Fondation H presents Shiraz Bayjoo’s first institutional exhibition in France, Lo Sa La Ter Ruz [On This Red Earth], curated by Ilaria Conti.
Expanding on the artist’s research into the colonial histories linking his native Mauritius to surrounding territories such as Madagascar, the exhibition presents a new series of works created specifically for the exhibition and highlighting the complex socio-political entanglements that have shaped the Indian Ocean. Presented on both levels of the Fondation H – Paris, Lo Sa La Ter Ruz is a critical reflection and homage to the resilient genealogies that have structured communities and transmitted knowledge through generations of colonised people, despite the crimes against humanity and nature they have faced.

Drawing on Bayjoo’s extensive research in French archives, the works in the exhibition propose new conceptual and material strategies of knowledge production, challenging the principle of extraction at work in colonial archives. I had the chance to talk with Shiraz Bayjoo and Ilaria Conti about some of the many aspects of the exhibition. I wanted to comprehend the challenges of Shiraz’s artistic practice and how they worked together with Ilaria Conti to put this exhibition together.

What does the use of colonial archives represent in today’s reflections on decolonial practices and more specifically in your work Shiraz Bayjoo ? 

Ilaria Conti (I.C): Colonial archives are a very intricate subject of study and debate; they are sets of information shaped by truly complex histories. We must also understand how such information informs us: our knowledge, present-day processes, and ways of thinking. Much work has been done on the use and detournement of colonial archives, and it is important to continue to develop work that fosters awareness on the genealogies of these materials and the structures of power that these documents reproduce in the present. 

We have long discussed with Shiraz the impossibility of having a one-dimension approach to archival materials, because they are in constant flux as much as we are in flux. Our ability to read and address them changes over time. We must therefore develop new thinking tools and a different vocabulary, as the relevance of these archives is given by those who look at them today, it is not just about the histories that someone collected in the past. 

It’s crucial to think about how the activation of such archives through the histories they perpetuate in the present and their implications for the future. Addressing colonial archives is also brave, as these represent a slippery territory: they are ever shifting, and so are we in relation to them. This courageous line of critical thinking is central to Shiraz’s practice. 

Shiraz Bayjoo (S.B): Colonial archives present multiple possibilities in unpacking the construction of post-colony national narratives, and ultimately the space in which we arrive at today. They become an important tool if we want to expand our understanding of our recent historical past. This work is about how histories have been recorded and how and where aspects of our identities and cultures have been collected, how they have been collected and how they are represented in the language of museums and museology. It is a complex journey in the re-representation of these materials, one that requires questioning and criticality in all directions around the subject, and throughout the process. It can become an act of reclaiming, making visible, and in this way pushing back against erasure. How ever we have to tread carefully, avoiding recreating the violence of the past, or the framing of language that has been used to obscure and ultimately reduce identities, cultures, and people. 

Can revisiting colonial archives today be considered in itself a form of violence? 

S.B: It is important that we don’t enter into the replication of violence or its visual repetition, but we also don’t want to deny what has taken place. It is important not to thin our understanding of the depths of subjugation, and how people were forced to exist in a very specific way at odds with their traditional ways of life. Looking at the framework of language can be a useful way, without having to point directly to situations of violence. I think it is important to represent the depth of trauma, but with pathways that seek to serve the healing process.

I.C: It is a continuous and very delicate process of figuring out how to relate to these materials. In focusing on what is considered violent in such archives, we must learn how to engage with it and understand how to not reproduce such violence. It is not just a matter of acknowledging what has happened historically, but also to understand what was considered worthy of being part of such archives, and—as Shiraz has mentioned—who has access to them now and why. The revisitation of the archives is not a form of violence per se, but it certainly requires us to learn how to navigate multiple levels of violence. As we work through these materials, we also discover new, more subtle forms of violence that pertain to the present-day discourse and to our positionality as those who engage with such materials in the now. 

Shiraz, why is it important for you not to restrict your research to the Mauritian case but to extend it to the whole Indian Ocean region? More precisely to the Great Red Earth? Is there a link here with the archipelago thinking of Edouard Glissant; act in your place and think with the world?

S.B: The research for this exhibition comes from a previous exhibition and body of work entitled Searching for Libertalia. It is a work that explores the process of African decolonization, specifically the process towards independence. Mauritius is central to much of my work not for patrimonial nostalgia, but because island post-colonies make visible the layers of the colonial project, of the hierarchies of race and people. 

