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 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!

I took time off from my blog and put Africa on the back burner for a few weeks while I finished a renovation and moved my home. I packed and unpacked like a wild woman with no other thought then to get it done with. Buried under boxes the only thing I could think of was to get my life in order again. Then I went off to Europe for some R & R, art gazing and family time.

My first art destination was the big art event Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, which takes place every five years and tends to be heavily conceptual. A sprawling exhibition set up throughout the industrial city of Kassel, this year’s Documenta, which is curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, is “more about creativity in general than about art” to use the words of Roberta Smith.  I did feel at times that I was spending more time reading text whether it was the text included in the work or the text explaining the work and walking, looking for the installations through out the city. Jerry Salz described my feeling perfectly when he shared his own experience of Documeta13: he felt like he was on “a combination of truffle hunt, forced march, and wild goose chase.”  On the other hand, come to think of it, not a bad way to discover a city.

Out of 300 artists only four were from Africa: Issa Samb, Zanele Muholi, William Kentridge, and Kudzanai Chiurai and I will add also Kader Attia who is of Algerian descent, which makes five! My favorite installation was Zanele Muholi’s Faces and Phases,which consists of black and white portraits of black queers and trans people from different places and professions in Africa. They were tightly stacked into three rows on three connecting walls. Standing in the midst of these women looking down at me I felt the intensity of their gaze, the sheer power of their personality, and sensed at a visceral level the courage and pride of their stance. It was clear I needed to pay attention to their message, which was explicitly conveyed in Muholi’s video that tells the story of her coming out and includes testimonies of gay women who were raped and beaten because of their homosexuality. It felt profoundly genuine, and while very much conceptual layers of meaning hard to decipher did not dilute its underlying message.

I discovered the work of Zimbabwean multi-media artist and political activist Kudzanai Chiurai. One of the “born frees” (Zimbabweans born after Zimbabwe achieved independence) he has been living in exile in South Africa after his satiric portrayal of Mugabe made him persona non-grate in Zimbabwe.  I liked the sculpture of his face embedded in a log with 5 pangas (big knives) piercing the wood. Resting on a small fur pelt on the floor it was a compelling piece conveying man’s violent relationship with nature. “It’s about the tree of life,” says Chiurai, “we’ve severed our ancient connection with nature.”  Part of a larger installation called “Conflict Resolution” which includes drawings, paintings, photography and video Chiurai aims to reach and engage a new generation of young Africans that he says no one is talking to.  While Kentridge’s and Attia’s installations were ambitious, complex and more layered in meaning I found the immediacy of Muholi and Chiurai’s work appealing.

Though Kader Attia is French I am including his installation The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental cultures because his work is deeply rooted in his connection to Africa. Born in 1970 in Paris to Algerian parents, he grew up between Algeria and the Parisian banlieue and spend time in Brazzaville and Kinshasa. He completed his art studies in France but his first solo exhibition took place in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The installation speaks of the damages of war and the subsequent effort at repair, at integration of past and present, of hybridity or “ metissage.”  Serge Gruzinski in his article “From Holy Land to open your eyes”, which was included in the exhibition, highlights Kadia Atter’s concerns when he writes: “ The REPAIRED is opposed to the INTACT just as the HYBRID is opposed to the AUTHENTIC. Consequently, neither the repair nor the hybrid have their place in traditional museums.” Set up like a cabinet de curiosities, large wood-carved contemporary busts made by Senegalese artisans of damaged faces of WWI veterans are displayed with vintage colonialist books on medicine, African art and Ethnography.

Kattia Atter includes his personal collection of African artifacts which he put together while living in Africa such as crosses, necklaces and frames made out of recycled old bullets and coins from WWI.  Gruzinski says: “Kader Attia turns into a historian, an archeologist, an anthropologist and ethnologist in search of objects that can show us how societies rebuild themselves, face one another, intertwine and respond to one another.”

I was mesmerized by the slide show of photographs of the repaired faces of war injured Europeans soldiers juxtaposed with mended African masks. Immersed as I was at that time in reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved where the main character is struggling to come to terms with a personal and collective traumatic past and embrace some sort of life the theme of repair struck a chord.  Not lost on me either was the relevance of this theme with the history of Germany, World War II, and its aftermath. I liked the acceptance of reality, of the good, the bad and the ugly combined with a focus on resolution and rebuilding.

Attia’s installation is an act of repair on one hand but also a challenge to the status quo. It also fits into a greater discourse that aims to highlight the challenges faced by ever expanding contemporary multicultural societies, which are the result of processes of migration, colonialism, exile, and expulsion.  This theme is further explored in Paris by Kader Attia at the Musee de L’Art Moderne in the exhibition Construire, deconstruire, reconstruire: le corps utopique. In his slide show describing the private life of Algerian transsexuals in Paris the body becomes architecture and goes through a process of transformation, re-appropriation and repair. “Strangers in their own body as well as in a different culture, they build their identity by re-appropriating both fields.” “What a tough life,” I thought “and yet what courage and determination”.

Collages of urban landscapes juxtaposing Corbusier utopian modern architecture, which was the model for the project housing in the banlieues with images of a local population mostly from African descent were particularly fascinating.

Why do I find this theme so fascinating, you might ask. Born to a Bulgarian father who left after the arrival of the Soviets in Bulgaria and an American mother, I was raised in France and am now living in New York. I relate to some of the issues. I am a hybrid myself as is my heritage.

In Paris I was pleasantly surprised to see that Africa was getting plenty of attention. The periodical “ Le Point” had dedicated a large portion of its August issue to Africa highlighting its record growth, successes, and hopes and for once not its tragedies. It was a nice change because we know that what you give attention to, grows.  There is lots of interests in the continent these days: In July, Hillary Clinton traversed the African continent emphasizing America’s new found interest in its development. It did seem a bit motivated by a competitive spirit with China though!

Furthermore, African artists or from the Diaspora were very well represented at the Contemporary art Triennial at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. I was in Paris to spend some time with my mother who has Alzheimer’s. I had some trepidation about being in Paris beginning of August with all French people gone on vacation and local shops closed! Well, it turned out there was no time for intellectual apathy, the Trienniale kept me plenty busy! That will be the subject of my next post.