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.

Rotimi Fani-Kayode

I was thrilled to see that finally Rotimi Fani-Kayode was getting a proper showing in New York. This tribute to his photographic work is long overdue. Indeed he was seminal in his portraiture of black African homosexuality.

“The first solo exhibition in New York of photographs by the British-Nigerian artist, presents large-scale color and black-and-white portraits created in the late 1980s by Fani-Kayode, before his untimely death in 1989. Fani-Kayode’s images interpret and reveal sexuality across racial and cultural differences, vividly merging his fascination with Yoruba ‘techniques of ecstasy’ and homoerotic self-expression through symbolic gestures, ritualistic poses, and elaborate decoration.”

While Mapplethorpe’s neo-classical photographs of the 1980’s with their emphasis on a perfect timeless body have become by now the acceptable norm in the representation of homosexuality and homoerotic desire as an art form, Rotimi’s enigmatic, theatrical, “neo-romantic” images of the black body engaged in some mysterious ritualistic exercise have encountered a reluctant establishment on this side of the Atlantic in particular. I am reminded of Caravaggio’s depictions of male youth, which were perceived at the time as highly provocative in their rejection of all classical normative rules of representation.

Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955-1989) was born in Nigeria in Ife, the Yoruba spiritual center, to a prominent family who were keepers of the shrine of Ife. Becoming political refugees his family settled in the UK and Rotimi went on to complete his education in the US at Georgetown University and at the Pratt Institute, finally returning to London where he worked until he died of AIDS at the age of 34.

Kobena Mercer in her essay Neo –Romantic, Afro-Atlantic: Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s Aesthetic Singularity describes eloquently his photographic work at the Project Space. .

“ In the luxurious darkness of the photographer’s studio, various young men have been adorned with flowers. Petals and leaves brush against their skin in an atmosphere of sensual calm, yet each figure is visibly agitated by strange gestures whose meaning is inscrutable. “Nothing to Lose” is a series of color photographs that communicates a passionate feeling for human beauty that is all the more vividly intense because of the imminent presence of death. Rotimi Fani–Kayode died in December 1989, having produced in the previous years a unique body of work that remains utterly original.”

This selection of photographs was taken from two bodies of work, Nothing to Lose and Every Moment Counts, which he did in collaboration with his partner Alex Hirst as part of two groups shows that dealt with the impact of AIDS (Bodies of Experience: Stories About Living with HIV and Ecstatic Antibodies).  Fani-Kayode embraced the subject fearlessly and without self-pity.

Leaving behind the more typical realistic documentary photographic tradition Fani-Kayode embraced at once the Yoruba ritual heritage and his sexual identity and turned to the more adaptive studio tradition with its potential for creating imaginary spaces. These images are mostly provocative not because of an overt sexuality, but more because in depicting a black male nude engaged in enigmatic rituals they become windows into the unknown: an intangible spiritual world where mysterious forces are at play and where spiritual and physical ecstasy merge provocatively.

These images are confounding. There is no obvious point of entry in Fani-Kayode’s fabricated world. While I feel drawn in by the theatricality of the composition, the rich and sensuous coloring, dramatic lighting and luscious flowers, leaves and feathers, I am unable to access the meaning. I feel ultimately kept at a distance.  Fani-Kayode deliberately aims to create a complexity in order to hold the viewer at bay. I am reminded of the tradition of the Yoruba masquerade rituals where the spirits of the ancestors are brought forth through the presence of masks and yet, at all time, are shielded from view. One does not enter their world.

A more comprehensive analysis that would take in account Yoruba rituals might give further helpful insight into the meaning of these images.

The fifteenth edition of Paris-Photo was held for the first time at the Grand Palais, a grand Beaux Arts building remarkable for its iron, steel, and glass barrel vaulted roof.  This new location for the fair, which was previously underground in the Carrousel du Louvre, is best adapted to the fair’s status as the most prestigious fair in the international photographic calendar. Well over 100 galleries from 23 countries participated along with several publishing houses selling photo books.

Julien Frydman, former director of Magnum Paris was the new director of the fair. Intent on not sidelining documentary photography as an insular art form, Frydman gave it a prominent place. Indeed, the fair offered a mixture of photography as contemporary art with its conceptual bias, and a substantial showing of historical and documentary photography.

