The backs of two painted African figures, an elder man and a younger boy, can be viewed on the large tapestry-like work of Kenyan artist Kaloki Nyamai in the Kenyan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The father-and-son-like rendering captures the pair in what seems to be a session of quiet contemplation, almost meditative. In some ways that is the experience desired after arriving by foot to Fabrica 33, the site of an old carpenter’s workshop in Calle Larga dei Boteri in the Cannaregio district of Venice where the Kenyan Pavilion is located. It is situated far away from the Arsenale and Giardini—the main attractions of the 59th Venice Biennale The Milk of Dreams curated by Cecilia Alemani. This year marks the fourth time Kenya is participating at the prestigious art world event, in which Africa, a continent that has garnered great attention from the international art world over the last decade, is still very much underrepresented. 

Kenya’s first and second national pavilions at the Venice Biennale pavilion, in 2013 and 2015, caused widespread controversy when they were curated by a team of Italians and showed works by Chinese and Italian artists and only one to two Kenyan artists. The serene feeling one receives while entering into Fabrica 33 is synonymous to the solid representation of the East African nation in Venice after two disastrous showings. When Kenyan Jimmy Ogonga came on board as the curator for the country’s pavilion in 2017 and its showing this year, an exhibition representative of the nation’s art scene was finally had.

This time the East Africa nation is presenting itself in a much sleeker way and with three prominent Kenyan artists—Dickens Otieno, Wanja Kimani and Nyamai—curated by Kenyan Jimmy Ogonga. It is titled Exercises in Conversation and explores the dynamics between participants in a conversation and how such a complex relationship can affect history It was commissioned by Dr. Kiprop Lagat, Kenya’s Minister of Sport, Culture and Heritage. The works, placed around the subtle setting of the Fabrica 33, are hung on the wall like Otieno’s seemingly sparking rendition of the pandemic hazmat suit made from African textile or hung across the room like Kyambi’s textile work that also refers to her Namibian heritage. 

Despite the international art world’s fixation on African contemporary art over the past decade, African representation at the Venice Biennale has been greatly lacking, due predominantly to the dearth of funding and resources, and oftentimes also from a lack of interest from respective governments. In 2007 there was only one African pavilion, and now, this year there are nine. Gradually, there has been increased visibility in recent years, particularly in 2015 when the late Nigerian curator, art critic and educator Okwui Enwezor (1963-2019) was curator. Countries that have previously participated, such as Angola, which won the Golden Lion for best national participation in 2013 for its pavilion Luanda, Encyclopedic City, Madagascar, Mozambique and Seychelles, are not present this year. 

This year nine nations out of the 55 member States that represent all countries on the African continent showed at the Biennale—out of 80 national participants that are present at the historic Pavilions at the Giardini, in the Arsenale and throughout the city of Venice. The African nations present include Egypt, Namibia, Ghana, Cameroon, Kenya, Uganda, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Ivory Coast. Out of these three participated for the first time: Namibia, Cameroon and Uganda, with the latter being awarded a “Special Mention” by the jury of the Venice Biennale. 

“The Biennale Internazionale dell’Arte di Venezia is a stage offering an opportunity for a multiplicity of artistic narratives to be presented and heard,” said Neri Torcello, founder and director of the African Art in Venice Forum (AAVF), which staged its third edition during the opening preview this year. “As the Biennale is perceived by its audience as a global platform, accessibility and representation become even more vital to promote an inclusive creative dialogue in a just society. AAVF, with its discursive, and content partnerships based format is an agile platform to allow this to happen, exactly when  the hearts of those sensitive to artistic expression are tuned in to the frequencies of the Venice Biennale.”

This year, in Cecilia Alemani’s The Milk of Dreams, the Biennale’s central exhibition occupying the Arsenale and the Giardini di Castello, 12 artists were chosen from the African continent out of the 213 artists from 58 countries that Alemani selected. These included South African Igshaan Adams, Sudanese-Danish Monira Al Qadiri, Ibrahim El-Salahi from Sudan, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami from Zimbabwe, South African Bronwyn Katz, Antoinette Lubaki from the Democratic Republic Congo, French-Egyptian Amy Nimr, Kenyan Magdalene Odundo, Ethiopian Elias Sime and Portia Zvavahera from Zimbabwe.