Mauritius is a colonial construct. For me it is important to situate it in relation to  the wider region. Madagascar in contrast is claimed as a site of indigeneity, it is not a colonial construction, and can therefore reveal deeper layers. These are not historical projects, instead we explore our contemporary presence, unpacking  language, and the framing of identity through Eurocentric visions. We have to be able to see beyond one space and understand particularly in the archipelago the interconnectedness of people and places.

Ilaria, in the paragraph 4 of the curatorial text it is said « Territory requires that filiation be planted and legitimated. Territory is defined by its limits, and they must be expanded. A land henceforth has no limits. » Can you please elaborate on what you mean by that? What do you think is the difference between land and territory ? 

I.C: This quote by Edouard Glissant is one tool among the many he has developed to address the complexity of colonial histories. When considering Shiraz’s work and in thinking about the curatorial path of Lo Sa La Ter Ruz, land represents a central point. With Shiraz we had in-depth conversations about the possibilities of representation when working with archives, and we realized the strong focus that there is on the human figure. It was key for us to move beyond this exclusive focus and consider the intimate relations that historically have been established with the land. The aim is to place the human and the non-human on the same level and explore the deep interconnection that exists among these two dimensions. This is also why in the curatorial text we address genocide and ecocide as one deeply entwined element. 

The works in the exhibition point toward the importance of thinking about the land as a place of knowledge and of its transmission—as well as of safety and refuge, as in the maroon forest featured in the textile work titled Riverstone. There is a crucial shift that takes place when thinking about land as a space of self-determination, culture, knowledge, resilience, and survival, as opposed to land as a site of extraction and exploitation.

The words by Glissant exemplify such shift, which leads to understand land as an entity with its own standing in society. I have therefore included this quote in the curatorial text as it insightfully mirrors Shiraz’s thinking and ongoing process. In this sense, the overall ecology of the exhibition can be seen as an ecosystem of interrelated elements that does not form a monolithic statement: it is a process that is not over yet, a point on a potentially endless arc of research. 

Precisely, in the Coral Island series, Shiraz, you reveal scenes that would be almost laughable if the matter wasn’t so dramatic: settlers having fun with the local fauna and taking possession of it, just as they did with the human populations of these islands. One can see the Dodo, an endemic animal of Mauritius, now extinct, as well as the giant turtle, also exterminated from the island but reintroduced thanks to the neighbouring species from the Seychelles archipelago: the Aldabra turtle. 

S.B: Our relationship to ownership of land and the idea of extraction has a firm connection,  exploitation of people through forced labour grew exponentially with the exploitation of natural resources across the globe throughout the colonial period. In the case of the Mascarene Islands, although there are no indigenous people, the ecology is of course indigenous. It is the fauna and flora that have witnessed the erasure more than anything else. Both become a metaphor in terms of reflection. It is a way to understand the violence, the backdrop against which all is unravelled. The plantation landscape, and the idea we are continuing the economics of the plantation, the Plantationoscene as a theoretical space opposing the position of the Anthropocene. It is upon this premise that we are still living in the legacy of this relationship of extraction, forced habitation, forced labour, forced productivity of human, animal, and plant. In fact, it is not just the colonial paradigm, but the genesis of the globalised relationship in which we live today. 

The work ‘San Visyon’ I quote the curatorial text “form a ‘material index of resistance'”. We also see in the series of paintings ‘En Cours’ drawn from the archives of the Musée du Quai Branly from which you creates new images that offer, and I quote, “an alternative and provocative archaeology. He brings to light the sovereignty of representation that the colonial archives have historically erased by their “order of perception”. I wonder about the links between the creation of a new imaginary and resistance in your work. Can you tell me more about this? 

S.B: One of the very strong narratives that we have in Mauritius is the story of the maroon, of maronnage and the act of escape. How do you survive in situations of extreme subjugation? How does that inherited legacy prevent you from moving forward or being able to create a new sense of yourself? Perhaps the act of escape as recounted in the book ‘The old man and the Mastiff’ by the Martinician writer Patrick Chamoiseau provides a pathway; the language of resistance, of the survivor. Can we learn from indigenous communities, understand better the custodianship of knowledge, of stories? What are our stories of heroism, of survivors? We know for sure the great grandmothers who survived the plantation, so we exist today to reflect on their stories. Their survival strategies are a common thread between people throughout the history of slavery. Perhaps within this is the language to continue this process of decolonisation. 

