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

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.

At Art Paris African art galleries from Europe and the African continent showed their new works:

Artist Billie Zangewa with her beautiful hand sown collage  at South African gallery ArtNova. Getting pretty pricey! She has been showing her work for a long time and was included in museum shows but her work had not grabbed people’s attention like this time  in Paris.  People were lining up for her work! Part of this success comes from her long relationship with her gallery.

Omar Ba from Senegal Zone de non droit, 2017. He showed at Parisian Galerie Daniel Templon. I just love his work! So uniquely his! He has developed his own unique vocabulary rooted in local imagery and mythology while contending with global issues.

Remy Samuz’s wire sculpture Maternity, 2016 from Benin showing at Galerie Vallois. I have seen other artists doing work with wire like that but this piece makes me feel like I am seeing the figures in a dream.

Tiwani gallery director Maria Varnava concentrates on her work surrounded by the large mix media canvas by  Gareth Nyandoro from Zimbabwe and  Angolan Delio Jasse’s photographic series.

Mario Macilau from Mozambique  striking photograph at Ed Cross Fine art located in London.

A superb El Anatsui was hanging at London based October gallery. I wanted to grab it and take it home. A bit expensive though!

Nigerian artist Nnenna Okore‘s wall hanging Hide at October gallery . I interviewed her several years ago and wrote a post on her which you can find on my website and I am happy to see that her work is getting more exposure.

There were a lot of good work at the October gallery. Here is the work of Alexis Peskine Wolot Cosmic, 2017. I had not seen his work before or not paid attention , I am not sure, but this time I saw three portraits by him. Dramatic images, with a chiaroscuro effect conveyed through a painterly use of  nails  (yes it sounds strange but when you get closer you see a lot of nails)and moon gold leaf. His work was also shown at the exhibition at the Parc de la Villette, “Afriques Capitales ” and at the salon Zurcher Africa at La Galerie Africaine.

I stopped in front of Gosette Lubondo‘s photograph Imaginary Trip at L’Agence a Paris. She is a young emerging artist from Kinshasa (DRC) who was included in the Kampala Biennale. What a fantastic way of conveying yearning !

Namsa Leuba‘s series Zulu Kids was shown at Art Twenty One, a Lagos exhibition space. She favors a theatrical approach with an aesthetic informed by fashion and design sensibilities. There is something highly incongruous and unsettling in seeing this child isolated on a plinth in a barren landscape and whose dress and body paint points to traditional rituals.

I liked French born and of Algerian descent Dalia Dalleas Bouzar series of portraits at Galerie Cecile Fakhoury. These portraits based on photographs of women taken during the Algerian War infused these women with a regained dignity. They had been required to take off their veil at the time to create identity cards and they had experienced this public exposure as deeply debasing. Bouzar paints them here adorned in gold.

I was very taken by the work of a young Tunisian young woman Aicha Snoussi at A.Gorgi Gallery from Tunisia. Her drawings in  Le Livre des anomalies were exquisite, at times provocative. She had bought old school note books with pages that had turned slightly yellow with age and light and drawn in each one of them a set of intricate drawings emanating from an imaginary singular universe. Each book was laid down on a shelve along the wall of the gallery. Intense, edgy, Snoussi revealed to me her unusual mind and even weird perspective, at times microscopique and at times largely spatial. She goes from creating these minute drawings to entire wall drawings. She impressed me with her unusual imagination, utter joy in the creative process and  artistic breadth.. She is a young talent that deserves to be followed.

Moving on to London, I trekked to see Ibrahim Mahama sculptural work at the White Cube gallery. While Mahama’s work has been extremely well received I have only liked it at the 2015 Venice Biennale where the stitched together cast-off  jute sacks  were draped along the pathway in the Arsenale. For once the visual effect was as compelling as the conceptual underpinning of his work. The installation was fantastic. So I arrived at White Cube with mixed feelings. I actually was pleasantly surprised. There was more variety of texture, and shape in his wall hangings. I felt compelled to look closer and discover the intricacy of the layering.

The next sculptural installation,  a precarious assemblage of thousands of small shoe boxes made from found material to which was added other repurposed items such as heels, hammers was phenomenal. Precarious but strong! It was organized chaos.  No discernible pattern could be identified, it was an endless jumble of shapes, colors, and materials exemplifying ‘Mahama’s inquiry into the life of materials and dynamic potential.’

Moving from the grand scale of Mahama’s sculpture I ended my exploration with the delightful exhibition of drawings  of South African artist Lisa Brice at Stephen Friedman gallery. All drawn in cobalt blue gouache they offered an intimate portrait of feminine power and sensuality. I had never seen her work but I left totally charmed.

By then I was “arted out ” !

