In the introduction to The World According to Bylex Filip De Boeck and Koen Van Synghel describe the Congolese artist Pume Bylex as “not interested in the day-to-day reality of Kinshasa. [He] turns his attention to what lies beyond the horizon of the visible and the tangible (…) a world with perfection and harmony at its centre.” [Read more...]
The World of Congolese artist Pume Bylex
April 7, 2012 By 2 Comments
Disco Angola (in New York City)
April 3, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Stan Douglas. "A Luta Continua, 1974" (2012)
The photographer Stan Douglas’s new project “Disco Angola,” a work in progress, is on display at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York until April 28, 2012. The New Yorker announced the show in Goings on About Town with the image above. What’s amazing is that Douglas has not been to Angola, though from what I read in this interview with Monica Szewczyk he has done a good bit of studying up. [Read more...]
French Tropicalism
March 30, 2012 By 2 Comments
At the occasion of the recent publication of Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s book ‘African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude’ (originally published in French in 2007) and listening to this interview where he speaks about his new book, ‘Bergson Postcolonial’, I intended to write a short post wondering why it often takes years before important work by African authors (both fiction and non-fiction) that is originally published in French becomes available in English — if at all. Browsing through English news and culture blogs focussing on ‘all things African’, one does find a lot of visual work (by francophone artists, fashionistas or musicians) because that work is easy to blog and reblog (Tumblr & co), but when it comes to engaging with French opinions and writings… it’s a desert out there. [Read more...]
Nothing to Lose? The art of Rotimi Fani-Kayode
March 28, 2012 By 2 Comments
Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s first solo show in New York opened last week. The British-Nigerian artist’s last works, large photographs of the naked male body, are on display at the Walther Collection in New York City. These are images of rites which explore the artist’s familial background as keepers of the shrine in Ife, Nigeria, and the artist’s status as liminoid. Fani-Kayode’s interest in Yoruba ‘techniques of ecstasy’ is juxtaposed against a sombre thinking into sexuality, race, and religion, as discourses of the body. [Read more...]
‘Golden Theater or Gutted Whore-house?’
March 21, 2012 By 5 Comments
Grace Ndiritu, To Africanize is to Civilize, 2003 (Courtesy of the artist/Galerie Baudoin Lebon)
The latest issue of Savvy Journal (#3) includes an article, ‘Transcending “Africa”‘, by Emeka Okereke, photographer and founder of the ‘Invisible Borders Trans-African Photographic Initiative’ (whose work we’ve been excited about here). It is an interesting contribution to debates about the recent successes of African art in the contemporary art world, which has been getting increasingly lively. In its first issue, Savvy published an essay — ‘Where is Africa in the Global Contemporary Art?’ — by Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, a Nigerian academic based at the University of California. Ogbechie wrote a forceful and rigorous piece on the misrepresentation of Africa in the international art community, where the continent is substituted for its diaspora. Even more striking and bold has been an article by Rikki Wemega-Kwawu–an internationally-renowned painter working out of Takoradi, Western Ghana–who asks similar questions to Ogbechie, but in harsher language: ‘How could the “gutted whore-house” of yesterday overnight become the golden theater for the playing out of contemporary African art?’ [Read more...]
The Branson Biennale for Morocco
March 19, 2012 By 2 Comments
Vanessa Branson stands, hands on hips, her loosely hanging skirt tails give her the figure of a Western women making modest concessions to the predictable inquisitive gaze of an Arabic polis. Her trainers are burnished gold — a playful note — and what you wouldn’t be forgiven for calling “ethnic jewelry” is slung around her neck. She has just organized the 4th Marrakech Biennale and looks proud of this achievement. Next to her, one of the young curators, Carson Chan, is dressed entirely in black, wearing statement glasses, with folded arms submitting mournfully to the publicity shot, any visible reluctance counterbalanced by a quiet confidence. It’s quite clear who has the money, and who already suspects he knows how this image will be read. [Read more...]
Canada’s 90s version of South Africa
March 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment
The Canadian High Commission to South Africa, probably meaning well or deliberately unaware of the emptiness of rainbow metaphors, is looking for photographs capturing “the Rainbow Nation”. They’re working with the Johannesburg Bailey Seippel Gallery on this. The photographer’s entries will have to display “multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-racial South Africa”. For real. It’s not the 1990s anymore. [Read more...]
‘An extra day to be black’
March 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment
I know we’re already seven days into March, but visual artist Michael Paul Britto’s request for ‘an extra day to be black’ in mainstream media outlets, still holds. (For those in the dark, he is ripping into Black History Month.)
Tank Girl
March 7, 2012 By 4 Comments
Nadine Hammam’s work turned out to be “too risky” for Art Dubai. Her new exhibition, Tank Girl, opens tonight at the Gallery Misr (Cairo, Egypt).
The Little Book of Terror
March 6, 2012 By 4 Comments
It was Daisy Rockwell’s “New Hat,” a painting of Nigerian “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab that caught my eye. In her portrait, the young Umar tries on a new black woollen cap, one with the Nike swoosh jauntily embroidered to the front, while on a school trip to London. His fingers are engaged in the action of pulling down the sides of the cap over his ears; the collar of his warm jacket is upturned against the autumnal chill. Around him, the Indian colours of fading summer—golden yellow, burning orange—halo the darkness encasing Umar’s figure. His eyes have that reticent inwardness already. It is that same immobilising sadness we came to recognise in his terrorist mugshot, after he was accused of attempting to blow up a Detroit-bound aeroplane in mid-flight, with explosives hidden in his underwear.