Shiraz, in reference to the ‘Sambo Sculptural Series’, can you tell me how does spirituality operate – has operated – as a means of resistance through everyday objects?

S.B: The Sambo Sculptures are offerings, intimate objects that would probably have little value in other spaces. However, in this context, they represent hopes, prayers, wishes and perhaps even spells. This series of works reflects upon the limits of our agency; objects and talismans become important tools in projecting yourself where none is possible. I think we have that in us as human beings. These objects and practices emerge from highly oppressive environments. We cannot underestimate the psychological power imbued upon these objects. This is why I come back to these spaces, offerings, that continue to exist today in Madagascar, Mauritius and around the world. These are survival strategies in secrecy and subtlety. 

The exhibition ‘Lo Sa La Ter Ruz’ [On This Red Land] because it is, and I quote the curatorial text, “conceived as a polyphony of artworks that resonate with one another to convey and honor the complex experience of the colonized,” seems to highlight both the singularities and multiplicities of Mauritians and Malagasies with respect to the common colonial history. This is particularly evident in the work ‘Politique des Races (4)’, 2021. The elements remain distinct without denaturing each other while producing a new connected synthesis in motion and not fixed? This seems to echo the glissantian thought on creolization. The question is: Change without denaturing?

I.C: In this series Shiraz addresses the artifice that placing the human above everything else enforces. He decides to think visually otherwise, working with diverse small elements and creating new adjacencies among them so as to form new meaning. 

This strategy can be seen as relating to notions of opacity, as the works seem to question whether it is possible to focus on a single, crystallized image that define nature in a singular, definitive way. In such process, an essential component is his process of “thinking through making”: the artist includes so many layers in his paintings that the potential meanings, atmospheres, and connections are always in flux; they form somehow a type of archipelagic thinking. 

Politique des Races (4) moves away from the idea of “nature” as a single identity and from the essentialism that standardized images of nature carry within themselves. The series liberates the potential for such imagery to re-exist in the present, shaping new meaning that are radical and critical in their ambiguous and transient nature.

Lo Sa la Ter Ruz [On This Red Earth] – Shiraz Bayjoo

Curated by Ilaria Conti

Fondation H – Paris

16 September 2021 to 20 November 2021

24 rue Geoffroy l’Asnier
75004 Paris, France

The post In Conversation With Visual Artist Shiraz Bayjoo And Curator Ilaria Conti appeared first on Artskop.

Using the Internet and exquisite sound technology Tabita Rezaire explores original and subversive ways of producing new work with the aim of investigating the process of decolonization. Self-identifying Franco-Guyano-Danish artist, Rezaire is a known practioner of Kundalini yoga, and centralized self-love as part of the process of decolonization with most of her work dealing with the concept of race and feminism. She produces videos and digital works which navigate the matrix of coloniality and energy to create works where technology and spirituality intersect. Her work Moon Center is an online interactive site that operates as a digital meditation hub dedicated to the variety of cultures that worship the moon immersing viewers in both a spatial and ambient experience.

South African artist Nolan Oswald Dennis also explores the politico-spiritual dimensions of time, identity, and knowledge production in his practice. With themes grounded in decolonial politics, his 2017 work Black Liberation Zodiac is a constellation of elements. The artwork uses video, prisms, drawings, and symbols that consider a variety of histories displayed non-linearly. Liberation movements are mapped based on star patters and star signs are used as iconology for global black liberation languages highlighting shared references from the global African diaspora of a gun, a book, a dove, a fist, a lion, and a panther. The spiritual constellation is evocative of broader Afro-futurist aesthesis.

Angolan multimedia and performance artist Nástio Mosquito artwork is also heavily political, with challenging and occasionally profane works. He creates digital-performative works that challenge African stereotypes in Western contexts. His practice revolves around cultural inheritance, as a constantly evolving idea showcasing elements of Afrofuturism, examining the production of future inheritance. Using technology as an archiving tool is a common theme.

