At 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair

The Cinematic eye of West African photographer Paul Kodjo: The Ivorian Miracle in the 1970’s

Saturday May 4, 2019, 6:30 – 7:30pm

Forum Room/1-54 at Industria, 775 Washington Street, New York City

Panelists:

Ananias Leki Dago (photographer and founder of Les Rencontres du Sud)

Antawan Byrd (art historian and assistant curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago).

Moderator:

Claude Grunitzky (media and culture entrepreneur, founder of TRACE and the media platform TRUE Africa).

During this panel, we will look at what makes Paul Kodjo’s photographic practice different from other West African studio photographers of the same period. Ananias Leki Dago has worked for the last ten years at preserving Kodjo’s photographic archive and will describe the artist’s journey, while Antawan Byrd will speak of Kodjo’s cinematic approach and aesthetic engagement with visual art and popular media, in particular the photo-novel. Claude Grunitzky will bring his own experience with popular media while highlighting this unique record of Abidjan being reshaped by social cultural changes and modernist design and architecture.

To register click on the link

Photography exhibition at 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair/ in New York, 3-5 May 2019.

May 2: VIP viewing with two private tours, 11-12pm and 3-4pm.

Saturday May 4: Panel Discussion 6:30 – 7:30 pm

Special Project Booth 26 / Industria, 775 Washington Street, Manhattan.

Isabel S. Wilcox is pleased to announce an exhibition from her collection of the work of the photographer from the Ivory Coast, Paul Kodjo.

Paul Kodjo’s black and white photographs are being shown in the US for the first time.  Working within the tradition of African traditional studio photography but pushing its boundaries, Kodjo photographed his subjects outside of the studio in staged modern domestic indoors and in the streets of Abidjan, creating a unique record of Abidjan during the years of the economic boom of the early post-independence years.

Kodjo used a cinematic approach and introduced movement and dramatic tensions drawing the viewer into his subjects’ lives: their relationships and emotions. He turned to the tradition of the photo-roman/photo-novel that were published in the national periodical Ivoire Dimanchewith wide exposure.  Kodjo’s photographs, which also include candid shots of private events and fashion photography, echo the shifting social and familial dynamics as well as the renewal of the urban landscape shaped by modernist design and architecture.  The exhibition is curated by Isabel S. Wilcox and Lydie Diakhate.

Panel discussion: Saturday May 4^th, 2019/ 6:30 – 7:30 pm.

The cinematic eye of West African photographer Paul Kodjo: The Ivorian Miracle in the 1970’s.

Panelists: Ananias Leki Dago (photographer) and Antawan Byrd (curator and art historian)

Moderator: Claude Grunitzky (media and culture entrepreneur)

Location: Forum Room/1-54 at Industria, Manhattan

For the first time in the last 14 years a year has elapsed since I have set foot on the African continent. Health issues got in the way of my travels, however my engagement with African art has not waned. Indeed during the past year I have been discovering the 1970’s photographic work of Paul Kodjo from Abidjan,  in the Ivory Coast. I am about to fly out to Abidjan to meet the artist who is now in his 80’s. I will be there when he signs the photographs that I have bought and discover the city!

The first time I saw Kodjo’s black and white photographs I found them immediately compelling. 

Working within the tradition of African traditional studio photography but pushing its boundaries, Kodjo photographed his subjects outside of the studio in staged modern domestic indoors and in the streets of Abidjan,  creating a unique record of Abidjan during  the years  of the economic boom of the early post-independence years. While blurring the lines between the real and the imaginary Kodjo used a cinematic approach and introduced movement and dramatic tensions drawing the viewer into his subjects lives: their relationships and emotions. These carefully crafted scenes  echo the shifting social and familial dynamics against the backdrop of  renewal of the urban landscape shaped by modernist design and architecture. But they also speak to the city dweller’s aspirations.

I first responded to the emotional aspect which I feel is lacking in some of contemporary photography which is more focused on the surface aesthetic and loved the sets and his talent as a portraitist.

Then as I learned about his practice which also includes photojournalism, fashion and event photography, and the condition under which these images had been brought recently to the public I was hooked! 