Standout pavilions this year included Ivory Coast, participating for the second time since its debut in 2013. It showed Dreams of a Story, a presentation of ethereal works oscillating between a surrealistic dream world and everyday life in the West African nation, with the participation of artists such as Aboudia, Armand Boua, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, Aron Demetz, Laetitia Ky and Yeanzi. Curated by Italians Massimo Scaringella and Alessandro Romanini with support from the Ministry of Culture and Arts and Entertainment Industry of Ivory Coast and the Italian Embassy of Ivory Coast, the heightened abstract mixed media canvases of Boua, with their inclusion of newspaper clippings, hang next to the abstract lightboxes of Yeanzi replete with depictions of various local icons and symbols as well as captivating profiles of unknown figures. Pulsating with movement, color, brushstrokes and lines are the abstract expressionist canvases of Aboudia , one of the nation’s most recognizable stars. His canvases document the street scenes of his hometown of Abidjan with graffiti-like renderings of daily life, people and children, and include his recurring skull, bullet and soldier motifs that point to violence and trauma—a nod to post-election conflict that took place in the capital in 2011. The works are assertive, strong and vulnerable in ways that speak to an Africa in crisis and to the fraying of the continent’s social fabric in its post-colonial years. 

Zimbabwe, by contrast, is participating for the sixth time at the Biennale. Yet its pavilion, titled i did not leave a sign?,  and featuring four artists— Kresiah Mukwazhi, Wallen Mapondera, Terrence Musekiwa and Ronald Muchatuta—features a loosely held together show that is disappointing in formal content and themes. Curated by Fadzai Veronica Muchemwa and commissioned by Raphael Chikukwa, Mukwazhi’s expansive abstract expressionist work with its vibrant hues and animated series of figures  prompts the spectator to stay for a while and ponder the rhythmic movement and figures depicted. It is the star of the show.  In other rooms, mixed media installation works, some including figurines made of pink, cream and white bras holding Kalashnikovs or large phantom like figures in another room made of dozens of old black wires, give off an unsettling and  incomplete feel. The goal of Muchemwa is to explore tales of dispersion and migration,  knowledge, science and technology, as ways to rebel against the uncertainties of organized religion.

A gem at the biennale this year was Uganda’s pavilion, making its debut in Venice, and for which it received a “Special Mention” for national participation from the Biennale’s jury. Titled Radiance – They Dream in Time, the exhibition was curated by The Ministry of Gender, Labor and Social Development, which officially supported the pavilion.  Juliana Naumo Kuruhiira served as the pavilion’s commissioner, with Tanzanian-born British taking up the role curator, Shaheen Merali, and features works by Kampala-based artists Acaye Kerunen and Collin Sekajugo. Tradition and contemporary culture are elegantly paired in dialogue through the two artists’ work. Sekajugo’s paintings  portray poignant subjects in rich hues in everyday and public settings, whereas Kerunen’s work resurrects local Ugandan craftsmanship and heritage in her contemporary installations made of natural and reusable materials such as swamp grown fibers and polyethene bags. Their work, when paired side by side, introduces the diversity in heritage and contemporary culture in present-day Uganda.

“Uganda has barely been represented on the international art stage,” said Sekajugo. “A country whose people I personally consider resilient and persevering, has seen so many ups and downs during its artistic revolution. From the country’s turbulent past to present day sociopolitical struggles, creative production has taken different shapes where platforms for self-expression have often been limited to a few brave practitioners. I strongly believe that this showcase will only open more doors for our creativities.” 

While Namibia’s first-ever pavilion was embroiled in scandal a week before the Biennale opened, with its main sponsor, luxury travel operator Abercrombie and Kent, and its patron Monica Cembrola pulling out because of  what they viewed as a misrepresentation of the Namibian art scene (the pavilion features the work of one artist who is making his debut in Venice and goes by the pseudonym RENN), the Egyptian pavilion, which focuses on digital art and features work by Mohamed Shoukry, Weaam El Masry, and Ahmed El Shaer, curiously remained closed during the first few days of public viewing due to technical difficulties. 