Afro-futurism

The Afrofuturism movement has also experienced a renewed interest in recent years as fresh perspectives on African stories emerges. Using technology, and elements of science fiction, new narratives are explored as part of the new generation of African storytellers as a postcolonial reclamation. Celebration of an Afrocentric future is seen in various works in the continent and its Diaspora.  The myriad levels of social commentary found in Afrofuturism envelops architecture, urbanity, as well as evolving identities.

Nigerian-American visual artist Olalekan Jeyfous, originally trained as an architect and his practice investigates the idea of place, arranging the concept as continuously constructed rather than given or imagined. His work in public art, installation, drawing, collage and design explores the past and potential futures of urban environments. His artwork Shanty Megastructures is series of a dystopian vision of Lagos, the dispossessed are given prominence and visibility in a somewhat dystopian vision of the city. In his latest self-initiated line of work he focuses on ideas central to Afro-futurism, eco-futurism, and agro-futurism in the Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy neighborhood in New York City. At the core of Jeyfous’ work is an investigation that confronts tensions between utopia, progress, and urban design.

Contemporary African and Diaspora society is infiltrated by technology. The exploration of a fictional possibility is part of Ghanaian-Moroccan Afro-surrealist David Alabo’s projects. Alabo’s work pertains to showcasing and critiquing African society culture using 3-dimensional abstract work; highlighting the ‘fantastical and strange’.

Another practitioner within the field is Lagos-based visual artist Joseph Obanubi whose Afro-surrealism work attempts to communicate an idea of metaphysics in an African context. His background in graphic design explore fantasy, delusion, and identity. His series Techno Heads (2018-ongoing) uses tools and tropes of science fiction and local cultural aesthetics as a means to confront and analyze present day issues within a globalized context.  

Global contemporary society strongly revolves around and depends on technology for communication, motion, and navigation, all of which are central aspects of human existence. New Media and Technology is now assisting artists in sharing their work in completely new environments. As pioneers in immersive creative landscapes, there is a whole group of artists from the continent that are piloting this new way of artistic exchange.

Virtual Reality

Navigation of spaces examines globalization in how it affects technology, human interactions and physical movement. François Knoetze artwork Virtual Frontiers, (2017) is a VR experience for HTC Vive, Oculus Go, Oculus Rift or Mobile VR. Virtual Frontiers was created over two months on location in Grahamstown. The work takes the idea of the frontier as its starting point, probing its connotations both as a historical concept and as a technological one. The series comprises six short virtual reality films shot in over 60 locations in Grahamstown bringing to light the multiple experience and contracts in the small town. The hybrid world created in the work is represented through archival footage, sound recording, and interviews exploring elements of the past, the present, and imaginings of the future

Nigerian-British artist Yinka Shonibare is at the forefront of leveraging new machine learning techniques to bring fully immersive VR art exhibit to life. In a recent exhibition with The Royal Academy of Arts: From Life Shonibare used emerging virtual reality technologies to create a 3D rendering of a neoclassical painting, Gavin Hamilton’s ‘Venus Presenting Helen to Paris’ (1785). Shonibare gives the view the ability to move around the 360 image and to inspect the artwork from all angles. The view can then move into a courtyard behind the painting where Shonibare’s Townley Venus (2017) is on display dressed in his trademark batik fabric, contrasting with the previously viewed painting; juxtaposing the two worlds.

Dakar-based designer and artist Selly Raby Kane work is a fantastical confluence of art and fashion. Her brand of ‘otherworldly’ visuals focuses on the juxtaposition of things, highlighting the surreal and abstract. Her latest project The Other Dakar is a continuation of her artistic practice of reassembling Senegalese traditions into a bold, idiosyncratic aesthetic. As a homage to Senegalese mythology, her debut into VR in partnership with Electric South, a South African platform working with African storytellers and artists on Virtual Reality transports the audience into a place where past and future meet and where artists are the beating heart of the city. As AI continues to evolve, its role in artistic applications globally have only just begun to be explored.

African artists are creating work that’s internationally celebrated, while focusing on issues that are specific to the African continent. Artskop3437 plans on continuing to elaborate and grow our understanding and appreciation for the multitude of experiences in new media practices.

The post New Media Art And Technology in Africa – Part II appeared first on Artskop.

Immersive installations, multi-sensory, and interactive art experiences are all an integral part of Africa’s dynamic contemporary art scene. In a globalised and hyper-connected art world, a new generation of artists are using technology to create and disseminate their work. Despite the existing and growing body of video, film, multi-media installations and digital artworks by artists from Africa, and its diaspora, there are few studies that have focused on new media scenes in and across Africa, specifically.