So hooked that I will now be showing Paul Kodjo’s works  from my collection at the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair in New York city, May 2-5, 2019. I have now turned into a curator ( with the help of curator Lydie Diakhate). The exhibition will be complemented by a panel on Saturday May 4th on Kodjo’s work. The panelists are Ananias Lèki Dago (photographer from Abidjan and Founder of Les Rencontres du Sud) ) and Antawan Byrd (art historian and assistant curator of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago) . The moderator is Claude Grunitzky (Founder of TRACE magazine  and TRUE Africa) .   

It was through Ananias Lèki Dago, photographer and founder of Les Rencontres du Sud ( a photographic platform in Ivory Coast in support of Ivoirian photography) , that I first came across Paul Kodjo’s work. In 2008 Paul Kodjo had asked Ananias to take on his photographic archive. It was a mixed blessing.  It was an honor, as Kodjo had been one of the  preeminent photographers of the 1970’s in Abidjan, but a huge challenge as the negatives were in very bad conditions due to terrible climatic conditions, and economic and political instability. 

“ On the day [I] returned to Abidjan, I saw a boy carrying a large trunk on his head walking towards me. When he reached me, he put his burden down at my feet. It was Paul who had sent him. I still remember the shivers that went down my spine  when he opened the trunk and I saw the roaches, spiders, and other insects, all too alive, scuttle away from their hiding places. I put my hand on the pile of negatives and old prints damaged by humidity. ….In the end, I agreed to be responsible for taking care of Paul Kodjo’s archive.” 

Ananias took the archive to Paris where the negatives were then shielded from the negative effects of the humidity but it took a few years before he had the time and the money to be able to fully start the preservation process with the help of the printer, Toros. By 2018 Ananias was able to show portions of the archive to the Musèe du Quai Branly in Paris who bought a selection.  The photographs are not vintage but contemporary prints made from this archive. As a result a few show signs of this history, others look totally pristine. As an art historian by training I liked those traces of history.  There is so much artistic work that has vanished in Africa and the history of its artistic production is still in the making. 

Ananias send me a whole lot of information.  I discovered that Kodjo was one of the few at the time that had sought formal training in photography: He had followed a correspondence course with the New York Institute of Photography when he was quite young and then continued his formal training in photography and cinematography in Paris in the late sixties.  

He was the first in the Ivory Coast and possibly (?) in West Africa  to turn to popular media for the production and dissemination of his photographic production. He adopted the roman-photo or photo-novel,  which was published in the national periodical Ivoire Dimanche with broad popular exposure. 

I did research of my own spending hours at Northwestern Herkovits library and the New York Schomburg library where I found  copies of the periodical Ivoire Dimanche which include Paul Kodjo’s roman-photos (photo-novels). Not only did I read the roman-photos but also read many articles that spoke of marriage ( infidelity, monogamy, polygamy,)  shifting aspirations, women and men at work which are all subjects raised in Kodjo’s roman-photos. 

Paul Kodjo worked in photography, in cinema; he also was an actor ( there is a wonderful picture of him playing the role of a woman in a play)  and a musician.  

Kodjo embraced contemporaneity in a way that artists do today in terms of culture, technology, and media. He deserves his rightful place in the pantheon of West African photographers. 

It is October 2017, in Merti, Kenya, a town in the middle of a desert-like landscape where the temperatures average up to 100 degrees under a blistering and relentless sun. Dee Belliere, the founder of MEAK, has gathered a scout, a male nurse and a couple of other volunteers to search for more patients that might need eye care, those that might have been missed at the first round up.

This is happening while at Merti’s hospital the medical team is screening patients and operating on the ones that need surgery. During the week 2652 patients will be screened, 201 cataract operations and 578 teeth extractions will take place. An outstanding success! I am so honored that through my fundraising campaign I was able to participate and help MEAK make such a difference in so many lives.

I am one of the volunteers for that afternoon expedition and we all climb into the truck that will take us North from the town, deeper into the desert. Merti is located in the eastern part of the Isiolo district in Northern Kenya.

During the drive I stand in the truck, and lean out of the window to better take in the azure sky dotted with small white clouds, and the flat sandy barren landscape that unfolds around us. There is very little to look at. There are no exotic leafy tree, nor the ubiquitous acacia tree, no bush or plant and no distant mountain to admire. In the very far distance and only seen with binoculars trees with weaver nests hanging on their branches, like fluffy decorations are possible points of interest.