For Cameroon’s first-ever pavilion, which took place in two locations, within the loggia of the Liceo Artistico Statale Michelangelo in the Guggenheim Museum in the Dorsoduro district of Venice and at the Palazzo Ca’ Bernardo. The former presents IRL (“in real life”) art by four Cameroonian (Francis Nathan Abiamba, Angéle Etoundi Essamba, Justine Gaga, and Salifou Lindou) paired with four international artists (Shay Frisch, Umberto Mariani, Matteo Mezzadri, Jorge R. Pombo). The works, done in a variety of media, including photography, installation, painting and sound, offer an eerie portrayal of the west-central African nation. While the works of Douala-based Salifou Lindou standout for their technical precision, color and movement, in the center of the loggia is Transfiguration (2022) by Justine Gaga, a Cameroonian sculptor and video artist. Her haunting installation consists of a group of metal rods akin to totem poles with circular metal objects as heads and long patterned scarves hanging from the top. On the metal rods are written words in French such as liberalism, violence, capitalism and fiction. 

It is the pavilion’s second location at the Palazzo Ca’ Bernardo that is perplexing. It presents an NFT show, arguably the first at the Venice Biennale, organized by Global Crypto Art DAO, a new collective that raises money to support artists making the transition into the world of crypto. Featured are works by artists from over 20 countries, notably Germany, China, and the US, but not Cameroon. 

Stationed prominently within the Arsenale, one of the biennale’s most coveted venues, is the Ghana Pavilion. Its exhibition Black Star – The Museum as Freedom follows the West African nation’s acclaimed debut in 2019 and features the work of Ghanaian artists Na Chainkua Reindorf and Afroscope and Brazilian Diego Araúja who is interested in the connections between Ghana and his homeland. It has the same curator as the 2019 pavilion, Nana Oforiatta Ayim, who is also the director of ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge in Accra and director-at-large of Ghana’s Museums and Cultural Heritage.

While underwhelming compared to the size, vision and quality of works shown at Ghana’s first presentation in Venice, what is notable is the theme and the diversity of mediums used—from works on canvas to technology and installation. The works on display support the idea of the Black Star that symbolizes Ghana through its flag and most important monument, the Black Star Gate, part of Accra’s Independence Square now known as the Black Star Square, which is topped with the Black Star of Africa—a five-pointed star that represents the continent with a particular nod to Ghana, which in 1957 was the first Sub-Saharan country to break free from colonial year when it declared independence from Great Britain. The Black Star, as the exhibition further emphasizes, also connects Africa with its diasporas through Jamaican political activist Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line and his resulting Back-to-Africa movement. The Black Star now goes beyond Ghana: it is symbolic of all people of African descent wishing to make their way home to the continent. 

“Last year we showed the superstars of the Ghanaian art scene and this time I really wanted to look at the future-builders,” said Oforiatta Ayim. “These artists for me are ones that are creating new models through language, narratives and technology. Last time we looked at the legacies of the past on the present and this one is much more looking at how we create new futures.”

While Africa might not yet have an adequate representation of the richness of its evolving art scenes through a more prominent showing of national pavilions at the Venice Biennale, an increase in the showing of artists from the continent and its diasporas at the world’s most prominent art event tell of a new chapter on the horizon for art from the continent on the international stage. Still, much work needs to done.

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The way in which art fairs are perceived in conversations that centralise the argument that the visual arts is not as important as other art forms is wide open for all sorts of arguments. One could argue that the views shared can be distorted for someone who has not been to any art fairs in Johannesburg, Cape Town or Miami. Luckily for many, who attend, the art fair in Cape Town are privileged to see the tone being set for what is to be expected from galleries, artists and curators, alike, in 2022. At the same time, we can also understand that as an artist creates in the midst of such an enormous puncture in our reality, the reigns of power, drastically change, bringing a new dawn of works. 

Cinthia Sifa Mulenga

No one could have prepared us for the rise of Cinthia Sifa Mulenga. She has continued from strength to strength. Her mixed media works of sensual images of black women, moving forward through their lives, navigating ‘beauty’ and its contradictions has catapulted Mulenga as a maverick in her own right. Unlike most creatives, her social presence is consistently showcasing her ability to engage multiple audiences and remain relevant to communities of a broad spectrum.

