I just came back from two weeks in Paris and London where I checked out the extensive showing of African art. I am just amazed how the showing of Contemporary African art has taken off in Europe and in particular Paris. The efforts of curators, gallerists, collectors, and institutions are bearing fruits.

Paris is changing. It is home to an increasing amount of people from North and Sub- Sahara Africa. As a result there is a concerted effort to share African art and culture with a broader audience. Going beyond the exclusive art fairs and museums African art is made accessible at the Parc de La Villette with an exhibition “ Afrique Capitales” that partially spilled into the park with its large scale photographic works and where the admission was only 5 euros!

Furthermore recognizing at once the increased relevance/impact of African culture in a society that includes a growing proportion of people of African origin and the creative potential of a collaboration/fusion of Western and African fashion, the department store, the Galeries Lafayette, hosted under the title “Africa Now” a series of artistic events .

It asked the Nigerian photographer Lakin Ogubanwo to design the department store window displays. I was quite thrilled to see that he had been selected and that his work was going to be exposed so broadly. Lakin started his photographic career in fashion so he brings to the task at hand his sleek sense of style, and colorful palette. He combines and layers his stylish photographic and video work, with the recent fashion lines by designers who have been inspired by African prints (wax, batik, kasai).

This is not the ravaged and poor Africa but a colorful and exotic Africa. Some would say that it further promotes an essentialist vision of Africa at the detriment of a more nuanced and diverse reality. Obviously it is true – how could people of 54 countries all be the same – however we are in the world of consumerism, branding and fashion. Simple ideas sell better than complex realities. Furthermore, Lakin lives in vibrant and chaotic Lagos and conveys here his experience of the creativity he sees in his city where many African and other cultures coexists.

On the first floor art gallery of the department store Marie- Ann Yemsi curated an art exhibit “ Le Jour qui vient” – a lovely poetic title – of emerging contemporary African artists works. It favored video and photographic works and mixed media installations.

Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze wonderfully playful drawing on paper was the exception to the rule. Gone are traditional materials such as paint. Materials and images are recycled, rearranged, layered.

Turiya Magadlela stretches women’s tights across the canvases creating colorful grids, Igshaan Adams uses string, rope, beads, found fabric like curtain tassels to create a majestic tapestry that makes me think of a wall of foliage.

Clay Apenouvon drapes black plastic along the wall and lets it spill like black oil onto the floor seemingly oozing out into black puddles, which morph into plastic garbage bags. Frances Goodman uses the yellow hood of a BMW as her canvas. Color and material matter. They mean something and yet that meaning shifts as the material is reused in a different context. Ideas, materials, people circulate reflecting migratory patterns, a questioning and breakdown of traditional classifications , a more global world and a continuously shifting landscape.

The romantic and exotic idea of the “African Landscape” considered a colonial legacy, is challenged in two photographic works. Monica De Miranda proposes the jungle landscape but hers is interrupted, one might say ruptured into three disconnected parts. Mohau Modisakeng’s photographs from the Bophirima series places him wearing a horse’s headgear walking through an asphalt landscape. It is stark and foreboding and speaks of the long history of violence in South Africa.  Mohau is showing at the Venice Biennale and I am looking forward to seeing his work there.

Under the Galeries Lafayette’ vaulted glass roof  hung Joel Andrianomearisoa‘s black banners which unfortunately I did not see.

In May The African Art Fair 1:54 was again with us New Yorkers in Red Hook, Brooklyn at Pioneer Works. The mix of artists was different than last year making the fair an opportunity for discoveries for New Yorkers and I found works that peeked my interest.

It was very well attended and therefore a great opportunity to network. A series of talks curated by Koyo Kouoh, founder and artistic director of Raw Material Company, Dakar had also been scheduled and I learned more about other creative web ventures – TrueAfrica and OkayAfrica – that focus on promoting African arts and culture and aim to reach the young hip African generation. Being cool is their motto! And it is working! They have a large following on the African continent. Most of them started for the same reason I did my blog: a desire to correct a mostly negative portrayal of the continent by focusing on the enormous creative energy that infuses the continent. Professionally run their writers are often based on the African continent, giving the fresh and dynamic reporting the perspective of an insider.

While run increasingly professionally I felt it fell short at being as exciting as the 1:54 edition last fall in London. Smaller, it represented a limited sample of what is happening on the African continent. While Red Hook is a cool location it is actually an awkward space and a few galleries found themselves assigned pathways/passages in lieu of booths where the works were not shown to their best advantage.
Walking into the fair I found myself immediately absorbed by the work of Omar Ba who had a solo showing at the Art Bartschi & cie booth. His work was just fantastic. I have written about his art before and it is with pleasure that I see his painting becoming more self-assured. The usually slightly chaotic scenes are more structured yet keep their highly patterned quality and imagery that references tribal decoration, natural fauna, self-styled leaders, and factional warfare. His characters loom larger, closer to the surface almost spilling into our space minimizing the psychological distance between the turbulent worlds he evokes and our present circumstances.

