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