Art history in Africa is often overlooked or, as harmful, taught in the context of a Western perspective. A polycentric and in-depth approach to the history of African contemporary art scene helps uncover developments that led to a vibrant art scene in Africa that fully utilizes technology, in all of its potential. African artists themselves are at the forefront of aesthetic innovation and conceptual exploration, creating artwork that examines socio-economic and political realities, traditions, and the diversity of experiences on the continent and in its Diaspora.

This new series comes with a caveat – there is a clear understanding that the art scene in Africa is incredibly varied; each country has their own practice; each artist has their own personal story. Africa is not a monolith, Artskop3437 is specifically founded on elevating the diversity of artistic experience from the continent. Increasing visibility of Africa’s talent in the contemporary art scene can take several shapes including this running series. We aim to add to the digital conversation public space with both comprehensive pieces, as well as dedicated deep dives and interviews with artists from the continent, and its diaspora.

This series provides an opportunity to examine the cultural, socio-economic, political and technological factors that have given rise to the development of new media art in Africa in the context of a global art history, with a particular focus on questions of performativity, identity politics and trans-national exchange. While there are legacies of traditional art styles like Constructivism and Geometric abstractions, combined with visual investigations of immigration, globalization, and post-colonialism in the scope; also, part of the continent’s practice is material play including digital art.

Tech x Art

Digital art is an artistic practice that uses digital technology as part of the creative or presentation process and is a foundational part today’s cutting-edge contemporary art, made possible by the rapid evolution of technologies. It’s both part of the digital production and distribution of art and rests under the larger encompassing term of new media art. New media art is artwork that is created with new media technologies, this includes digital art, computer animation, virtual art, Internet art, interactive art, computer graphics and robotic, 3D printing, cyborg art, and art as biotechnology.

© Courtesy SMAC Gallery

Artists in Africa are not limited by only tapping into the prolific artisanal knowledge of the continent, but also creating work in decidedly novel ways. Kenyan painter and sculptor Cyrus Kabiru, defies the ideas of contemporary modernisation with work that deals with the transformation of modernisation and the idea of the future. He is best known for his sculptural spectacles or “C-Stunners.” The ‘Afrodazzled’ glasses were made from recycled material and found material in Nairobi. His mixed media art challenges genres, and reflects not only his Kenyan roots but his international outlook.

New media tools overlapping materialism study is also a central part to Portuguese-Angolan artist Pedro Pires visual language. His practice focuses on exploring questions around stereotypes and identity. He creates sculptures and paper works that incorporate a wide range of mediums, such as plastic containers and rafia brooms to industrial metal grinders. Pires’s practice works to explore questions about stereotypes and identity as well as the utilitarian histories of mass-production and exploitation.

The medium of sculpture, including light, sound and projection encompasses an inventive multiplatform means of exhibiting and sharing content. Using technology to reveal the local, while existing in the global gives artists an enormous scope for production. Algerian multimedia artist Atef Berredjem‘s body of work uses technology to examine contemporary society; specifically, subtle manifestations of power in daily life. In one of his works, Continuum (2014) a double screen video installation shows a street corner in Algiers with an accompanying quote by Larbi Ben M’hidi (revolutionary leader during Algeria’s war of independence) handwritten on the wall ‘Throw the revolution into the street and it will be born aloft by the people,’ juxtaposing the recent wave of revolution in the North African country and the continued status quo.

Digital art work acts as a bridge from the contemporary world into the past, examining histories and ancient traditions in new ways as part of the process. South African mixed media artist Nandipha Mntambo uses digital tools to explore ideas around traditional gender roles, body politics, and identity. South African photographer and digital artist Puleng Mongale’s work examines a variety of themes, including a running social commentary on labor relations and the legacy of domestic work in South Africa. In her conceptual and stylised series, When the Madame is Away, the Help will Slay  Mongale interrogates the conditions of Blackness within the historical and socio-political ecology of South African society. 

Using Technology to Reclaim/Create Narratives

Mounir Fatmi, a Moroccan artist working in Paris multimedia practice encompasses video, installation, and sculpture whose artistic research investigated the history of technology and its influence on popular culture. Working “through the prism of trinity comprising of Architecture, Language, and Machine” Fatmi work focuses on the transformation of objects and their context by immersing viewing in distinctly spatial experiences.