Gor Soudan’s approach is essentially conceptual. He greeted me in his new small studio not too far from the Circle Art Agency. He came to art by way of his passion for philosophy. Translating an idea, concept or observation into material form and letting the process of making  and the properties of the materials (wire, ink, metal) intuitively guide him are two of the guiding principles of his working process.

I first encountered Gor’s work in 2013 at the 1:54 Fair in London at the ArtLabAfrica’s booth. He was making figurative sculpture out of “protest wire”: fragments of the human form that felt deeply poetic in their incompleteness and nest-like forms. Gor favors working with materials he finds in his surroundings and at that time he was working out of a space in Kibera, a large slum on the edge of Nairobi and was recycling this wire which was left over from burned car tyres set afire during earlier riots.

His work has been well received and he is now able to afford his own space, which while  small by Western standard, is a real treat for Gor. He tells me how he used to weave the wire while sitting in a chair with the wire resting on his knees.

Equating this weaving process to drawing in space his subsequent investigations into drawing on paper were a logical move for him.

Currently he is particularly drawn to the Arabic wood carvings that one finds in Lamu and he is incorporating some of their patterns in his recent drawings.

I later went on to pay a visit to Michael Soi who has a studio in the GoDown art center situated in an abandoned industrial complex.

Known for his biting critique of China’s increasing presence in Kenya – his work is mostly satirical and critiques Kenya’s social, economic and political contemporary situation – he is currently pointing the finger at the rampant sex industry in Nairobi.

Deeply aware at the corruption crippling Kenya at all levels and seeing his art as an agent of change he deliberately makes his work explicit and easy to read. He wants his audience to get what he is saying. He paints cartoon-like scenes with flat and bright colors. His work resonates with a younger audience in Nairobi and as Danda says “ He brings a young dynamic Kenyan crowd because they get what he is doing. It’s social commentary, it is cheaky.” Next door to his studio is his shop where he sells totes that bear his signature style. A successful business it provides him with a safety net: “ I paint what I want to paint. I can do this because I have a safety net!”

Other artists to follow are:

Paul Ondoti

Jackie Karuti

Mimi Cherono Ng’OK

Muchiri Njenga

A lot is happening on the Africa front. I went to Kenya for a couple of weeks this summer and spend a few days in Nairobi interviewing  a few key players and artists in an emerging East African art scene that is gaining momentum. I will report on this in my November Newsletter. In the meantime I have joined the Tate Modern African Acquisition committee so here I am off to the Netherlands and Belgium to visit several African artists studios. I will then go to London to see the third edition of the African fair 1:54. I plan to go home soon after that and not leave New York city for a bit because the jet lag is getting to me. Unfortunately I will miss the first edition of the new African Fair in Paris in November (Akaa fair) . No worries because next March at Art Paris, Africa is  the guest of honor !! I am really thrilled that African art is getting so much attention and that main stream galleries are increasingly taking African artists on. The talent is there though it may require one to open up to some new perspectives.

In the meantime here is a long list of exhibitions showing African artists in New York and London that you might want to check out if you find yourself in either city in September and October.

NEW YORK

The Expanded Subject: New Perspectives in Photographic Portraiture From Africa (Sammy Baloji, Mohamed Camara, Saidou Dicko and George Osodi).

Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Gallery, Columbia University

September 7 – December 10, 2016

 Meleko Mokgosi

Jack Shainman, 513 West 20^th Street

September 8 – October 22, 2016

 David Goldblatt

Pace/ MacGill Gallery

32 East 57^th Street

September 14 – October 29, 2016

 Recent Histories: New Photography from Africa

Walther Collection

526 West 26^th Street, Suite 718

September 22 – December 17, 2016

 Julie Mehretu

Marian Goodman

24 West 57^th Street

September 22 – October 29, 2016

LONDON

Samson Kambalu

Kate MacGArry

27 Old Nichol Street, E2 7HR

September 9 – October 15, 2016

 Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Corvi-Mora

1A Kempsford road, SE11 4NU

September 9, 2016 onwards

Virginia Chihota

Tiwani Contemporary

16 Little Portland Street W1W8BP

September 16 to October 29, 2016

William Kentridge

Whitechapel Gallery

77-82 Whitechapel High Street, E1 7QX

September 21, 2016 to January 15, 2017

 Yinka Shonibare

Stephen Friedman

25-28 Burlington Street, W1S3AN

September 28 to November 5,2016

Njideka Akunyili-Cosby

Victoria Miro

16 Wharf Road, N1 7RW

October 4- November 5, 2016

 Emo de Medeiros

50 Goborne

50 Golborne Road, W10 5PR

October 5 –November 20, 2016

 Romuald Hazoume

October Gallery

25 Old Gloucester Street, WC1N3AL

October 7 to November 26, 2016

Joel Andrianomearisoa

Tyburn Gallery

26 Barrett St, W1U

October 4 – December 23, 2016

Wim Botha’s fragmentary spectacle: An engrossing juxtaposition of materials.