Black women remain active in her art – making, bestowing dignity, respect and substance for many to witness at this year’s fair. A debut showing at this year’s fair, Mulenga presents 3 works, in collaboration with Botho Project Space as well as Latitudes Online. Botho Project Space was created by Nelson Makamo in 2019, to provide a natural transition for artists such as Mulenga, who choose to create on their own terms. Mulenga, a young force has been absolutely certain of her trajectory and talent through their mentoring.

The investment value of Mulenga’s work is increasing with each exhibition, project and her participation in international shows, which Latitudes Online has enabled for close to 2 years. Mulenga’s works encourage the viewer to see the parallels in which she draws from, pursuing a narrative,unique to her own heritage, background and experiences.

Mavis Tauzeni

A masterful, magical combination of figurative and abstract painting imparted by Tauzeni cannot be missed in 2022. One is immediately captured by her use of colour surrounded by patterns of grand size. Not a single of Tauzeni’s pieces leaves you not desiring to surrender to a tone of a world with harmonious rapture.

The point of Tauzeni’s work is to denote much more than the technique, which may very well be an outstanding feature to also be one of the Cape Town Art Fair’s Tomorrow /Today Art Prize recipients, however it is also to marry enormous ideas of pleasure and freedom and also mourn many other parts of Zimbabwe’s unpredictable circumstances. A word that comes to mind while witnessing Tauzeni’s works is omniscient. Mavis Tauzeni is part of the artist roster for the Harare – based, First Floor Gallery.

Luyanda Zindela

It’s no surprise to see Zindela honouring narratives of safe spaces, friendships, kindred spirits and times that represent kin when moments require such bonds. Much of Lindela’s body of work is steeped in memory and archiving the messages from encounters he has had with his peers. A Sepedi reference to this kind of creation would be the word, “Thake”, denoting someone who can be or is your peer. Life takes shape and is real within the margins of conversations with those we choose to be family and that is something Zindela does so well in his work. The artist is at ease with the people he profiles, capturing each and every comment, without fail..

As a curator and an artist, Zindela references his friends to enter a space of unadulterated territory, taunting the viewer to interrogate the ways in which they measure the depth of each conversation they are able to have with their own “people’. How real are these conversations? What is the main purpose of the conversations? Do they ever become more than just conversations? And when can it be that these conversions become reality? In 2021, Zindela had his solo show at SMAC Gallery and continues to be part of the artist roster. 

Investec Cape Town Art Fair

18 < 20 February 2022

CTICC, Cape Town (South Africa)

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Todd Webb in Africa: Outside The Frame is both a book and a survey exhibition about the legacy and work of the American photographer Todd Webb (1905-2000) on the African continent. The exhibition was curated by MIA curator Casey Riley, MIA collaborators, and book co-authors, Aimée Bessire and Erin Hyde Nolan, and is currently presented at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA) until 13^th June 2021.

Presented in 9 chapters, the exhibition showcases over 80 photographs, that Webb took as part of a diplomatic commission from the United Nations (U.N.) in 1958. The photographs were recently discovered by Betsy Evans Hunt, Executive Director of the Todd Webb Archive. The commission by the U.N. was to “document emerging industries and technologies” in the following countries: Ghana, Kenya, Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia), Zimbabwe (formerly Southern Rhodesia), Somalia, Sudan, Togo, and Tanzania (both formerly Tanganyika and Zanzibar).

As an initial encounter with the exhibition content and meeting the curatorial team, so many questions came into mind, and are guiding this review: the first one being, why is Webb’s work relevant in the current photographic discourses about the African continent today, when there is an urgent need to focus on underrepresented practices as well as uncovering silenced narratives?

In other words, a key point of reflection was whether we still need outsider views about the continent today in order to analyse, retrospect and make a statement on the violent and “critical period between colonialism and independence”? And who, within arts institutions and museums, holds the right and privilege to define and disseminate this knowledge, for us?

There is also a blurry line about the mission’s intentions – the photographer was commissioned by the U.N., a detail to be analysed carefully in the realm of international operations from the North to the South. Moreover, the commission was never shown, and the negatives disappeared after Webb sold them to a suspicious gallerist and were only recently discovered. Their unuse remains a mystery. One can imagine the propagandist aims of such commission, where African countries would be looked in the North and framed according to levels of “development” and “progress” from a “modern”, Eurocentric gaze and “civilization”.