The emptiness is deceptive however; it is mirage-like. When we stop for a photography moment the emptiness slowly becomes alive.  A tiny spot in the distance is actually moving.  I wait, and as time unfolds and my eyes adjust, the image expands. The dot metamorphoses itself into a human figure . I discern one donkey, then two, then three! I am intensely aware of time, space, and movement. I smile.

I find myself strangely happy! This landscape devoid of seductive luxuriousness feels so freeing. I feel at peace. Maybe it is in this bareness that I can truly be in my own skin, no longer compulsively distracted; Nothing to cling to, to romanticize, or to ruminate about.

I remember ten years ago the first time I felt like that. My then lover and I were driving north to go to Marsabit. We drove in silence, his attention solely focused on the treacherous road and mine on the increasing desert like landscape. We were in synch, I remember feeling. A Kenyan safari guide, farmer and conservationist who thrives on harsh conditions, he could feel I liked the bareness, the starkness and harshness of the land with the occasional herdsman and camels appearing along the road. I have no idea why it felt right perhaps because both of us had so much to let go of: He, a deceased wife, and I, a failed marriage and loss of family life. That stark landscape suited our broken hearts. I have since gravitated towards the North of Kenya during my yearly visits where conditions are harsh and the land can be unforgiving yet so deeply moving.

We did meet a little boy who has one malformed foot and Dee immediately gets on her phone and makes arrangements for him to be seen in Nairobi. She will have to find the money to pay for this.

During this time in Merti I am mostly a witness. I observe the MEAK medical team screening, giving care, doing surgeries and MEAK leadership making plans for the next eye missions. I offer my help where needed. Accompanying us are a photographer, Tom Munro and a video maker in charge of documenting the mission.

We all sleep in the same make shift camp, in the middle of the town and eat at the same table in the mess. The mission is going well, no unexpected complication has cropped up. However something is making me uncomfortable. At each meal the medical team, all black Kenyans, sit together at one end of the table and the rest of us, all white women and men from England or the US sit at the other end. Granted, many (the team and us) are on our cell phones, the team prefers to speak Swahili, and this is not a social occasion, but still I feel uncomfortable with this racial, cultural, and hierarchical divide and distance. I express my discomfort but lethargy prevails on both sides until the video artist starts to interview each member of the medical team and their stories become heard. That is the beginning of a slight change, a relaxation of that distance.

The real shift happens when a snake appears while we are all hanging in the yard. It slithers quietly towards one of the huts where a tent had been erected. I notice it and ring the alarm. Mayhem ensues. Everyone is searching for the snake, first in the hut and tent then in the adjacent huts and tents! I ask: Do snakes go up walls? Can it have really traveled to another hut?

Nobody knows but every one is acting as if there is nothing stopping this snake. The driver refuses to sleep in the doomed hut and decides to sleep in the Land Rover. Some of the female nurses decide to sleep in the bus parked in the yard. All of us are talking to each other, laughing and forgetting our differences, united in our fear of the snake!

By the last day we are sharing stories about dating in different cultures and communities. We have not become best friends but we feel closer, we shared something. We are more ready to sit next to each other and inquire about each other’s lives.

I also watch the comings and goings of the people who live in Merti. They belong to the Borana tribe. I learn that they have more in common with people in Ethiopia then other Kenyan tribes. 99% of the Borana tribe lives in Ethiopia! It sure brings home the craziness of the original partitioning of the region by the Western powers. The people from Merti feel a bit forgotten by the government in Nairobi. Very little government medical funding reaches them and with the endless nurses strike in the country, there is almost no activity in the hospital. They are extremely grateful for MEAK’s medical help.

I discover a peaceful community. It wasn’t always so I am told. Three years ago you could regularly hear gunshots. Today the sounds I hear – crying children, the occasional motorcycle or car passing by, the yellow weavers chirping away, the sounds of goats and obviously the call for prayers, as it is a Muslim town – suggests that times are better. However, the relentless heat and drought are a big strain; during three days of our time there the charity organization Action against Hunger was distributing food to mothers and children. Life is precarious here.

