I felt that the works displayed at Anne de Villepoix, a French gallery that has been showing African artists for many years, were strong. She offered a mix of recently produced works but also earlier works (early 2000) conveying a sense of history and scope to contemporary African art. A striking 2001 photographic diptych “Static Drift” by Ingrid Mwangi was hanging over the fireplace. Born in Kenya, daughter of a Kenyan father and German mother she was transported to Germany in her teens where she has settled and is now married to a German artist, Robert Hutter, with whom she works closely. In this work she uses her body as canvas. She addresses personal issues, such as her constant discomfort because of her mixed race status of always feeling the odd one out whether she is in Kenya or Germany – never black or white enough – and of broader issues of nationalism, colonialism and post colonialism. She challenges preconceptions of the African continent by showing it as a white shape and refers to the past colonial might of Germany by making it proportionally much larger. However the words she uses point to a different reality: of an African continent on the rise and of a Germany in decline. In the context of today’s current events this work made in 2001 seems prescient at least in terms of Germany’s aging population and slowing economy in contrast to Africa’s higher growth rate and growing population. However as with everything in life reality is more of a mixed bag. Economic growth in Africa while stronger than in Europe is not keeping pace with its population growth on the continent and many of the young are seeking jobs up in the Global North.

Mwangi’s use of her naked body to speak of boundaries evokes other thoughts in my mind. I think of the history of desire for the “exotic” or for the one that is different from oneself, and of how the female body has and is still in some cultures seen as the territory of men.

Here Mwangi reclaims her body. As she says: “ My body is the only thing that I own…I react, interpret and question the clichés and stereotypes with which I am faced..I use art to awaken consciences.”

Some other strong pieces graced Anne de Villepoix’s walls:

Barthélemy Toguo,

Omar Ba,

and Yashua Klos.

It was a first in London for Axis Gallery that had participated in 1:54 in New York and I was intrigued by the installation by Hervé Youmbi Two-Faced/Double Visage from his project Faces of Masks and while not quite successful visually I found it thought provoking. In this project Youmbi purposefully blurs boundaries between the ethnological and the contemporary, and between distinct tribal styles challenging systems of classification that have been historically favored by Western museums. He commissioned the Bamileke craftspeople from Cameroon to create a hybrid Ku’ngang mask incorporating the face of a Dogon mask from Mali. Once the chief of the Ku’ugang Society authorized the mask it was then activated during a ritual masquerade, which Youmbi filmed. One of the masks included in the installation incorporated Edvard Munch’s Scream: another example of hybridity. In reality ritual masks from some tribal African groups have morphed along the centuries and have absorbed elements from other cultures. For instance early 20^th century Yoruba Gelede masquerade masks incorporate colonial figures, and later elements of modernity such as bicycles. Museums have had a tendency historically to favor less hybrid pieces but things are changing. Also I just reviewed an exhibition of George Osodi’s photographs of Nigerian Monarchs where the contemporary and the ethnological were held in tension through out. It is good of Youmbi to challenge any simplistic or essentialist approach.

Axis was also showing the work of Jebila Okongwu.

I was pleasantly surprised to see a whole room dedicated to the poetic photographic work of Mohamed Camara. This is a lovely body of work that he did a few years back and sadly he has not produced new work since then as far as I know.

I liked the work of Zak Ové at Vigo gallery. Assemblage and collage are used for expressive means.

Here he finds objects that he picks up from the Thames and assembles them.

Aboulia and Armand Boua at Jack Bell gallery,

Beatrice Wanjiku at Artlab gallery

Délio Jasse at Tiwani Contemporary

Nemsa Leuba at Art Twenty One

Mimi Chereno Ng’ok at the Fondation Donwahi; she is showing at Les Rencontres de Bamako currently.

Billie Zangewa

Clay Apenouvon at Mariane Ibrahim, a gallery from Seattle whose presence on the international art scene is on the rise.

A few words of caution I feel need to be said. It is great that Contemporary African Art is getting much more attention in the West and that an international market for these artists’ work is taking shape. The only problem is that the pricing shifts to reflect an international pricing and gradually the works will be too expensive for a local middle-class African audience who already is slow to wake up to the idea of buying and supporting its contemporary artists.