Dutch-Ethiopian video artist and filmmaker Theo Eshetu extensive body of work also examines challenging narratives and the exploration of cultural identity. Through electronic time-based media and optical devices as a tool Eshetu’s work seeks to question the hegemonic status of television in a multicultural context. Elements of fractal repetition, kaleidoscopic mirroring, multi-screen projections, and mosaic-like patterning are all elements found in his artwork.

Technology and new media play a role in not only showcasing and sharing vital new art from African nations and the diaspora, but also its production. New media artists working in the continent exhibit a contemporary mindset with definitive African roots. With artwork that delves into the continent’s collective memory and identity of Africans and of their diaspora

South African artist Mohau Modisakeng, practice also centralizes the process of investigation. His body of work reflects his own personal experience of growing up in Apartheid and post-Apartheid South Africa. New media is the part of the overture of dialogue in in his 2017 art work Passage. The artwork’s three-channel projection invites the audience to focus on the central themes of violence, ritual, and slavery’s dismemberment of African identity. Justifiably, interrogating concepts of knowledge, power and violence is a, justifiably, common topic.

‘What stories are told? How are they told? And told by whom?’ are constant questions in Grada Kilomba body of work. Kilomba is a Portuguese interdisciplinary artist, psychologist, and writer who has roots in in São Tomé e Príncipe and Angola. Her work critically engages with memory, gender, racism, and post-colonialism. She uses a wide array of digital art, sound art, and other forms of experimental formats as part of her process – performances, readings, and video installations to revise post-colonial narratives. In her audiovisual project-installation Secrets to Tell offers a new perception on African oral traditional and retelling histories of previously silenced narratives. Technological tools have been significant in reclaiming and introducing new narratives.

This is the first part of the essay “New Media Art and Technology in Africa”. To be continued…

The post New Media Art and Technology in Africa – Part I appeared first on Artskop.

Black people were present in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. Here, in society, in Rembrandt’s neighbourhood and in art. This has long—wrongly—been overlooked. Until September 6, 2020, in The Rembrandt House Museum you can come eye to eye with extraordinary portraits of black people. How did artists depict them? And can we find out who they are? HERE: Black in Rembrandt’s Time is about overlooked works of art and representation, about recognition and acknowledgment.

What strikes us in Rembrandt’s art and that of many of his contemporaries? The stereotypes that later fixed the image of black people were yet to prevail. Black people are not simply secondary figures in subordinate roles, but often the subjects of the work. The exhibition also tells the stories behind the works. Between around 1630 and 1660 there was a small community of free black people around Jodenbreestraat, in Rembrandt’s neighbourhood. Recent research has revealed a lot more about these Afro-Amsterdammers.

“For years I’ve been looking for portraits of black people like me. Surely there had to be more than the stereotypical images of servants, enslaved people or caricatures? I found the alternative in Rembrandt’s time: a gallery of portraits of black people who are depicted with respect and dignity.”– Stephanie Archangel, Guest Curator of the exhibition

HERE: A Selection of outstanding masterpieces

Rembrandt’s interest in black people was highly unusual in the seventeenth century. They appear in at least ten of his paintings, six etchings and six drawings. They are usually secondary figures, but in a 1630 etching (‘Bust of a Woman’) a young woman stars. Rembrandt made this etching when he was still living in Leiden. Her facial features indicate that she was black, but he had not yet managed to make her skin appear dark. He had more success with this aspect later, in Amsterdam; his later portraits are often accurately depicted from life. It seems likely that Rembrandt used his neighbours as models.

Another eye-catching work in the exhibition is Hendrick Heerschop’s King Caspar. Legend has it that one of the three magi who came to worship the Christ child was an African. Sometimes he is called Caspar, sometimes Balthasar. Heerschop painted him without a setting or a story. He can only be identified by his expensive clothes and the jar of incense he gave as his gift. But it is the man’s face that attracts the most attention; he looks at us proudly and self-confidently. Rembrandt’s first pupil, Gerrit Dou, also made an impressive portrait of a black boy dressed in a fantasy costume, looking at us over his shoulder. 