On our last day the community and its dignitaries express their gratitude to all of the team and the elder women of the town sing and dance for us. We all get scarves, tunics and wraps!

Thank you all of you who have helped!

The next day we fold camp and wait for the plane from Tropic Air  to take us further north in the Ndotos mountains where we will hike for the next 7 days. It took us a while to  find the airstrip! Another adventure! Check out my next post for more images of the hike .

UNMASKED: EXHIBITION IN CHELSEA CELEBRATING AXIS GALLERY 20 YEAR OF SHOWING AFRICAN ART

Seminal Cape Town artist, Sue Williamson’s photographic installation, Joyce Seipei – as a mother- Winnie Madikiza Mandela, 1988 at Axis Gallery which addresses the South Africa Truth And Reconciliation hearings is so timely. While it relates to the court appearance of Winnie Mandela and reveals the truth behind the atrocities during Apartheid it points to how facts and statements can be manipulated: Viewers can shuttle fragments of statements within the work, reordering truth and shifting appearance and interpretation. Sound familiar?

Her work is part of a larger exhibition Unmasked curated by Gary Van Wyck and Lisa Brittan for the Axis gallery in New York in honor of the 20^th anniversary of their gallery that includes the work of Theo Eshetu, Jebila Okongwu, Graeme Williams, Sue Williamson and Herve Youmbi.

True to their original stated mission of highlighting the tensions between ‘traditional’ and ‘contemporary’ African art in Western minds they have put together a group of works, largely conceptual, that challenges the West misconception of non western art, its idea of authenticity in African art, and reveals underlying social and economic power dynamics between Third and First World. As if this was not quite ambitious enough they top it all by debunking the idea of the American Dream. Graeme Williams’s triptych, which incorporates photographs of urban and suburban environments with collaged ‘posters’ that reference an idealization of America that excludes its black population, reveal the bleak physical reality of the American dream.

Probing the underbelly beneath surfaces appearances the exhibition includes three stills from Theo Eshetu’s Atlas Fractured, a multimedia installation shown at Documenta 4, that layers images from diverse cultures and periods. Portraits of living people were projected over ethnographic masks. The layered faces are set against a black background in the photographs and gain in intensity. While quite beautiful they are disturbing. Theo Eshetu remarks: “The now is grotesque, uncertain, and burdened by the ghosts of the past. Yet there is also beauty in the present, a vitality for new justices, a search for new harmonies, and, contrary to facile political tendencies, acceptance and desire for hybrid states hitherto unknown.”

Expanding on this idea of the hybrid, the masks included in Herve Youmbi’s multi-media installations entitled Visages des Masques/Faces of Masks combine diverse cultural sources. They are a hoot: One of them includes the Halloween Ghostface mask from Wes Craven’movie Scream. They debunk the Western popular notion of clear stylistic distinction in the African masking tradition or tribal styles.

I was particularly intrigued by this body of work. Youmbi initially in 2013 commissioned Bamileke craftspeople from Cameroon to create a Ku’ngang mask incorporating the face of a Dogon mask from Mali. The mask was later activated during a ritual ceremony and thereby accepted by the Bamileke leaders. Youmbi filmed the ceremony and the video was included in the original installation. I had already encountered the notion of hybridity in the Yoruba masking tradition when I had done s research on the subject years ago during my post graduate studies. Indeed Yoruba masking has shown itself to be open to innovation and able to integrate elements from Islam, Christianity and the Western world, thereby keeping it relevant to the new generations. The Gelede mask includes modern day motifs such as motorcycles, planes, and other mass-produced items such a sneakers, Halloween latex masks. Youmbi expands on this phenomenon more recently with these masks that incorporate, or should I say, appropriate western elements.

SOUTH AFRICAN ART IN NEW YORK

With Performa 2017 with its focus on South Africa in full swing in New York City this week there is much African art to see and not to miss. No need here to pay for a 14 hours plane fare to Joburg to discover the works of some of the most creative talents in Africa. All have an international presence and have been shown extensively in Biennales, museums and fairs.