Traditionally this fair adopts a main geographic focus. This year, Africa was given the place of honor with photographs from a new generation of African artists selected from the Bamako Encounters in Mali and a carefully curated exhibition of portraiture from the Artur Walther private collection of contemporary photography. In the galleries, African historical photography was extensively represented with works by Malick Sidibe, Seydou Keita, Jean Depara, and Oumar Ly while the more contemporary manifestations were more limited and mainly of the documentary kind. The result was an overall conservative showing and not fully representative of the range that currently exists in African photography.

My first impulse was to check out the selection from The Bamako Encounters.  I noticed an effort to temper the overall documentary tenor of the exhibition in Mali and its emphasis on ravaged communities and landscapes.  Among the photographs of the 12 artists chosen were Husain and Hasan Essop’s conceptual images of a society where conflicting cultural and religion agendas coexists precariously,  Mohamed Camara’s personal musings and Baudouin Mouanda‘s snapshots of Congolese sapeurs/dandies. Besides Ouedraogo’s photographs of Accra’s electronic wastelands the theme was generally inferred more than explicit.  Somewhat unfortunate was the location of the Bamako section. Set to the side of the fair behind the publishing booths it could be overloked.

Better situated  and set amidst the main galleries, the installation of the Private Collection of Artur Walther was very successful.  The installation, which was curated by Okwui Enwezor, was structured around distinct groupings, which highlighted the conceptual component and the serial quality of some of the artists’ photographic work. I lingered in front of Okhai Ojeikere’s hairstyle series, which document an aspect of Nigerian culture.  Seen as a group they looked phenomenal and the systematic aspect of Ojeikere’s process was made evident. The hairdos are seen more as an art form; they become abstract shapes and look sculptural.
Samuel Fosso’s self-portrait project where he stands in for black cultural icons such as Angela Davis, Haile Selassie, Miles Davies, Muhammad Ali was another great series. I find it fascinating that he runs a portrait and passport shop in Bangui (C.A.R) and nobody in his vicinity knows that he does this other kind of work, or that he has an international following.  I was pleased to see the color saturated portraits of “Miss D’vine” by Zanele Muholi who explores the conceptual power of portraiture to address issues of gender, race, and colonialism. In the context of South Africa where homosexuality is unacceptable, when first exhibited, these images of a drag queen dressed in drag or tribal dress and set in the African bush were seen as highly provocative and politically potent. Berni Searle ‘s photographic installation – a composite of photographs of parts of the palm of a hand – forces the viewer to see the life lines of a slightly discolored black hand through the modernist grid thereby highlighting the post-colonial dynamics.
Notwithstanding the obvious contemporary focus here of the selection, the inclusion of some vintage photographs of the 19th century provided a historical basis for this contemporary manifestation.
Implicit in the inclusion of Walther’s collection was the part he plays as an example in the field of collecting, thereby conveying to African photography further legitimacy as a collectible item.

I then proceeded to walk through the main part of the fair taking in its broad international offerings, and I was most of the time amazed of how often I did not recognize the names of the contemporary photographers on view.  Indeed the European market for contemporary photography is quite different from the American one. Getting back to my focus, I came back on my steps for a closer look at the material relating to Africa that was included in the galleries’ showings. I realized that only 20% of the galleries had addressed the theme.  With the exception of the two South African galleries whose selection was contemporary, the majority of them had favored historical material.  A long stop at the booth of La Revue Noire was truly rewarding with its mix of historical figures such as Jean Depara who is having his first retrospective at the Revue Noire’s gallery and more contemporary artists such as Alain Polo and Joel Andrianomearisoa, who are both more conceptual in their approach. Oumar Ly, whose work of the 1960’s and 70’s was recently discovered, had a whole wall at Les Filles du Calvaire.  Walking through this fair, I had the sense that a case for a history of African photography was being made. Pascal Martin Saint Leon, director of The Revue Noire summarized it well when he said : “ l’histoire de la photo Africaine se construit au jour le jour.” And indeed it is by going through photographic archives and making prints that this history is being put together bit by bit.
I was pleased to see that Viviane Sassen had a prominent place at the Stevenson’s gallery.  She is getting a lot of attention: she was included in MOMA’s New Photography exhibition this year. While she now lives in Europe and is not African, she lived in Kenya as a young girl and her photos deal with her memories of those years. However contemporary examples were overall few amidst the galleries and while David Goldblatt was given fair representation, more of his recent work could have been included.

Malick Sidibe was honored at this fair and decorated officer of Arts and Letters. When asked to share his thoughts on the fair he recommended that young photographers resist copying others and focus on making photography that speaks to their African sisters and brothers. Sound advice and yet few Africans buy photography. Non African public and private collectors are almost the sole purchasers of these works.