“His work was mostly sold by the beginning of the opening night” said the gallery attendant with satisfaction. Owning two of his earlier works I am particularly pleased that he is doing well though that also means his prices are going up and getting a new piece may be a bit more expensive. I also have to contend with more competition! While still represented by Art Bartschi in Switzerland he has changed galleries in Paris and is now with Daniel Templon.

Em’kal Eyongakpa’s photographic installation at Apalazzo gallery was the next work to catch my eye. I was not quite sure what was going on but I found the enigmatic interweaving of reality and illusion in the forest setting particularly intriguing. I felt the same way as when I read poetry. My senses are awakened, I am drawn by the dreamy quality and the elusive meaning is what makes me feel challenged and leads me to ponder my reactions.

Hanging on the opposite wall two of Edson Chagas conceptual photographic self-portraits where his head is covered by carrier bags were a reminder that rampant consumerism is taking over urban Africa. I thought the one with the words “World of Hope” turned upside down particularly appropriate these days!

One of Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze’s drawings was hanging at Mariane Ibrahim gallery. She creates these fantastical scenes that have a collage aesthetic where imaginary characters that she calls aliens or hybrid creatures engage in mysterious and playful activities. As she explained during one of the Fair’s panels much of her work is anchored in the idea of play. Yet through out her work and as she constructs these new paradigms she also addresses contemporary issues of displacement and hybridity. She is getting a lot of attention these days. She is one of the finalists of the Prix Canson Sixth Edition whose works are being shown at the Drawing Center in Soho, New York City. Njideka Akunyili Crosby is the other finalist of Nigerian descent. I am thrilled to see African artists’ work being shown at the Drawing Center!

Kenyan multi-disciplinary artist Jim Chuchu’s photograph tinged with eroticism where a man seems engaged in some mysterious ritual is part of a body of work that attempts to reconstruct future-past anonymous deities, their devotees and forgotten religious rites. Being gay and therefore rejected by the local prevailing religions Chuchu invents new religions and rituals that are inclusive of gay people.

Hanging in the back of Jack Bell’s booth, in his storage corner, was a lovely wall hanging “ God Save The King” by Gastineau Massamba from the Republic of Congo. Here an Okapi, a native animal to Central Africa and a national icon is beautifully and sparingly embroidered on a broad sheath of linen speckled with delicate flowers. The whimsy of the piece was enchanting and I was seduced. However it is the story behind the work and the artist’s choice of medium that moved me deeply. Massamba has chosen embroidery in part because that particular process helps him contend with the recurring war traumas that he has been living through. Part art / part therapy: a magical mix.

In a totally different vein just around the corner at Richard Taittinger hangs the work of Frances Goodman from South Africa from her recent solo New York show Rapaciously Yours. Her wall sculptures made out of acrylic nails looked like scaled creatures at once beautiful and yet also somewhat creepy. I preferred her car seat sculpture where she sews on the worn cover of a car seat a text using pieces of fake diamonds that speaks of sex workers mixed feelings as they lose their innocence while gaining sexual power. The contrast between the refinement of the glittering text and the roughness and coarseness of the car seat was what caught my attention at first. Once I knew the underlying story I was even more intrigued. I liked the feminist tone and there was a little of Tracy Emins’ sexual provocation and aesthetic but with even more of an edge and without her narcissistic undercurrent. Boy! Did that take me back to my teenage years in Paris where hookers were part of daily life in my posh neighborhood, the 16^th arrondissement. I would notice the same hooker regularly pull into our street in her green car, presumably service her customer and then drive away. We were not shocked, it made for a good story but mostly it made me aware of other lives, other realities that were not so easily dismissible.

The work of painter Beatrice Wanjiku at Artlabafrica is edgy,  aggressively disturbing. She paints howling figures that are struggling to break out from the constraints of straightjackets and become metaphors of human struggles and pain.. There is no holding back here. Her paint is applied thinly and has the transparency and looseness that one would associate more with watercolors and as a consequence the resulting image has a blurry quality almost like a dream; maybe more a nightmare in this case. All facial features dissolve into a big black howl. She is an artist who deserves our attention!  I find her  raw and direct. She makes herself totally vulnerable and the work is that much more convincing for it.

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