Leaving the ethical and political questions aside for a moment, the colour photographs are stunning and, in a sense, captured present moments with great style. The privilege of the photographer to be able to be either visible or invisible to its subjects and landscapes is obvious. One can take a closer look and identify his position from photographs to photographs – whether they were an imposed shot or through a genuine encounter isn’t known and revealed but open to subjective interpretations.

Referring to interpretation texts (Image 1), Webb ‘encountered some difficulty in photographing citizens’ in Somalia (formerly Somaliland), ‘as many were apparently resistant to his requests for posing’, a somewhat revealing statement about Webb’s approach when at work, and contradictory to the curatorial and critical lens that is promoted. Instead, we are faced with a reality of what the medium of photography can be: a tool re-producing violence and breaching ethical boundaries.

The exhibition does not allow for a different or critical reading of his work nor unlock the photographs from the time they were taken. It implicates a certain level of complexity, as well as disparity, about what and who Webb captured in beautiful colour photographs and the reality of the socio-political and economic contexts that he was witnessing.

(Image 2) The photographs are captured with an incredible exposure – creating a harmonious array of colour from the pastel palette to brighter details, such as an individual wearing a very stylish red suit bringing a vibrant energy to the photograph. A photograph for which it is difficult to allocate a specific period of time, or location, and that has a fashion photography energy to it – we almost forget the photograph’s purpose within the diplomatic mission.

By further deconstructing this image, one can imagine either the rapidity of the encounter with Webb, and/or whether it was an intentional shot. The image captured a contextual moment that is revealing of a difference in class amongst the subjects: in the first plan, a working-class worker, in a plough and in the second plan a middle-class man wearing a stylish business suit. Webb attempted to capture a vision of a “civilised Africa” for a Western gaze – Africa as economically thriving, projecting similar entrenched class systems than in the North.

At first sight, the images do not portray a typical romanticized or exoticized version about the continent but allow to seep into an aestheticized idea of what “progress” looks like. Moreover, the exhibition further confuses this paradigm, with, what seems to be a lack of contextual narratives about the historical events at play. It becomes a difficult task for the visitors to deconstruct this photographic language when seeing the photographs.

Visitors will have access to a multitude of similar photographs when navigating (online and on-site) the exhibition’s narratives in a non-chronological flow. The 9 categories include Colonialism+ Independence, Portraits + Power Dynamics and Built Environment, to name a few. Therefore, the journey of Webb’s on the continent classifies the photographs under these broad headlines without the personal stories and counter-narratives that lived in the shadow of the themes. Furthermore, visitors also have access to vitrines in which memorabilia, collected and archived by Webb, are on display, including colonial travel brochures and transport tickets from his journey, as colonial nostalgia.

In spite of demonstrated efforts by the curatorial team, the depoliticization of the context, the inappropriate use of words in the interpretation text (interpretation texts are all available on the MIA website), as well as the broadness of the sections of the exhibition are sadly inscribed within myopic colonial narratives.

According to the words of scholar Tina Campt, visitors should however be encouraged to “listen to images”¹, question their position, understand and interpret the people and the personal stories behind the images with care and attention, as well as dig into the narratives that is at stake in the background, and somewhat silenced here. There is a need to make a different and independent reading of this photographic material.

How does his work raise critical contemporary questions concerning photography agency, power, racial and national privilege if the resources aren’t offered and the tools aren’t present to allow for a comprehensive and accessible collective reading of the materials and its multi-layered context? It is key to interrogate the place of public engagement around the exhibition that allows a space to uncover important questions. A space that can actively involve people in re-thinking and articulating present and future narratives around the photographs.

In parallel, a book of over 250 pages including photographs and texts, accompanies the curatorial work around the exhibition including contributions from writers, scholars and artists about Todd Webb and this series of work, such as the artist Rehema Chachage and renowned photographer James Barnor. The book was a way to create a collaborative complementary dialogue and share open reflections about the work through formats such as fictional narratives and personal stories, in contrary to an academic voice, or solely by a Western institutional response. Reaching out beyond, the exhibition will be presented at the National Museum of Tanzania and a set will remain in their possession for the creation of new interpretations and narratives on the continent.

