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. 

Congolese Artist Samuel Fosso’s photographic series ” African Spirits” has been added to MOMA’s permanent collection after a unanimous vote by the MOMA’s acquisition committee. This process has taken two years at least!!

It is fantastic and important series. Read more about it on my blog post of April 2013

I am thrilled that my review of George Osodi’s exhibition curated by Christa Clarke – Royals and Regalia Inside the Palace of Nigeria’s Monarchs: Recent photographs by George Osodi – at the Newark Museum in 2015 has just come out in the publication African Arts, Fall  2016, vol 49 published by MIT. You can read it online.

Between the rehearsal dinner and the wedding of the son of a dear friend of mine whom I have known since he was a baby I drove into Philly just a short hour away from West Chester where we were staying .

My friend who knew of my interest in African art had told me there was an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum. I was a little annoyed with myself for not knowing this already. Either the word does not get around enough about African art shows or there was something I was not doing despite being on Instagram, Facebook, and blogging on African art. Ugh! Keeping up theses days is a challenge! Maybe I was too distracted by a house project that takes me to the Luberon in France, I told myself.

Enough with that! The exhibition “Creative Africa” was a bit of a misnomer but in any case it was exhilarating. It was clearly divided spatially in five sections – photography, fashion, textiles, architecture and traditional African art – which felt like mini exhibitions. Visually it was engrossing: the displays were fantastic and easy to navigate. I could immerse myself into the manifestations of each medium and come out with a better understanding and appreciation of each artistic expression and perspective.

Holland Cotter of the New York Times wrote a praising review, which I encourage you to read. I will mostly focus on images here.

Here are some of the photographic works from Three Photographers/Six cities that caught my attention:

Seydou Camara from Mali who has been photographing ancient Islamic texts in Timbuktu since 2009. A trading post for centuries Timbuktu is a center of Islamic scholarship. Since the town has been overtaken by extremist these books have risked destruction.

Ananias Leki Dago, Soweto, 2008, from his series Shebeen Blues

Ananias Leki Dago, Bamako, 2006 from his series Bamako Crosses

Akinbode Akinbiyi, Lagos, 2003-4 from his series Lagos: All Roads. He captures the chaotic energy of Lagos.

Vlisco: “Africa Fashion on a Global Stage” which showed the many Dutch wax prints designed and made by Vlisco for the African and Diaspora markets was a visual treat. Risking the ire of many who feel that these Dutch wax prints are not truly representative of the Creative Africa, or authentically African and a product of the colonial history of the continent this exhibition unabashedly embraces the complex and global aspect of the production of African fashion. I for one have no problem with this. To me this aesthetic is truly representative of contemporary African taste.  I am of the post postcolonial mind where one accepts the bad and good of ones history and looks towards the future knowing that things are never simple. After all  European cubism  could not have come without the influence of African aesthetics. Picasso is deeply indebted to African sculpture. I am a mutt myself, my father having come from Bulgaria that was for 400 years under the rule of the Ottomans. But I am also American and grew up in France.  As a result I am not so attached to the idea of cultural authenticity. You can read more about the complex history of Dutch Wax print here.

Designer Inge Van Lierop 2016

Designer  Manish Arora 2016

This pattern is known as Love Bomb and Dynamite. In Togo it is known as Wounded Heart.

Conceived and made outside of Africa these prints that are designed for the taste of the African consumer, and once in Africa are named by the local African women who find inspiration for the names in proverbs, current events, religion and material culture. Once named the prints acquire social meaning.

Designer Nico Verbart. Title of fabric ” Chaussures de Yayi, Boni.” after President Yayi Boni

The Architecture of Francis Kere: Building for Community.

I left the saturated colors of the wax fabric for another engrossing and all embracing installation and just as colorful made out of parachute cord material by the architect Francis Kéré .

Grounding his work on the idea of community and shared space the layout of this soft structure here was arrived through taking into account the architectural grid of Philadelphia and the organic development of a Burkina Faso village. True to Francis Kéré’s belief, which reflect local belief that survival depends on the strength and unity of the community the exhibition was the result of a collaboration between Kéré Architecture, the Museum team and the UPenn undergraduates.

Followed a room full of photographs, architectural maquetttes, and videos recording Francis Kéré’s work in Africa, and in particular the construction of the Lycée Schorge School in Koudougou, Burkina Faso which was done without the use of heavy machinery. The emphasis was on the communal aspect of all the work done.

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!

The Lay of the Land at the Walther Collection in Chelsea, New York.