From my summer house in the Luberon in Provence, South of France it takes me barely 20 minutes to get to the Fondation Blachere in Apt, which is devoted to fostering contemporary creativity in Africa and to promoting its artists. Situated in the industrial suburb of Apt, a small town in the south of France, the foundation was started by industrialist Jean-Paul Blachere and sits right next to his lighting factory ( Blachere Illumination). The foundation has a top notch exhibition program, offers a series of artist residencies for African artists and has a really cool store (la Boutik) selling creations of African craftsmen and designers from several African countries, and an art book store.   Two years ago I saw a wonderful exhibition of Yinka Shonibare’s sculptural work . This year an installation by South African artist Wim Botha titled Still Life with Water was on display. I had seen Botha’s unique and disturbing busts carved out of leather bound books in the Venice Biennale but besides that I did not know much about his work.

The title did not prepare me for the sculptural spectacle that I encountered. First two fierce heads of a lion and lioness made out of plywood, poised to attack, greeted me at the entrance. There was an undeniable sense of energy and that same energy pulsated throughout the main part of the installation in the next room. It was a stunning beginning though it only partially prepared me for what was to come.

In the main room winged creatures made out of Styrofoam captured in flight and saddled with fluorescent light tubes appeared to be circling around a nest-like cluster of more fluorescent light tubes and reflective sky blue panels.

These panels, an obvious reference to the sky, and their reflection allowed for an amplified effect, a sense of multiple perspectives and an ever-expanding spectacle.

Sculpted busts, some made out of books and some made out of wood, framed this whirlwind of activity, containing and grounding the scene into some kind of art historical continuum by their inherent reference to traditions of woodworking, portraiture and knowledge. No one style dominated; figuration and abstraction coexisted and enhanced each other. The primacy and diversity of materials and their particular physical properties and their associations, either art historical or cultural, was at the core of the experience.

I was left pondering the whole, which I found hard to grasp or take in all at once as the fragmentary character of many of the elements made it almost impossible to complete a narrative or reach a singular cohesive explanation. I came to accept that there was no easy interpretation, and certainly not a singular one. Because of the presence of the lions at the entrance I thought of nature, birds, sky, nature – I was also about to go off into the African bush for a 7 day hike so my mind was wired towards nature ! – yet the presence of the carved busts, with their cultural and art historical references did not quite fit with this narrative. For an interesting analysis of the exhibition it is good to read Benjamin Sutton’s review of the exhibition where he makes reference to the Renaissance tradition of painted ceilings which possibly play a role in Botha’s aesthetic.

Listening to Wim Botha speaking in an accompanying video sheds some light. After having a mostly conceptual focus in his earlier works he now claims to be guided almost solely by aesthetic concerns and aims to get away from meaning. “Balance, form, line, textures,” are at the core of his artistic practice. The process is what captivates him and dictates the work. He wishes to leave the work open, to not shackle it to an over-riding message. Yet it is clear Botha’s work through its use of material is in continual dialogue with tradition and knowledge, yet it is firmly anchored in the present, mostly through the overwhelming feeling of fragmentary turmoil. The installation will travel to the Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town this fall.

New African Photography can be seen in Brooklyn, New York, May 7 – 15, 2016

Something that five years ago was unthinkable is happening in New York . Contemporary African photography is getting increasing exposure in New York , not just the classics but also the newest of the new.

Nataal, a new global media platform focused on contemporary African culture joined up with Red Hook Labs and curated an exhibition of New African Photography. Located next door to the African Art fair 1:54 which was held in Red Hook it was easy to go from one to the other.  Six photographers from Africa and its diaspora ( Atong Atem, Delphine Diaw Diallo, Kristin-Lee Moolman, Lakin Ogunbanwo, Namsa Leuba, Owise Abuzaid) some coming straight out of university  and others more established were gathered in this hangar expressing their singular views. There was no common theme but one could see in some of them a nod to the older generation of African photographers while adding their own very personal, imaginative spin.

Atong Atem‘s photographs are absolutely enchanting. She is a young South Sudanese artist who lives in Melbourne. She is clearly looking at West African photographic portraiture with the idea of pattern against pattern. However hers is a very hybrid image. When her friends are dressed in African clothing she sets them against a non- African floral background, and surrounds them with fake flowers in pots or they can be in jeans and she adds then African cloth to point to this in between place she lives in. A bit Sudanese and a bit Australian.  Her take is so personal, and I love this juxtaposition of styles.