What remains complicated is the identity of the seventeenth-century black sitters. We are discovering more and more names of Rembrandt’s black neighbours, but we cannot link them to the portraits. We do, though, know who the man in the portrait on the right is. Dom Miguel de Castro was a controversial figure, the ambassador of Soyo (or Sonho), a region of the Congo that wanted independence. Dom Miguel and his servants came to Holland to argue his case and he sat for his portrait during his stay in Middelburg. He is shown here according to the standards of a seventeenth century portrait of an important man: powerful and serious. 

HERE: Black Artists Now

In contemporary art, black plays an entirely different role from that in the seventeenth century. Now there are black artists who reflect on their own identities. And when black people are depicted, we know who they are. Both sides, the maker and the portrayed, now have a voice. The exhibition features new and existing works by ten prominent contemporary artists, including Iris Kensmil, Iriée Zamblé and Charl Landvreugd.

“As a museum we hope that this exhibition will make an impact. HERE. Black in Rembrandt’s Time is a powerful statement about black presence and representation in the Netherlands, about better looking and blind spots, about having a voice and a changing image.” – Lidewij de Koekkoek, Director, The Rembrandt House Museum

HERE: Black in Rembrandt’s time is on display till September 6, 2020 at The Rembrandt House Museum (Amsterdam). The exhibition was the brainchild of guest curators Elmer Kolfin and Stephanie Archangel, the design was by Raul Balai and Brian Elstak. Multi-disciplinary evening programmes in a number of venues accompany this exhibition. WBOOKS is publishing a book and there will also be a zine about contemporary black artists.

HERE: Black in Rembrandt’s time is on display till September 6, 2020
REMBRANDT HOUSE MUSEUM
Jodenbreestraat 4
1011 NK Amsterdam
www.rembrandthuis.nl

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The University of Cape Town’s Works of Art Committee (WoAC) is currently hosting an exhibition titled We’ve come to take you home #1. The exhibition serves as a point of reflection, following the student protests that challenged the status quo of universities in South Africa, including challenging artistic representation and curation on campuses. It showcases some of the committee’s recently acquired artworks from 22 artists.

Artskop interviewed committee member of the WoAc and curator of the exhibition; Amogelang Maledu. 

NM: Why is this a critical moment to reflect on collections and acquisitions, particularly at UCT? or rather, is there something about this moment right now that makes the reflection salient, pertinent? 

AM: The Works of Art Committee (WOAC) at UCT under the leadership of Professor Jay Pather was instituted in 2016 following the torching of artworks on Upper Campus where students felt that the artworks curated on the campus’ buildings and hallways didn’t represent the demographics and diversity (both culturally and artistically) of the institution. This was known as Shackville, which was in conjunction with the Must Fall movement and the broader discussions around institutional racism and the critique thereof, specifically at UCT, but also broadly to institutions of higher learning in South Africa. These moments became fundamental in engaging the discourse of the institutions’ historical collection practises that seemingly didn’t change much despite the country’s transformation agendas post-1994. In 2016, a research task force team mandated by UCT management found that 79.1% of the artists in the collection were white artists. So the work of the committee, under Prof. Pather, and by extension, through the recently acquired artworks we’ve bought and some showcased in this show, is really interested in the reflections of those moments with a curatorial lens that is intrinsically cognisant of the historical and socio-political exclusion of non-white artists in cultural production.

NM: One could view the exhibition from a lens of “inclusion”; thinking of how Black artists are constantly being “included” into existing white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, capitalist structures as a way to show progress etc. If that is the case, what does this inclusion do to the decolonial process where these structures (e.g. the UCT art collection) are possibly upheld and not dismantled or undermined? 

AM: In the curation of this exhibition, I am very careful to not frame the exhibition as decolonial because as far as my understanding of decolonisation goes, it isn’t. What WOAC does through these recently acquired works exhibited at Michaelis is deliberately respond to the visceral and legitimate charge students demanded during Shackville and the larger Fallism movement: UCT has been and continues to be challenged to be the African university it needs to be for one of its most important stakeholders; students. The status quo, and delayed transformative ideals that the institution supposedly espoused post 1994 are being perpetually challenged for their effectiveness in the contemporary. They will continue to be until the fruits of transformation are socio-politically, culturally and economically felt by those who form part of the institution’s fabric and that is a commitment that won’t simply take the inclusion of non-white artists into a collection to fully transform and become inclusive. It is a much bigger project that WOAC is not claiming to do on its own. More so, the socio-political angst of colonisation’s ramifications, as per the project of decolonisation, is not simply a UCT question alone, as the world is largely conceding with these questions of equity in general. These questions of decolonisation, transformation and re-thinking new justifiable societal models are conversations that continue to determine and inspire the production of art and culture and subsequently frame and gesture to how even UCT (through WOAC and prioritising specific artists in their collection) is itself grappling with these concerns, and by extension through the committee’s democratic nature, is interested in having an array of voices added onto the discussion of espousing the ideals of transforming the institution. 

