LONDON WELCOMES AFRICAN CONTEMPORARY ART.

This October was the second year that African art was making a showing in London during Frieze week and it was doubling in size! Named 1:54; 1 for one continent, 54 for 54 countries, the title was a reminder that Africa is not one country but a multitude of countries with distinct traditions, styles, and histories. Founded by Touria El Glaoui  the fair was also the impetus for a critical dialogue organized around a series of lectures and panels curated by artistic director Koyo Kouoh.

While I had been in London just a couple of weeks before I could not miss the event. I made a quick jump to London leaving late Tuesday night after attending suitcase and all a fundraising for a cause dear to a friend of mine. I caught miraculously a few hours of sleep on the flight over and after dropping off my bags at a friend’s house rushed first to the Frieze art fair to see the work of Serge Alain Nitegeka, a Burundi artist at Stevenson Gallery. I had put one of his recent panels on hold – I don’t buy from an image on the Internet – and needed to make a decision. An established South African gallery, Stevenson shows its artists at global contemporary art fairs eschewing the African tag.

The booth looked fabulous with Barthelemy Toguo’s large paintings hanging on the walls and works on paper displayed on easels.

 

I found Serge Nitegeka’s two recent panels in the back room, out of sight. I was immediately struck by their powerful visual impact. Serge paints on large wooden boxes. Abstract geometry here is imbued with potent psychological power.

In one of the panels Serge has chosen to eliminate any illusion of space: heavy black bands delineate a square slightly off center pressed up against the picture plane. There is nothing serene about this square: shards break up its interior periphery; I even have a visceral reaction and experience a sense of oppression and aggression.

In total contrast, the black lines on the other panel open up to a fictive space allowing for a sense of relief and perhaps hope. The contrast between the two pieces is striking and highlights Serge’s increasing ability to manipulate competently geometry for his own psychological and pictorial purposes.

Despite the fact that I loved the piece I couldn’t figure out where I would put in my apartment so I decided to be reasonable, urged along by my boyfriend who keeps on trying to curtail my art buying. So I very reluctantly let it go, not sure that I was making the right decision. In fact I later chided myself for not following my inclination. Indeed Serge is a very promising artist and he is having a show at Marianne Boesky in New York opening mid-November.

After a quick walk through Frieze I headed off to the Somerset House where 1:54 was housed. Somerset House is a U shaped neoclassical structure built around a courtyard and since the fair has grown from the previous year it now occupies two wings of the building. I confess it took me two visits to realize that half of the galleries were located in another wing! The lack of information given at the front desk was in part the culprit, but my fried brain resulting from the frantic pace of my short visit to London did not help!

I liked ambling on my own through the galleries, taking time to discover, explore, and understand new and different perspectives. There was a healthy mix of art coming from West Africa, North and Sub-Sahara Africa; a diversity of style; plenty of painting, photography, and sculpture. Some rooms were better curated than others, and overall there was enough good work to feel satisfied with the visit.

I was quite pleased to see Abdoulaye Konaté’s wall hangings in the foyer of the fair and later on during my visit at the booth of Primo Marella Gallery of Milan.

 

Konaté, an artist from Mali started as a painter and later turned to using textiles native to Mali to create large wall hanging where he developed a unique aesthetic combining a local sensibility for symbolism and color and craft with a global political message. I had visited his studio a couple of years back and felt his work had a striking grandeur.

 

Sammy Baloji’s photograph from his series “Mémoire”was particularly appealing. I was familiar with Baloji’s work and this image was one of his best ones. Born in Lubumbashi, in the DRC he has created photomontages where past and present collide. Here colonial figures, both indigenous and European, are layered over the contemporary architecture of a local mining town in the Kantanga province. Past and present coalesce to expose the underlying economic alliances that benefited colonial masters and a small minority of privileged indigenous people. The juxtaposition here was particularly successful which I don’t think is always the case in his work.

I stopped to ask questions about Nicene Kossentin’s photographic work (Boujmai Fatouma) at the Selma Feriani Gallery. Kossentin has set ghost-like portraits of her late mother and grandmothers against the backdrop of a dried salt lake found in her native city of Sfax, Tunisia. A line of calligraphy delineates the horizon. Because the wordage has no beginning and end it points to her historical cultural lineage. Kossentin’s work is about memory, about remembering, and mostly about the fear of not remembering. She points to the role of women in her culture as “passeuses de mémoire”- a beautiful phrase – or couriers of memory. Long a tradition in her culture it is also the role of women in many other cultures in the rest of Africa where grandmothers are the storytellers and keepers of the oral history of their community. The images were particularly haunting and poignant.

 

 

From there I wandered towards the Galerie Mikael Andersen where I had the opportunity to see the lovely drawings of the late Ernest Mancoba, who while perhaps considered the most important modern artist from South Africa is barely known internationally and deserves a new critical look. His drawings – often stylized figures – done during the 60’s and 70’s and inspired by African ritual woodcuts oscillate between abstraction and figuration and convey a unique energy. Having emigrated to Europe at the time of WWII Mancoba was part of the CoBrA movement in Europe before he returned to South Africa. Always present in his mind was his wish to bring his deep understanding of African culture to European art.