Photographer and visual activist Zanele Muholi who is best known internationally for her ongoing portrait series Faces and Phases which captures LGBTQI life in her native South Africa will be participating in a series of conversations with other artists and writers. She will be exhibiting publicly her photographs, perform with local and Africa based musicians and organizing with black LBGTQI communities throughout the burroughs.

Multidisciplinary artist Mohau Modisakeng (b.1986, Soweto, South Africa) is choreographing a street procession called ZION of 20 dancers in Harlem Saturday November 11 from 1 to 7pm. As Performa describes it, each dancer will be carrying “an array of personal possessions, various pieces of baggage, and furniture via an exodus choreography of walking, running, jumping, falling, leaning, and sitting – enacting the blistered legacy of segregation, violent displacement, colonialism and apartheid coursing through South African history.” Modisakeng was one of two artists shown at the South Africa Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale where he showed his video Passage. More recently, and further expanding on the same theme of displacement he put together a striking performance in Cape Town that I was lucky to see during my visit to Cape Town. While Modisakeng privileges a poetic aesthetic in all his works there is no equivocation as to the intensity and urgency of his message.

Nicholas Hlobo (b. 1975, Cape Town) whose studio I was privileged to see in Cape Town is presenting umBhovuzo: The Parable of the Sower at the Harlem Parish on November 18 and 19. He is challenging expectations of sexuality and identity within Xhosa culture. Here men clad in dresses and working with cotton and silk at sewing machines point to issues of domesticity, labor and globalization. It is useful to know that much of Hlobo’s work involves fabric and materials such as leather, silk, ribbon and sowing and all of it is done by him and male attendants.

Tracey Rose, (b.1974, Durban, South Africa) a seminal figure in post-apartheid contemporary art, has her video work in the AFROGLOSSIA Film Program at 32 2^nd Avenue.

Four short films created by the NEST COLLECTIVE from Nairobi are also included in AFROGLOSSIA. I met up with Jim Chuchu and Dr. Njoki Ngumi of The Nest Collective when I was recently in Nairobi. Jim is a visual artist (photographer and video artist) and Njoki a medical doctor who in 2012 joined together with 10 other like-minded individuals to create new content and support creative endeavors. They explore through film, music, fashion, the visual arts and literature modern identities, re-imagine the past and re-mix their futures. Their first important ground breaking production was a critically- acclaimed queer anthology film Stories of Our Lives which was screened in over 80 countries. However it is banned in Kenya. They are presenting this time a new production: We Need Prayers : This One Went to Market which questions the ways the global art industry frames African art.

They also recently came out with a new fashion book ‘Not African Enough’ that challenges the narrow expectations of what African design looks like. I am impressed by the quality of the work and I like their forward focus. See you there on Sunday, November 12 th at 6:45 pm at 32 Second Avenue !

Unfortunately I was not able to see William Kentridge’s performance Ursonate . It got booked pretty quickly. The good news: he is coming back in 2018 at the Park Armory.

On the other hand I did get to see South African artist Kemang Wa Lehure’s production I cut my skin to liberate the splinter with theater director Chuma Sopotela at the Connelly theater last weekend.

Wa Lehulere’s installation not only claimed the stage but also spilled over into most of the theater.   It became quickly clear that the order of things was being inverted. On the stage, ceramic dogs were positioned amidst musical stands and mysterious signaling hands and faced the parterre where Wa Lehulere had arranged his sculptural instruments and where the sound performance was going to take place. I recognized the wooden and metal sculptures that I had seen just a month before in his studio in Cape Town. There was the wooden pyramid with its glass tube that functioned as a traveling tunnel for messages in glass bottles; the bird houses which reference the first female black artist in South Africa, the wooden school desk that point to Wa Lehulere’s school years when he chose to not speak Afrikaan: This was then his first act of protest against apartheid.

And again the ceramic dogs which appear in most of his installations these days. During the visit at the studio he explained their link to mythology: if you took sleep from a dog’s eye you could see into the spiritual world. They are for him metaphors for the past, for memory. In addition those kinds of dogs are attack and guard dogs in South Africa. By including them he points again to what happened during apartheid. Black people were forbidden to own dogs and if they did, the dogs were killed.