NM: Can you speak to me about the ideas of home in relation to the art world and in relation to the title of the exhibition? Where is home? Why home? Home for who? 

AM: The title of the exhibition is intertextual and resonates on many levels with regards to ideas of home. The title is a direct reference from an acquisition WOAC made—an artwork by Lady Skollie titled WE HAVE COME TO TAKE YOU HOME (A DIANA FERRUS TRIBUTE) which is another intertextual reference to Diana Ferrus’ poem; I’ve Come To Take You Home, written in 1998 as a tribute to Sarah Baartman in anticipation of the return of her human remains from France to South Africa. Her human remains were on public display at the Musée de l’Homme up until 1974. The framing of the idea of a homecoming was important to me in thinking about the larger resonance of the movement of lives and objects in society and the impact those have in the contemporary. These movements are culturally significant especially if we situate the legacy of colonialism by looking at the story of Baartman and her subsequent objectification in a museum, a cultural and artistic space that is also largely responsible for the project of validating colonialism.

And because of South Africa’s historicity of exclusion as a result of colonialism and apartheid, the country and by extension UCT hasn’t been considered home for South Africa’s majority even after apartheid was abolished, former white spaces still feel exclusionary especially in a city like Cape Town. So curatorially it was important for me to reclaim the collection of UCT as a legitimate home for the artworks of artists that would most certainly be historically excluded in the past. WOAC and by extension UCT is in a capacity to intentionally create space for artworks by artists that would’ve and have been marginalised by systems of white supremacy that even implicates the collection itself.

NM: In curating the show, what would you say were the key threads (thematically, visually etc) that you were trying to uphold, especially when thinking about where to place works and how they converse with one another? 

AM: The placing of each and every artwork was deliberate, not only from an aesthetic point of view but also from the subject matter of the artworks in relation to one another and spatially too in terms of curation. For instance, it was very important for audiences to be confronted first and foremost with Helen Sebidi and Buhlebezwe Siwani‘s work to speak to intergenerational conversations of Black women artists in South Africa and the marginalisation that continues to resonate even post-apartheid. 

Regardless of how prolific of a career you have established, collections that should be prioritising your work, haven’t and it’s more than unfortunate—it was important to expose that incongruent gap that may have been a surprise for many. 

UCT, since its collection in the 1920s, had not collected an important Black woman art historical figure that continues to inspire many other young Black women’s artistic practices today. It was very important to pair Sebidi with Siwani’s work, who through a collective she is a part of, iQhiya, challenged and resisted the marginalisation and systemic exclusion of Black womxn artist while studying at Michaelis School of Fine Art. That stark critique and reflection point for my curation and WOAC was important to illustrate how pervasive and relevant the question of inclusivity remains. 

Many of the artworks in the exhibition are produced by recent UCT alumni. Even though through the committee’s acquisition mandate, prioritising artists that come from the university was not necessarily deliberate, it became important that we also support artists in their early careers. 

NM: Are there some artworks that you specifically would have wanted to include in the show that did not make it? 

AM: Yes, the show at Michaelis is only showing some recent acquisitions as there are many that couldn’t fit because of space constraints. That is the challenge again for WOAC; we don’t have a permeant museum or gallery to have long term exhibitions of our collection. So collating some of the artworks we’ve recently acquired and showcasing them in a thematic exhibition where their curation is intentional, is important in situating the larger conversation of why specific artworks were or are collected. After the exhibition, these artworks go back to being displayed in campus hallways, common areas and offices of various faculties of the university; thus not always being appreciated from a cultural and site-specific perspective – they can easily become decorative. However, we are planing more exhibitions; We’ve come to take you home #2 will follow at the Irma Stern Museum in March/April.

 We’ve come to take you home #1 is on view at the Michaelis Galleries until 24 March 2020.

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