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 ” !

The stranger is now next door.

The global aspect of contemporary art and the impact of new waves of migrations are definitely on curators’ mind in Europe this summer. Indeed, The Triennial at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris probes the way in which artists react to the challenges of a multi-cultural society. I found again at the Triennial exhibition Intense Proximity the notion of the hybrid, which I had encountered in the work of Kader Attia in Documenta 13.

The Nigerian-born American director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, Okwi Enwesor,  is the curator of the Triennial.  His point of departure is the ethnographic practice, which he sees as the beginning of the interest in the other. Traditionally, the other was generally located far away on a different continent. However, the distance has now collapsed and the other is now the stranger next door.  It is this experience of co-habitation, that intense proximity and how it is negotiated that is the focus of this show. In other words, ethnography starts at home.

The Marriage Room by Meschac Gaba, which was situated at the beginning of the exhibition, is a perfect illustration of the theme.  An autobiographical work, it includes images of Meschac Gaba’s wedding ceremony with his Dutch wife, her wedding gown and shoes, and a large selection of ordinary objects used by the couple in their daily life which are arranged on tables. The approach is clearly anthropological in the classification process of everyday objects. The juxtaposition of his and hers artifacts which are each linked to their respective origins addresses this idea of proximity.  “Cross-pollination” is one of the effects of this co-habitation.  

This room is part of a bigger project, the Museum of African Contemporary Art that Meschac Gaba has been working on for the last decade. His mobile museum, which in addition to a collection selection includes a museum restaurant, a playroom, and a library, has been touring for the last 8 years.  The whole idea seems so inventive and gutsy I was quite impressed. I liked also the nomadic aspect.

I found the fair quite fascinating and saw lots of good art despite the fact that the underlying premise was not always evident throughout the selection. This was a huge exhibition set in the newly renovated Palais de Tokyo, which felt like a labyrinth at times. As I went down from one floor to another I discovered a succession of cavernous spaces with video projections and installations, which contributed to a feeling of continuous discovery.

Wangechi Mutu’s video installation Suspended Play Time, 2012 in the cavernous lower level of the museum was for me the most striking and provocative piece of the whole exhibition. I am more familiar with her collages, which highlight the hybrid construct of contemporary cultural identity.

The video was projected on an arrangement of white sheets of paper set on the floor in a cave-like setting shaped out of grey felt against which balls made of recycled garbage bags and twine hung like ornaments. Mutu favors organic settings as opposed to the aseptic white cube of the gallery and museum space. The black and white video showed a black woman with long hair sitting with her legs apart proceeding to dig her hands into the cake, slowly eat it, and lick the chocolate cake off her fingers. Eventually she stood up and trampled and squished the cake with her fancy high heels. The video ended with a shot of her washing her hands in the river.

I walked in the middle of the video so it was unclear to me what she was eating. Was it mud or chocolate? Was I going to walk away responding to the part of me that was grossed out and or was I going to hang in there and embrace all my associations and fantasies (let me tell you they were of all sorts!). I stayed and saw it twice.  What was this piece about? Was it about gluttony as a metaphor for our consumerist society, and a critique of the ideal contemporary emaciated female who cannot embrace her pleasure and must conform to a Western norm of beauty? I am not sure, but those were some of my associations. Her lack of inhibition was certainly inspiring in a funny sort of a way.

I loved Marcia Kure’s exquisite watercolors that are becoming more abstract and anthropomorphic, and Nicholas Hlobo’s drawings on canvas made with silk ribbons and rubber.

El Anatsui’s new sprawling sculpture was stunning and surprisingly laid down on the floor. Usually his sculptures become wall hangings.

I am off to South Africa: Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town and will be back with lots of news.