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.