I was seduced by the work of Armand Boua at Jack Bell gallery. Using tar and acrylic on found cardboard boxes Boua captures the street kids from his hometown Abidjan.In the process of layering paint and removing it he creates scenes imbued with light and poetry despite the pathos of the subject. I absolutely loved the work though I was not sure the price was justified. Fortunately by then I had reached a state of  temporary wisdom and this time knew to walk away…no matter how much I was tempted.

Across the corridor The October Gallery had an eclectic selection that needed time to take in. I was struck by Homeless Hungry Homo, a sculpture lying on a low stand in the middle of the gallery by the Nigerian artist Adejoke Tugbiyele.

I found myself aware of some of my inner prejudices, which were fortunately being challenged. I was at once intrigued and slightly puzzled and even a bit put off at first. The supine figure disturbed me. It felt unapologetically African and so a part of me – the part shaped by my Western training – hesitated to give it its due. Yet it was so bold and provocative: strangely human despite it being a thing made out of yarn, palm stems, metal, African mask, and dollar bills. Would this appeal to a Western audience? I don’t know but I liked the boldness and the artist commitment to her particular aesthetic.

I hope you notice the variety of styles and aesthetics exemplified by all these artists, which makes it all very fascinating.

I moved on then to the ArtLabAfrica Gallery and soon found myself engaged in a long conversation with James Muriuki and Miriam Syowia Kyambi about their recent seven months residency in Kilifi, Kenya at a science research center as part of the Art in Global Health Residency.

I loved looking at the photographic work coming out of this residency, many of the photographs capturing the local architecture of Kenyan small towns. As you know I have a fondness for Kenya so I was just thrilled.

Great was my surprise when I saw hanging on the wall the work of Kenyan artist Peterson Kamwathi. A couple of years ago I had tracked him down on the outskirts of Nairobi. After he had very kindly offered and then made me tea we had spend two magical hours looking and talking about his work. I was so happy to hear that he was experiencing good success and had just had been commissioned to do a public project in Nairobi.

In the center of the booth were two sculptures by conceptual artist Gor Soudan. Using protest wire – a tangled black mass of wire he salvages from car tires burnt during civil unrests in Nairobi – he reworks them into beautiful, wispy, poetic sculptures, which look like drawings in space.

Photography was well represented with works by Francois-Xavier Gbre, Leonce R.Agbodjelou, Edson Chagas and Frank Marshall. I noticed an interesting trend: two photographers that were getting a lot of attention had originally trained and worked as fashion photographers. Lakin Ogunbanwo and Omar Victor Diop both work with a keen interest in form, color, lighting and design and turn to the inclusion of the self as a mean to address their personal and artistic concerns.

 

An erotic and subversive undertone can be felt in Lakin Ogunbanwo’s beautiful compositions (shown at Whatiftheworld) where he eludes the gaze of the viewer while highlighting the centrality of his presence in a serial layering of his figure.

Omar Victor Diop at Magnin-A in his project Diaspora is the main protagonist as he adopts the dress and pose of African historical figures having lived in Europe, which he combines with more contemporary props pointing to contemporary life.

Another photographer who has a fashion background is Hassan Hajjaj. His work was unfortunately squeezed between two booths but his take on the “Odalisque”, a video piece, was just wonderful: full of wit and incisive criticism. See upcoming post on his work.

 

Athi-Patra Ruga’s camp tapestry peppered with eclectic multicultural references was an explosive reminder of the hybrid construct of cultural identity. I was mesmerized by his unabashed combination of gaudy motifs, traditional stitching, and profusion of fake flowers that made the tapestry a textural and colorful delight. He was just included in the Phaidon book “Younger Than Jesus” directory of the 500 of the world’s best artists under the age of 33. It was a fitting and uplifting end to my perusing through the fairs.

I enjoyed the more low key tempo of 1:54, the absence of jaded dealers and collectors, and the opportunity to see more work from North Africa. The big fairs are already so big and to my view a bit of a chore, therefore I like the smaller venue.

I got to see some African galleries that I would not normally see mixed with Western galleries which made for a good mix.  For instance Anne de Villepoix, a mid –size gallery in Paris who has a few African artists in her roster liked the low-key atmosphere which reminds her of how fairs where years back.

Is it ideal to set African art apart? Perhaps not as it risks reenforcing the colonial idea of the African being seen as the other. However, one thing I have learned from all my times going to various African countries,  there are no simple solutions. This one seems the right one for now. It is an unique opportunity for many of these artists to be seen by a greater audience. More importantly it gives them a platform where they can explore keeping an authentic voice while contending with a global art world which demands them to fine tune their  skills, incorporate contemporary strategies, and hone their message to make it more effectively convincing .

PS: No one was walking around talking about being afraid of catching Ebola at the fair. That was a different reaction from the hysteria that I was about to witness at the airport when I landed at JFK! All customs officers were wearing masks and plastic gloves. Go figure….