense of the place completely. It clarifies things and I am sorry to have seen it.*” On another: “What about the story the writer would have written the day after he died?*” The exhibition also includes a narration by South African actor Marcel van Heerden of a text by critic and writer Sean O’Toole, ‘The so-called fruits of lives.’ The narration is part of a film installation featuring a series of slow-changing slides of all the images included in

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Abrie Fourie, Corridor, Steinbächle, Ilshofen, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany, 2010. Hand printed black & white photograph on Baryta paper, 30 x 30 cm. Image courtesy the artist, Fried Contemporary Pretoria and SMAC Gallery Cape Town.

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Fourie’s follow-up publication, Labor Berlin 11, OBLIQUE, produced in 2012. This was the film’s first screening. Much of the film, in the space/timeframe between the slideshows, comprises projected white light against the cubicle’s wall, together with the narrated soundtrack: a story of migrancy, borders, the imaginary, desperation, survival and a longing for meaning; to be meaningful.

His photographic works on the show are comprised of images taken mostly in various spaces in Pretoria, where Fourie was born and in Berlin, where he currently lives, with several other smaller images included that reference other parts of South Africa, Germany and one of neighbouring Switzerland. Most of the images are architectural to some degree – of an interior space; or a detail of a structure; or of an image shot of the outside from within. Those images that are not of formal structures nevertheless make reference to architecture, even when makeshift.

Fourie’s photographs are bold, interesting, clearly framed and delineated, formal – even those of seemingly familiar moments of everyday banality – and they are opaquely beautiful. Narrated by the artist through seemingly straightforward captions, they are titled by stating what you are looking at and where: Kaffee Schmidt, Schererstraße, Berlin, Germany; Korridor, Steinbächle, Ilshofen, Baden-Württemburg, Germany; Detail: Voortrekker Monument, South Africa; Empty room view, Plein Street, Sunnyside, Pretoria, Gauteng, South Africa, for example. The titles are only seemingly straightforward though, because as much as they locate what you are looking at, they provide no context to why you are looking at them. Their connections to one another appear to happen at a formal rather than a strictly thematic level.

Abrie Fourie, Empty room view, Plein Street, Sunnyside, Pretoria, Gauteng, South Africa, 2001. Lightjet print diasec, 30 x 41cm. Image courtesy the artist, Fried Contemporary Pretoria and SMAC Gallery Cape Town

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What are we supposed to read onto, or into them? How do the narrative texts Fourie introduces guide how we might, or should, read them?

Poignant, for me, is how Fourie has for this particular iteration narrowed down his imagery to works reflecting his two home towns (and home countries): two ideologically structured spaces whose borders both shifted in the early 1990s; spaces inhabiting both the intimacies of home and the obstructions to same. Pretoria and Berlin. Spaces left and returned to. Perhaps, for Fourie, spaces of shifting perspective. Places marked physically and psychically by boundaries of control, containment, inclusion and exclusion. The inside and the outside. Points of one’s positioning. Obscured vision, looking out or looking in; how much and how far you can see. Oblique points from which to interpret and imagine what it is that you are seeing or looking for within the space of the unknown, which is just out of reach. Into the space of imagining and the slippage of photography’s ‘real’ into the projected space of interpretation and fiction, based on the clues we believe we are reading, but always from the photograph’s prescribed view: its incomplete picture. Fourie comments that his approach is “not so much defining a place, as circling the relationship between spaces, sign and self; it hints at that silent tension between absence and presence, abstraction and reality.”

Tracy Murinik is a writer, commentator and curator based in Johannesburg.

Abrie Fourie’s ‘OBLIQUE: The so-called fruits of life’ was on at Fried Contemporary (Pretoria) from 31 March - 30 April 2016.

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LEFT TO RIGHT: Abrie Fourie, Corridor, Steinbächle, Ilshofen, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany, 2010. Hand printed black & white photograph on Baryta paper, 30 x 30 cm; Installation view, ‘Oblique: The So-Called Fruits of Life’ at Fried Contemporary, Pretoria. All images courtesy the artist, Fried Contemporary Pretoria and SMAC Gallery Cape Town

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Self-definition Through Time

A joint review of 'The Time is Out of Joint' and'Two Suns in a Sunset' at the Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE

by Zoltán Somhegyi

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Is it past and future or, perhaps, continuous present? Former events influence our today and shape our tomorrow. This fluidity of temporal perspectives results in the phenomenon whereby the reflection of real events has an impact on the potential future. The future is thus always imaginary, since we can never fully define and predict our destiny. What is less obvious, however, is that the past itself is just as unknown as the future. Therefore, imagination, as well as the fertile mixture of real and fictitious, can be an important element not only in our expectation of the future but in our understanding of the past too.

These considerations are apt for both of the exhibitions on review. The Sharjah Art Foundation’s two large-scale shows work together wonderfully, even if, from the outset, they seem to be ‘formally’ quite different. The first, titled ‘The Time is Out of Joint,’ is a group show of mostly recent work, curated by Tarek Abou El Fetouh. The other exhibition, curated by Sharjah Art Foundation’s President Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, is titled ‘Two Suns in a Sunset’ and features Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige (displaying their work from the late 1990s until today). In a way, each exhibition analyses the power of time and its effect on us, all subjects of its strength.