To the sound of drums, of make-do strings and wind instruments, Wa Lehulere and his female protagonist seemed to be enacting a story as well as engaging in child play. He pushed a wheel with two crutches just like I had just seen a little boy play in Kenya out in the desert town of Merti.

I hope you take advantage of this wonderful opportunity at our doorstep if you live in New York City.

DISCOVER THROUGH MY PHOTOGRAPHS LIFE IN REMOTE PARTS OF KENYA 

HELP ME MAKE MEAK EYE MISSION IN KENYA CHANGE AS MANY LIVES AS POSSIBLE.

My 60th birthday is coming up on September 9th , two months from now and I have chosen to challenge myself. On October 1, 2017 I will join the MEAK medical team on an eye mission in Merti, Kenya followed by a 6 days walk in Kenya’s rugged Ndotos mountains. I have committed to help fund Meak’s eye mission where the medical team plans to restore the sight of over 200 patients. To donate find link to donation page at the end of the post.

Screening.

Post-op after two cataracts removed

Life in the bush

MEAK RESTORES SIGHT AND REPAIRS HEARTS. I have been an active supporter of MEAK’s work in Kenya for the last ten years and a witness to their life changing work as it organizes and funds medical and surgical missions often in remote areas of the bush where there is little access to health care. MEAK is caring, gutsy, lean, and very effective. You can find out more on MEAK by going to Meak.org.
I have a special fondness for Kenya. My family owned property there when I was a teenager and I have been going back every year for the last 13 years. Being there has helped me put my troubles in perspective for one and embrace humanity in a deeper and more inclusive way. In other words it repaired my heart and restored my sight !
Blindness has also touched my family in a very deep way. My Bulgarian grandfather became blind at the age of 11 and while he was able to become a famous composer he needed the constant help of his family and loved ones. Restoring eyesight allows the family to be more productive.
Please help me reach my goal of $10,000 and make my birthday memorable. For US citizens who wish to donate and want a tax letter I am collaborating with Eyes On Kenya a 501 (c) 3 US non for profit to fund MEAK’s mission. Please write a check to Eyes On Kenya and send it to Eyes On Kenya, 487 East Main Street, Suite 345, Mount Cisco, NY 10549-3420

 OR donate online.  Click on EYESONKENYA  and donate on the site. First put the amount and then select the payment option. 

ALL the funds raised will go directly to MEAK’s October eye mission. Any amount makes a difference!

Usually I like to go to see the Venice Biennale long after its late spring opening, any time from September to November. This year was different because several African artists whose work I own were going to be included either in the Biennale Pavilions or in side events. I wanted to meet up with the artists and share the moment with them.

I showed up for the preview week and while the streets of Venice were not yet overrun with tourists, the vaporettos (water buses) that ferry us back and forth to the Guardini and the Arsenale were jammed packed  with art enthusiasts from all over the world. People were queuing up to enter the various pavilions in the Guardini. Patience and persistence and a sense of humor were one’s best assets!

The South African pavilion was worth the wait! Two excellent videos installations graced its small allocated space. Mohau Modisakeng’s black and white three channel video installation Passage was particularly gripping and aesthetically beautiful.

I became the witness of three characters, each distinctive by the tailored clothes they wore, and each one lying in a slowly sinking rowing boat struggling with the rising water. Modisakeng makes reference to past transatlantic slavery and comments on current displacements of people created by political and economic upheaval. While the restraint of the performance conveys a dignity to the characters, who never try to escape and allows the viewer not to feel overwhelmed, the watching does take you down underwater leaving one out of breadth to say the least.

Candice Breitz’s seven channel installation Love Story was just as absorbing and disturbing. First I was watching two well-known actors, Julianne Moore and Alec Baldwin, alternate impersonating two refugees on an oversized screen. I was captivated by their performance in part because of the harrowing stories they were recounting but also because they are two Hollywood actors that I am familiar with. Breitz made it easy. It was just like going to the movies. However it is a performance. Then in a room behind on 6 smaller screens I saw the real refugees tell their true story that I could only hear if I took the step of picking up the earphones and of listening to their voices. Breitz makes a point here of having star actors overshadow the ‘real” refugees highlighting the role of the media structures in telling the refugee story and “overshadowing” the personal stories.