1:54 premiered in New York during Frieze week and just like the main art fair it was situated outside of Manhattan. Located in Red Hook, a fun, and super cool spot at the Southern tip of Brooklyn with fabulous views of Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty the contemporary African art fair was a more casual and smaller version of the 1:54 fair in London. It featured 16 galleries, half of them from Africa and half from other countries showing work described as “African”. A congenial atmosphere prevailed and I soon found myself absorbed in Bobson Sukhdeo Mohanlall’s color portraits of Zulus dressed in traditional dress and admiring the richness and depth of the hues, in particular the reds. Axis Gallery curator Gary van Wyk soon explained to me that Mohanlall was one of the first photographers to produce color portraits in Africa and described the long process of restoration of the original negatives that had been recently completed. Cleaning and restoring the colors to their original state had been a painstaking task but well worth it!

Passing by Ivory Coast artist, Aboudia’s heavily layered painting I felt stared down by the oversized child like figures drawn with vibrant colors against an ominous darkness. I find Aboudia’s work at times too busy but this one was remarkable. The gaze of the figures was inescapable nailing me to the ground. Tightness started to grip my chest: either something was about to happen or I was guilty of something I felt irrationally! Work that engenders that kind of emotion has to be good!

Less confrontational but potent nonetheless Moroccan Rim Battal’s photographic installation had a quiet and pared down aesthetic that also delivered a powerful message though I think a larger scale would have benefited the work. She expands on the idea of the female body as territory first seen in the traditional terms of man’s conquest of the female body and draws a parallel with the domination that comes with colonization.

Playful creativity, a sense of infinite possibilities emanates from Nigerian multimedia artist Amoda Olu’s installation that reads like a grouping of drawings though made from a combination of scraps of paper, drawn or recycled, paint marks and old nails all glued on plexiglass.

Many other good works could be seen but I particularly lingered in front of Fabrice Monteiro’s arresting photograph of a gorgeous and proud bejeweled African woman. “Dressed to the hilt” in a sumptuous black and gold gown, her shoulders draped with a matching scarf, her head coiffed with an oversized African wrap tied in the Yoruba fashion, she is smoking a long wooden pipe while holding an African fan. The theatricality of the posture, her proud carriage and the fusion of Western and African fashion in her costume caught my eye. Here was no ordinary woman and no victim! She is a signares explained Marianne Ibrahim, the owner of the gallery, herself a striking woman. These are African women from the island of Gorée in Senegal who in the 18^th and 19^th century married colonizers. Both benefited from the union, the women gaining trading power as they helped their husband in their trading transactions. I am particularly fond these days of images that highlight the strength and richness of African culture versus images of victimhood, not because I want to deny painful histories but more because it is times one celebrates the strength and richness of African cultures.

Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze ‘s exquisite drawing was another treasure to be seen in Marianne Ibrahim’s booth- see my upcoming studio visit review. Playing with scale and space she creates layers of narratives that coalesce into a strange universe populated with hybrid creatures and infused with light.

The tenor of Soly Cissé’s small paintings was totally opposite to the poise emanating from Ruby’s careful orchestrations, but I liked their cartoonish quality and the immediacy of the mark. Here again human and animal forms coexist in a strange way but Cissé’s imaginary universe is chaotic and vibrant with slight intimation of violence.

African art was also to be found at Frieze. At the Vigo Gallery I saw a rarely seen series of drawings “Visual Dairy of Time-Waste Palace” by the Sudanese artist Ibrahim El –Salahi that he did in 1996/1997 while in self imposed exile living and working in Qatar. One of the most important artist coming out of the Khartoum school in the 1950’s surrealism infuses his African modernist approach. It was only recently that El-Salahi was given his due in a retrospective of his work at the Tate Modern.

I left the fair not totally comfortable with the fact it was located so far from any of the other fairs. I welcome the day that some of these galleries/ artists get included in fairs such as Volta or Nada.

However the excursion into Brooklyn was well worth the hassle to get there and I ended the day with a lovely dinner at the Good Fork around the corner .

Here are a few other works that I liked at that fair  :

Vincent Michea
Bintou #2

Barend De Wet

Owusu-Ankomah

Artworks I favored at Nada:

Nichole Van Beek

Brie Ruais

Artworks that caught my eye at Frieze:

Arlene Shechet

Nick Cave

Los Carpinteros