I love that even though I now spend my summers in Provence in an adorable house in the foothills of the Luberon I don’t have far to go to see good African art. The Photography Festival at Arles – Les Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d’Arles – is an hour away and this year South African artist and activist Zanele Muholi curated with artist Walead Beshty the exhibition Systemically open?New Forms of Production of the Contemporary Image, which among other artists showed her latest body of work Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail, the Dark Lioness).

I encountered Muholi’s work in 2009 in South Africa and met her in Bamako during the Rencontres de Bamako. She was just starting to get known internationally for her work on the LBGTI community. Already an activist she was speaking up for this community that was greatly suffering from hate crimes in South Africa and beyond. At the time she was getting attention for a body of work, the Miss D’vine series. She photographed black queens and drag artists set in an “African” landscape.

“The photos examine how gender and queer identities and bodies are shaped by – but also resist, through their very existence – dominant notions of what it means to be black and feminine”. (Zanele Muholi, 2009). This series was visually alluring and conceptually provocative. I fancied more her photographs of gay women in their own homes. I liked how she captured these quiet private moments with tenderness bringing the viewer into their private world.

Simultaneously she was already working on a long term project, the series Faces and Phases where she documents members of the South African LBGTI community. The work is very different formally. Color had been reduced to black and white. All theatricality had been removed in favor of a formal and deadpan approach. Intent on giving visibility to a community that has suffered from being invisible her focus is unwavering as she imbues the women with a pregnant dignity. This series has received much international attention and praise.

I was familiar with the body of work being shown at Arles– a work of self-portraiture – but I was not expecting the huge scale of the display. Installed in one of the recently renovated Ateliers of the Luma space Zanele had had some of her photographs printed the size of the huge walls. Wow! There was no way of avoiding her unflinching gaze.

In this new body of work she turns the camera on herself. The work is essentially autobiographical. Born in Umlazi, Durban to a working class family (her South African mother was South African domestic worker and her Malawian father a day laborer) Muholi was at first a hairstylist and factory worker before embracing fully her artistic career. There is a theatrical aspect to the work as she uses props, such as materials she created herself and found objects, clothe pins, scouring pads, various hats, wigs to name a few which reference her experiences. She plays with the color of her skin, most of the time darkening it, “reclaiming her darkness” she says.

Unlike Samuel Fosso or Cindy Sherman she is not pretending to be someone else. On the contrary she is making herself vulnerable by exposing aspects of herself and her history, which has been shaped by South African political, cultural and social history. It is as if she is play acting in front of the mirror like I remember doing when I was younger but with great vulnerability as she exposes herself to herself, and to all of us. The result is a multifaceted Zanele, increasingly hard to pinpoint and because of that, that much more fascinating and endearing. All the while she is forcing her audience, us, to confront our own discomfort with some of her uncompromising exposure. Read here a description of her process.

“I have embarked on a discomforting self-defining journey, rethinking the culture of the selfie, self-representation and self-expression. I have investigated how photographers can question and deal with the body as material or mix it with objects to further aestheticise black personhood. My abiding concern is, can photographers look at themselves and question whom they are in society and the positions that they hold, and maintain these roles thereafter? ( Somnyama Ngonyama, Zanele Muholi, Stevenson).

Zanele Muholi was a little tardy for a scheduled talk during the opening week of the Arles festival. She eventually appeared, slowly moving towards the panel like a queen . She had an amazing hairdo almost 8 inches high above her head. I just loved that hard won self-assurance. What a great example!

Wim Botha’s fragmentary spectacle: An engrossing juxtaposition of materials.

From my summer house in the Luberon in Provence, South of France it takes me barely 20 minutes to get to the Fondation Blachere in Apt, which is devoted to fostering contemporary creativity in Africa and to promoting its artists. Situated in the industrial suburb of Apt, a small town in the south of France, the foundation was started by industrialist Jean-Paul Blachere and sits right next to his lighting factory ( Blachere Illumination). The foundation has a top notch exhibition program, offers a series of artist residencies for African artists and has a really cool store (la Boutik) selling creations of African craftsmen and designers from several African countries, and an art book store.   Two years ago I saw a wonderful exhibition of Yinka Shonibare’s sculptural work . This year an installation by South African artist Wim Botha titled Still Life with Water was on display. I had seen Botha’s unique and disturbing busts carved out of leather bound books in the Venice Biennale but besides that I did not know much about his work.

The title did not prepare me for the sculptural spectacle that I encountered. First two fierce heads of a lion and lioness made out of plywood, poised to attack, greeted me at the entrance. There was an undeniable sense of energy and that same energy pulsated throughout the main part of the installation in the next room. It was a stunning beginning though it only partially prepared me for what was to come.

In the main room winged creatures made out of Styrofoam captured in flight and saddled with fluorescent light tubes appeared to be circling around a nest-like cluster of more fluorescent light tubes and reflective sky blue panels.

These panels, an obvious reference to the sky, and their reflection allowed for an amplified effect, a sense of multiple perspectives and an ever-expanding spectacle.

Sculpted busts, some made out of books and some made out of wood, framed this whirlwind of activity, containing and grounding the scene into some kind of art historical continuum by their inherent reference to traditions of woodworking, portraiture and knowledge. No one style dominated; figuration and abstraction coexisted and enhanced each other. The primacy and diversity of materials and their particular physical properties and their associations, either art historical or cultural, was at the core of the experience.

I was left pondering the whole, which I found hard to grasp or take in all at once as the fragmentary character of many of the elements made it almost impossible to complete a narrative or reach a singular cohesive explanation. I came to accept that there was no easy interpretation, and certainly not a singular one. Because of the presence of the lions at the entrance I thought of nature, birds, sky, nature – I was also about to go off into the African bush for a 7 day hike so my mind was wired towards nature ! – yet the presence of the carved busts, with their cultural and art historical references did not quite fit with this narrative. For an interesting analysis of the exhibition it is good to read Benjamin Sutton’s review of the exhibition where he makes reference to the Renaissance tradition of painted ceilings which possibly play a role in Botha’s aesthetic.

Listening to Wim Botha speaking in an accompanying video sheds some light. After having a mostly conceptual focus in his earlier works he now claims to be guided almost solely by aesthetic concerns and aims to get away from meaning. “Balance, form, line, textures,” are at the core of his artistic practice. The process is what captivates him and dictates the work. He wishes to leave the work open, to not shackle it to an over-riding message. Yet it is clear Botha’s work through its use of material is in continual dialogue with tradition and knowledge, yet it is firmly anchored in the present, mostly through the overwhelming feeling of fragmentary turmoil. The installation will travel to the Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town this fall.