“Please feel free to take a picture,” reads the short description – in the accompanying catalogue – of one of the works by Hadjithomas and Joreige. The ambiguous imperative, however, does not (only)

2/5

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PREVIOUS PAGE AND THIS PAGE: Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Faces, 2009. 42 photographic prints on aluminium with drawing, dimensions variable. Co-produced by Sharjah Biennial 9. Installation view, SAF Art Spaces, 2016. Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, The Circle of Confusion, 1997 – 2004. 3000 photographic fragments stamped and glued on a mirror, fragment to be taken away by the visitors, 300 x 400 cm. Courtesy of the artists. Installation view, SAF Art Spaces, 2016. Courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation. Images courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation.

SELF-DEFINITION THROUGH TIME / DR. ZOLTÁN SOMHEGYI

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refer to the act of photographing the exhibited artwork. It can also be taken literally: “please take a fragment of the artwork.” The monumental installation of 3 x 4 metres, titled The Circle of Confusion is a panoramic view of Beirut, cut into three thousand pieces. Behind each numbered fragment is the statement “Beirut does not exist,” and upon lifting the pieces, a mirror – underlying the entire installation – becomes increasingly visible. As the image of Beirut gradually disappears, the artwork reflects more and more of the visitors, who will carry the city’s constantly fading image with them. Like most of the other work exhibited, this piece departs from the events and context of the Lebanese capital – including the cruel civil war – and from the possibilities of memory, hence the re-elaboration of individual experience, which in turn forms yet another collective.

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3/5

TOP TO BOTTOM: Hicham Benohoud, Ânes situ [Donkey in situation], 2013. digital photographs, 50 x 75 cm each. Courtesy of Cultures Interface, Casablanca and the artist. Installation view, ‘The Time is Out of Joint,’ SAF Art Spaces, 2016. Photograph: Shanavas Jamaluddin; Wael Shawky, Cabaret Crusades:The Secrets of Karbala, 2015. Single channel HD-video, colour 5.1 dolby surround sound system,120 minutes. Courtesy of Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut and Hamburg and the artist. Installation view, ‘The Time is Out of Joint, SAF Art Spaces, 2016. Photograph: Shanavas Jamaluddin. Images courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation.


ARTAFRICA

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4/5

The artists constantly examine the interconnectedness of history and its presentation or even presentability: the ways in which past events can be re-told and reactivated through various forms of art. This is why the exhibition incorporates a wide variety of media: photographic, sound and video installations, sculptures and works on paper, all presenting the temporary result of the artist’s research; temporary results, since they do not offer a precise and final answer but rather an invitation to join them as they continue their attempts at making sense of the past.

Parallel to ‘Two Suns in a Sunset,’ ‘The Time is Out of Joint’ investigates the interconnectedness of temporal and physical perspectives, inviting the visitor to get lost between cities, events, here and there, past and present. Following on Andalusian philosopher Ibn Arabi’s concept of time as a fluid place and place as a frozen time, the exhibition ‘re-enacts’ two previous art events, the First Arab Arts Biennale in Baghdad in 1974 and the China/Avant-Garde exhibition in Beijing in 1989, and also ‘pre-enacts’ a future event, the Equator Conference to be held in Yogyakarta in 2022. The exhibition comprises video works, installations and photographs (four of them new commissions) and is a critical evaluation – or re-evaluation and pre-evaluation – of the aforementioned events, questioning the influence of time in our own self-understanding.

Both exhibitions challenge the viewer by confronting our understanding of the relationship between context and the individual, highlighting the fragility of the illusion of stability. We can understand

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Two Suns in a Sunset, various works. Installation view, SAF Art Spaces, 2016. Courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation.


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that not only is the future unforeseeable from the present perspective, but also that the past and its personal rendering – i.e. memory – is perpetually reshaped and its fading is unstoppable. Our only possibility is to be constantly working on memory, collective and personal, at the same time. An important manifestation of this is the series of collateral events, talks, conferences and presentations that accompany the exhibitions. Also, as part of the group show, we find a Reading Room with a wide selection of publications and a consultable digital archive. Obviously, as we can learn from the shows themselves, we can neither stop the fading of remembrance, nor make the future more foreseeable. However, by working on our self-understanding we can definitely strengthen our resistance against the challenging condition of the overwhelming constraints of time.

Dr. Zoltán Somhegyi is a Hungarian art historian, holding a Ph.D. in aesthetics. Based in the United Arab Emirates and teaching at the University of Sharjah, he is Middle East Editor-at-Large of ART AFRICA. (www.zoltansomhegyi.com)

‘Two Suns in a Sunset: Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’ was on until 8 May 2016. ‘The Time is Out of Joint’ will be on show until 12 June 2016. Both exhibitions were shown at the Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE.

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Postcards of War, 1997-2006. Edition of 18 postcards of war, 10 x 15cm each. Courtesy of the artist. Installation view, SAF Art Spaces, 2016. Courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation.


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