After a couple of days I set off to trek through the web of streets of Venice in search of the other African Pavilions that were scattered across the lagoon. On top of my list was to attend the opening of the Kenya Pavilion whose location had been in constant flux prior to its opening. At first it was to be in Dorsudoro and its location was included in the map provided by the Biennale team. I then received an email from Lavinia Calva of ArtLabAfrica the night before the opening informing me that the venue had changed location and was now far in the Guidecca at the Palladio school. The process had been a real challenge she said :”it’s been a real struggle. They lost two places for lack of funding. The artists have been brilliant and sorted everything out themselves with zero support!”. However because of the last minute change the Kenya Pavilion is not listed on the Biennale map.

Just hearing that made me determined to be there. After two days of being spoon fed art I was ready to work harder to encounter it. I walked across the Dorsudoro, feeling that I was walking away from a Venice that makes me look back and romanticize history. I was also shaking off this thing that happens to me when I see too much art all at once, this feeling that I am consuming art, and turning into someone that seeks to be entertained or inspired and reassured about humanity. I reached the Zattere vaporetto station where I picked up the waterbus that crosses the Canale della Guidecca and dropped me off at the Palanca stop. I was now in a different Venice, one where the working class Venitiens live. It was around four o’clock and school was out. I passed mothers pushing strollers with their young children zipping past them on their scooters; here was the laundrymat, the convenience store. I walked deep into the Guidecca and I knew that I was getting close when I saw Simon Njami holding forth at an outdoor table. I finally arrived in front of the Palladio school, a partially empty building , and noticed a small yellow sign with “Another Country, Kenyan Pavillion” written on it. I climbed to the third floor where the work of 5 Kenyan artists selected by curator Jimmy Ogonga occupies each an empty classroom and followed the sound of familiar voices.

Peterson Kamwathi was being interviewed by the Zucca Project team that provided last minute funding and saved the pavilion from a certain demise. Soon walked in Beatrice Wanjiku, another Kenyan artist whose work has been included in The European Cultural Centre exhibition and a good friend of Peterson. They shared the financial and logistical challenge it had been for all of them, and the thrill of being here. Peterson had no idea of the space where his work was going to be hung and had to travel with his artwork on his flight from Nairobi. He felt  now that it was  up he could expand its scale. I concurred. His current subject is one of migration and scaling it up would be quite effective. But overall it was the thrill to be finally here that dominated. The government failed to come up with the funds but the artists made it happen anyway. I am moved by their persistence and commitment! Beatrice is housed on the mainland and has a 1h30 commute in both directions! Nothing is taken for granted here.

Next door hung Paul Onditi’s’ richly layered paintings capturing a global world order collapsing into chaos. Onditi’s manages to make beautiful a nightmarish scenario, capturing the terrifying seductiveness of chaos.

In another classroom working in direct dialogue with the classroom’s architecture sculptor Arlene Wandera created a sculpture “ On the ladder” using a repurposed ladder that she stood in the middle of the room with tiny figures of men standing on a beam positioned across the ladder and another hanging from a wire. In the dichotomy of scale to my eyes the ladder became the towering framework, and a metaphor for the established structures of power that exist within which the tiny figures must navigate. Unfortunately the piece seemed a bit lost in the space and I felt her idea was not flushed out enough. The pavilion includes also works by Mwangi Hutter and Richard Kimathi.

I was soon off : Nigeria was having its first pavilion ever and it was a distance away. It was quite a long waterbus ride before I saw the Nigerian pavilion nestled against the church of San Stae. The show is titled How about Now. First it was the past that greeted me as I walked directly into Victor Ehikhamenor’s enveloping installation A Biography of the Forgotten, walls draped with canvas painted with geometric patterns and small Benin bronze heads (replica of real large size ones that were taking from Benin) and mirrors hanging from the ceiling.

In the words of the artist Ehikhamenor: ‘The symbolism of the mirror is two-fold: on the one hand, it was one of the objects the white man exchanged for African art, commodities, and human slaves. It also serves as a metaphor for self-reflection – a selfie if you like- a way of introspection.’