Lakin Ogunbanwo lives in Lagos and is a fashion photographer as well as an artist. I have actually seen his work for awhile now in South Africa and written about him in prior blogs. I am reminded of J. D . Okhai Ojeikere views from the back, where the focus is not the face but more the hairdo. Here the focus is the hat and the way it is being worn, and what it means socially and culturally. It is its role as a signifier that is highlighted here. As Ogunbanwo says” For Nigerian men, a hat adds a sense of confidence, it’s like a personal crown.”

Namsa Leuba, half Guinean and half Swiss also has a fashion background and is particularly interested in how one constructs and deconstructs identity, in particular African identity and cultural paradigms .  Using props, and eliminating all sense of place she creates these colorful fantasies that question reality.

All these works are for sale at a very reasonable price so check it out before it closes!

Total commitment to the art of mark-making.

Toyin Ojih Odutola just had her fourth solo show at Jack Shainman Gallery. Odutola’s medium of choice is drawing. She is quite aware of the inherent challenge to restricting her practice to drawing, which has always been considered in Western art as secondary to painting. Yet she embraces the medium with the same ambition, scale and vision that one would associate with painting and feels quite gratified that despite this prejudice her work is getting full recognition.

In this particular body of work she has eschewed color and limited her palette mostly to black and white. I remembered the vibrant colors of her previous show at Shainman and was at first taken aback. Yet quickly I became fascinated with her obsessive mark making and the patterns it creates. These patterns activate the surface of the skin, which loses its particularities and shifts from being something identifiable to something unstable. At times it is hard to say where one figure starts and the other ends. Odutola’s subject is portraiture and yet she says little about the identity of the people she chooses to portray. Identity is subsumed under the structured patterning. We don’t know if the skin is white or black. In this body of work she moves deliberately away from politics of identity – ie her Nigerian identity – and the prescribed idea of portraiture to focus on perception and art making.

After being in London for the 1:54 art fair I rushed off to Paris for a couple of days to look at sinks and faucets for a little house that I am renovating in France. To my surprise I found out the exhibition at the Fondation Cartier, Beauté Congo- 1926-2015 that opened in July had been extended until January 2016. So here I was off to the boulevard Raspail and lined up with a refreshingly diverse queue of eager people of all ages and ethnicity.

I was in for a series of wonderful surprises, most of them on the lower floor of the exhibition. Curated by André Magnin the exhibition focused on two urban centers in Congo (DRC) at opposite ends of this huge land mass that is Congo: Kinshasa or Leopoldville which is West of Congo and Lubumbashi or Elizabethville miles away to the east and south near Congo’s border with Zambia. That was left a bit unclear, as there was a dearth of maps.

One was led to believe that there were particular styles that dominated each period in each location. I tended to be cautious and resisted this inevitably reductive and subjective narrative but I appreciated very much discovering the rich artistic production of earlier decades of the 20^th century and the sense of artistic continuity over the last century.

The early works located at the lower level were the jewels of the exhibition in my view.

The earliest works were the watercolors made by local artisans in the Katanga region, Albert and Antoinette Lubaki and Djilatendo who once given paper and watercolors produced these delicate and beautiful watercolors.

In that same region of Katanga but in Elizabethville (today Lubumbashi) in1946 a school of indigenous art was founded by a French painter Pierre Roman-Desfosses. He encouraged the artists to not imitate European art but instead let their imagination run free and turn to their own world for inspiration. I was struck by the delicacy of the work, a tendency to create patterns by repeating motifs inspired by the natural fauna.

Pilipi Mulongoy

In the 1950’s coming from Angola Jean Depara photographs Leopoldville’s (today Kinshasa) nightlife.

In the 1970’s art is flourishing:

Bodys Isek Kingelez who is quite aware of the chaotic nature of the rapid urbanization that is taking place creates utopian African cities out of cardboard and plastic.

In painting Moke is one of the first generation of painters who worked in a popular style in the streets. Moke captured street scenes and nightlife.

Inspired by daily life, politics and social issues a particular style developed that is characterized by bold and flat color, a cartoon like simplicity of form and use of text.

Cheri Samba.

Cheri Cherin

A younger generation comes out of this school of painting and continues this critical approach and finds formal inspiration in the photographic work from Bamako with its emphasis on decorative patterns.

JP Mika

This narrative brings us to the 21^st century with the works from artists belonging to the collective Eza Possibles in Kinshasa, and Kiripi Katembo and Sammy Balojy.

Kiripi Katembo photographs a Kinshasa reflected in the water puddles; the order of things can no longer be apprehended. The viewer is forced to let go of making sense of what is shown and is left with a profoundly poetic and moving image. I met him actually a few years ago at Bamako and many of us liked his work. Sadly he just passed away.

Additional reviews provide further useful background.

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.