SOUTH AFRICAN ART IN NEW YORK

With Performa 2017 with its focus on South Africa in full swing in New York City this week there is much African art to see and not to miss. No need here to pay for a 14 hours plane fare to Joburg to discover the works of some of the most creative talents in Africa. All have an international presence and have been shown extensively in Biennales, museums and fairs.

Photographer and visual activist Zanele Muholi who is best known internationally for her ongoing portrait series Faces and Phases which captures LGBTQI life in her native South Africa will be participating in a series of conversations with other artists and writers. She will be exhibiting publicly her photographs, perform with local and Africa based musicians and organizing with black LBGTQI communities throughout the burroughs.

Multidisciplinary artist Mohau Modisakeng (b.1986, Soweto, South Africa) is choreographing a street procession called ZION of 20 dancers in Harlem Saturday November 11 from 1 to 7pm. As Performa describes it, each dancer will be carrying “an array of personal possessions, various pieces of baggage, and furniture via an exodus choreography of walking, running, jumping, falling, leaning, and sitting – enacting the blistered legacy of segregation, violent displacement, colonialism and apartheid coursing through South African history.” Modisakeng was one of two artists shown at the South Africa Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale where he showed his video Passage. More recently, and further expanding on the same theme of displacement he put together a striking performance in Cape Town that I was lucky to see during my visit to Cape Town. While Modisakeng privileges a poetic aesthetic in all his works there is no equivocation as to the intensity and urgency of his message.

Nicholas Hlobo (b. 1975, Cape Town) whose studio I was privileged to see in Cape Town is presenting umBhovuzo: The Parable of the Sower at the Harlem Parish on November 18 and 19. He is challenging expectations of sexuality and identity within Xhosa culture. Here men clad in dresses and working with cotton and silk at sewing machines point to issues of domesticity, labor and globalization. It is useful to know that much of Hlobo’s work involves fabric and materials such as leather, silk, ribbon and sowing and all of it is done by him and male attendants.

Tracey Rose, (b.1974, Durban, South Africa) a seminal figure in post-apartheid contemporary art, has her video work in the AFROGLOSSIA Film Program at 32 2^nd Avenue.

Four short films created by the NEST COLLECTIVE from Nairobi are also included in AFROGLOSSIA. I met up with Jim Chuchu and Dr. Njoki Ngumi of The Nest Collective when I was recently in Nairobi. Jim is a visual artist (photographer and video artist) and Njoki a medical doctor who in 2012 joined together with 10 other like-minded individuals to create new content and support creative endeavors. They explore through film, music, fashion, the visual arts and literature modern identities, re-imagine the past and re-mix their futures. Their first important ground breaking production was a critically- acclaimed queer anthology film Stories of Our Lives which was screened in over 80 countries. However it is banned in Kenya. They are presenting this time a new production: We Need Prayers : This One Went to Market which questions the ways the global art industry frames African art.

They also recently came out with a new fashion book ‘Not African Enough’ that challenges the narrow expectations of what African design looks like. I am impressed by the quality of the work and I like their forward focus. See you there on Sunday, November 12 th at 6:45 pm at 32 Second Avenue !

Unfortunately I was not able to see William Kentridge’s performance Ursonate . It got booked pretty quickly. The good news: he is coming back in 2018 at the Park Armory.

On the other hand I did get to see South African artist Kemang Wa Lehure’s production I cut my skin to liberate the splinter with theater director Chuma Sopotela at the Connelly theater last weekend.

Wa Lehulere’s installation not only claimed the stage but also spilled over into most of the theater.   It became quickly clear that the order of things was being inverted. On the stage, ceramic dogs were positioned amidst musical stands and mysterious signaling hands and faced the parterre where Wa Lehulere had arranged his sculptural instruments and where the sound performance was going to take place. I recognized the wooden and metal sculptures that I had seen just a month before in his studio in Cape Town. There was the wooden pyramid with its glass tube that functioned as a traveling tunnel for messages in glass bottles; the bird houses which reference the first female black artist in South Africa, the wooden school desk that point to Wa Lehulere’s school years when he chose to not speak Afrikaan: This was then his first act of protest against apartheid.

And again the ceramic dogs which appear in most of his installations these days. During the visit at the studio he explained their link to mythology: if you took sleep from a dog’s eye you could see into the spiritual world. They are for him metaphors for the past, for memory. In addition those kinds of dogs are attack and guard dogs in South Africa. By including them he points again to what happened during apartheid. Black people were forbidden to own dogs and if they did, the dogs were killed.

To the sound of drums, of make-do strings and wind instruments, Wa Lehulere and his female protagonist seemed to be enacting a story as well as engaging in child play. He pushed a wheel with two crutches just like I had just seen a little boy play in Kenya out in the desert town of Merti.

I hope you take advantage of this wonderful opportunity at our doorstep if you live in New York City.

“I recycle good pieces out of the past and create something that is new”

Nicholas Hlobo (video by Al Todd).

I am thrilled to see that Nicholas Hlobo is finally having his first gallery solo exhibtion in New York City at Lehman Maupin. I can report that his health scare a couple years ago has done nothing to squelch his imagination, talent and the ambitious scale of his work.

Mixed media on canvas paintings hung on the walls and leather and wood sculptures sprawled on the floor combined to create a provocative and unsettling installation.

Nicholas Hlobo likes to play with a wide range of materials. He typically weaves and stitches satin ribbon, rubber, and in this case soft leather and creates intricate, seductively tactile drawings and soft and amorphous sculptures.

Here two fantastic hard to define creatures are sprawled on the floor of the gallery. A large piece of driftwood to which is attached a bull’s horn made out of stitched leather makes me think of a ram’s head and feels a touch aggressive. It conveys masculinity yet held in check by the attached trailing tentacles entwined with each other made out of brown soft leather. These feel fluid and yielding, sensuous and more resonant of ocean creatures. Is this a land creature or a water creature? It seems to be both to my eyes. Hlobo here is referencing eels whose migratory patterns become a metaphor for the artist’s personal creative journey who must let go of all secure mooring or traditional references to create. These hybrid creatures reflect Hlobo’s constant challenge to identifiers such as ritual, sexual orientation, gender and nationality.

I notice a change in the way he deals with leather in two of his mixed media canvases. Leather ( or animal hide)  has been given a greater role. No longer tightly contained by the stitching like in his earlier canvases, -we can see a beautiful example on one of the walls – the leather now has been allowed to have a life of its own. It increasingly takes over the surface of the canvas, at times hanging loosely while at other times it acts like a live organism distorting the canvas as it pulls it away from its original flatness. It is as if the modernist focus on the flatness of the canvas is being literally challenged by an alternative African aesthetic.  His trade mark stitching is still present but plays a secondary role.

Well represented by the Stevenson gallery in South Africa Hlobo has had a long history of institutional exhibitions in Europe, Australia, and in the States. It was high time that he had local representation in New York.

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.