On the upper floor the sculptural scale shifted to life size with the work of Peju Alatise Flying Girls who brings attention to the girl-child and her vulnerability in Nigeria. Not only have many girls been abducted by Boko Haram and sold as sex slaves, but Nigerian society itself allows young girls to be enslaved and married while being underage. Alatise bases her work on a story she wrote about a little Yoruba girl called Sim who is nine year old and is rented out as a domestic servant in Lagos. Here the artist offers us a flight of fancy, an escapist vision, something that the little girl imagined to manage her anguish. Eight life size sculptures of young girls sprouting wings are set in a circle amidst flying birds and butterflies. Overhead, in a sound piece, girls’ voices chatting away brought a smile to my face reminding me so well of the delight of childhood and the poignancy of what was at stake.

Finally the video recording of the work of dancer and choreographer Qudus Onikeku was particularly powerful and moving. With a focus on the present and the now as a way to encounter the past, through performance, and movement that often felt self generated the performers including Qudus enact extremely poignant scenes. I felt in my own body the violence that played itself out. More effective than words it conveyed a historical trauma deeply embedded in the collective unconsciousness of the Yoruba people.

‘ Body memory is something that has always been a fascination to me. The appeal results from the capacity of the body to be a storehouse and to keep memories we are not aware of until it manifests in consciousness. For me, it’s also a way of looking at ourselves, as Africans, as black people, and how the body has been the thing that has passed through the tunnel of what we might refer to as history.’ Qudus Onikeku..

I was sorry to have missed his live performance.

The Ivory Coast Pavilion was set in the grand Palazzo Dolfin. I met up with Joana Choumali, a photographer from the Ivory Coast who I had met in Lagos a couple of years ago. I found myself quite engrossed with her new body of work that was included in the Pavilion. In this work, Choumali delicately embroiders with colorful threads her photographs that she took in two hemispheres, the North and the South. By cutting out a figure from the photo taking in Africa and repositioning it in another location she speaks of migrations and highlights the longing of those who wish to leave but also the vacancies and the loss that it engenders locally.

Jems Roberts Koko Bi’s sculpture in wood was particularly effective and poignant. He was present on the beach in Grand BAssam near Abidjan where a terrorist attack took place in March , 2013.

At the Zimbabwe Pavilion I liked Admire Kamudzengerere 900 Post-It self-portraits that he did to remember his recently deceased father. Speaking about this body of work that was shown in New York at the Catinca Tabacaru Gallery he explains:” It was a slow process of calming down by looking into the mirror and drawing one [portrait] after another. It was my way of trying to understand who this man is and was and our shared connection.” Not one self-portrait is alike. Quite an amazing feat and mourning process! Knowing why he did this made me look at each post-it with a different eye and emotion. This was not narcissism but a quest for the departed loved one.

I stopped at the Future Generation Art prize organized by the PinchukArtCentre. South African artist Dineo Seshee Bopape was the winner of the 4^th edition and Phoebe Boswell (Kenya/ UK) had received Special Prize.

Bopape’s installation consisted of an earth sculpture made of black local soil acting as a platform for organic and geological objects. I was dying to touch everything. I thought of the natural wealth of our planet or in particular South Africa with its soil rich in minerals including gold before it became altered by man and transformed into objects. Installed in a richly wooden paneled room with high ceilings, bookcases and century old brass chandeliers the juxtaposition of materials could not have been more thought provocative.

Other works were from

Ibrahim Mahama

Kemang Wa Lehulere

Njdeka Akunyili Crosby

Beatrice Wanjiku at Personal Structures – Open Borders.

Abdoulaye Konate at the Arsenale.

The presence of new pavilions was a welcome development. However I felt overall there could have been more artists from Africa and its diaspora included in the Guardini and the Arsenale. There is excellent work out there that deserves to be shown. There was a Diaspora Pavilion but  too often the attention was given to the message and not to the actual form of the artworks which I found disappointing. The issue of migration is obviously at the forefront of the works on display but I missed the personal impetus that is necessary to make a work convincing and memorable.

This superb tabernacle was an eloquent illustration of how Africa’s wealth ( mineral, and human) has played an important part in Western civilization economic achievements. Today is a time  for  Africa to focus on the richness of its continent  and design its economic and culturel future shifting its gaze away from the West or as we say today the North.