I was looking forward to this exhibition since my conversation with Mame –Diarra Niang in Arles about her recent body of photographic works Metropolis. I had first met her the previous year in Joburg at a cocktail party on the occasion of the art fair. While I had not yet seen her work I had liked her smarts, her erudition, and the way she spoke of her art in terms of her personal life experiences which spanned her life in France and many visits to her family’s home town in Cote d’Ivoire and later Dakar. A need to reckon with her feelings around her father and his history was something that struck a cord in me and I was eager to see her work at the time and was not disappointed when I did a few months later.

Her work deals with the cityscape in the process of modernization. It is also a metaphor for her evolving sense of identity, as she reckons with her history. More then a record of a place or “territoire” , it is her memory of a place that she captures in these images .

The photographs’ abstract quality was most impressive. Mame has an uncanny ability to present urban structures of all sorts as flat color planes organized in geometric patterns. It all happens in a flash as she takes her photographs quickly – At The Wall series and Metropolis were taken from a taxi as it was driving by – and she rarely feels she needs to rework them afterwards.

Her photographs are of a modest size and each one makes a subtle statement. Her three series were displayed together beautifully and with great effect. A new comer to the international art scene she held her own opposite Angolan photographer Edson Chagas’ work from his ongoing series Found Not Taken that brought him fame at the Venice Biennale in 2013.

The way he transforms the ordinary into a field of vibrant colors is very seductive yet it is his critique of global consumerism that give his work weight. Francois –Xavier Gbre’s constellation of sixty-three small-scale architectural photographs completes this contemporary take on the postcolonial African cityscape.

I was more familiar with his large architectural views of obsolete interiors, which I always found beautiful but left me ambivalent.

Here, however I found myself engrossed in each small architectural vignette loving the warm hues and the subtle play of the light as it touched the surfaces. The effect was wonderfully poetic: the images capture the passage of time in often time-worn urban structures.

All together this was a very well curated and hung show and a first of several exhibitions on contemporary and video art from Africa and the African Diaspora that will be held at the Walther Collection Project space in Chelsea.

I met Hassan Hajjaj at a casual dinner given by Christa Clarke who was hosting a few guests at the occasion of the opening of two photographic exhibitions at the Newark museum: Hassan Hajjij ‘s My Rock Stars and Georges Osodi’s Royals & Regalia. The curator of African arts at the Newark museum, Christa Clarke is a staunch advocate of African contemporary art. She has put together a program of noteworthy exhibitions and is expanding the museum collection of contemporary African art in a significant way.

I had recently bought one of Hassan Hajjaj’s works from the My Rock Stars series – a decade long project where he stages and photographs his friends from the music world – and I was eager to meet him.  Hassan is not a man to easily categorize and that made him instantly appealing to me in addition to his warm smile and charisma!  His slightly disheveled look, beard, hair tied in a knot at the back of his head, marked face were all signs that suggested hard living which all added to make the mix intriguing.

While a Moroccan by birth, he speaks with a pronounced English accent, which surprised me since to my mind Morocco is more connected to France. I was soon to learn that he was born in Marrakech, and moved to London as a child. It was there that he was driven to create” his own village”; a community of culturally diverse and creative individuals where he could feel at home. Self-taught he learned by doing, delving along the years into the worlds of music, fashion and design. These rich and diverse professional experiences feed into Hassan’s current artistic practice, which includes photographic work and room installations (part pop-up nightclubs, part urban café)). He now splits his life between Marrakech and London.

Hassan is above all multicultural. His brand of multi-culturalism is Moroccan-infused. He rethinks cultural relationships and creates art works that reflect his idea of an inventive fusion where tradition meets the contemporary and cultures mingle to create a new vision that is essentially positive.

His photographic work at first glance falls into the tradition of African studio portraiture. Carefully staged, he poses his subjects – a variety of musicians such as well-known masters of Gnawa , a type of popular music inspired by African-Islamic spiritual songs to hijab-clad young women – against brightly patterned textiles, often with furnishings and clothes that he designs. Because of his experience with club culture, cat-walks and fashion shoots he makes the images look cool, sexy, his eye for fashion shaping the image into something dynamic and contemporary.

He breaks with tradition by moving “his studio” in the street and documents people moving in an outdoor setting. His Kesh Angel series of women bikers driving through the streets of Marrakech are truly novel and unique in the fusion of tradition and the contemporary, the Arabic and the Western world. At once cool and threatening, depending on which side of the cultural divide one is, these images challenge the female stereotype of both Western and Arabic cultures.

His frames are specific to each piece and are three dimensional incorporating serial arrangements of packaged goods labeled in Arabic. As Martin Barnes, chief curator of Photographs at the V& A says: “ By drawing attention to framing, Hajjaj makes the photograph inescapable as a physical object. It is not an impartial image to be read, opening like a window on the world. Rather, it is a partially-staged confection, derived from reality but ultimately a manipulated and recontextualised view point. “