However, the broader and local public engagement is neglected which diminishes the intentions that are shared within the statements from the team about unsettling the colonial framework that are deeply rooted within MIA as an arts institution, and this exhibition. When inquiring whether the exhibition will be specifically engaging with a diasporic audience, that live in the city, and relevant to this subject every day led to poor outcomes, and reduced to a few “community conversations”. Bearing in mind that, for example, Minneapolis has one of the largest Somalian population outside of Somalia.

Exhibition-making should be regarded as a statement in creating knowledge with engagement around the questions that it brings to the surface. Arts institutions fail to be held accountable and to work with a commitment to genuinely deconstruct their legacies when shifting the model of the museum to its core, whether from its leadership, the ownership of collections or tokenistic programming practices.

How does Todd Webb’s photographic practice separate itself from ethnographic practices? and in this case, how do we look at his work within the broader “history of photography” in which Eurocentric gaze is prevalent over those that have been systemically silenced and erased from it?

It is a larger exercise of looking at past materials today and having a sincere conversation about the future in imagining the shift that takes us away from violent representations. What is the breadth of interpretation that we’re aiming to create for ourselves and building up counternarratives outside of a neo-colonial frame today?

—

Note: all quotes are from a direct conversation with the curatorial team or exhibition interpretation texts.

Todd Webb in Africa : Outside the Frame

An exhibition at the Minneapolis Institut of Art (MIA)

January 2, 2021 – June 13, 2021

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While conventional in its display, practices only recently welcomed into the hallowed halls of contemporary art feature prominently: textiles in particular. Viewers initially experience Malawi-born, South Africa-based artist Billie Zangewa’s pieced and sewn works in raw silk from a distance. Stepping down from the ticket area towards Zangewa’s work creates an optical game that makes her choice of materials a surprise not necessarily visible from a distance. Zangewa describes The Rebirth of the Black Venus (2010) towering over downtown Johannesburg as biographical; the title also suggests the historical figure of Saartjie Baartman, whose body in the early 1800s infamously became the subject of colonial prurience – only eventually returning to South Africa for burial in 2002. This tension between the personal and the political perhaps troubles art from the African continent more so than elsewhere.

If an ability to recognise political subtexts feels almost mandatory interpretation for the diligent viewer, Zangewa’s figure wears a banner announcing a useful mantra: “Surrender wholeheartedly to your complexity”. The phrase could be carried throughout the exhibition, which makes no curatorial claims of thematic cohesion. Where Zangewa uses textiles to create works that may look like paintings from a distance, the patterned paintings of Malian artist Amadou Sanogo recall textile patterns without the literal use of cloth. Instead, Sanogo’s paintings are informed by personal knowledge and experience, in his case of the labour intensive textile dye process of bogolan. The technique uses fermented mud on cotton to pattern woven textiles often with a high contrast palette – an aesthetic that carries over to Sanogo’s stunning paintings.

In the upper mezzanine two South African artists use stitch for very different aesthetic means. Senzeni Marasela’s ongoing work with textile and performance is inspired by her mother’s generation, life under apartheid and the women who wait because of work, or war or incarceration, for their men. In the ongoing series Waiting for Gebane, delicate red water colours and stitched thread line drawings evoke the erasure and disregard for women’s identity. The artist uses the derogatory description “Kaffir sheet” to describe the material she stitches into – a re-appropriation of the name denoting coarse quality cotton textiles sold during the colonial era in rural trading stories of KwaZulu Natal and the Eastern Cape.

Nearby, Nicholas Hlobo’s trademark use of recycled rubber tyres and vibrant organza stitched with ribbon sutures create a sculpture that is both phallic and anthropomorphic – a reference, at least in part, to the artist’s identity as openly gay black South African man. The museum’s online podcast explains Hlobo’s use of his native language of Xhosa for titles (which remain untranslated) in the sculpture Ndimnandi ndindodwa (2008) and stitched wall piece Nalo ikhwezi alinyulu (2015) as a “reference both to his own roots and how art often needs to be translated when seen outside of its original context”.

If Zangewa’s The Rebirth of the Black Venus towers over the urban horizon of Johannesburg, Wura-Natasha Ogunji’s Atlantic (2017) offers another image of female empowerment. Ogunji works across media, including performance, but here uses delicate tracing paper. A simple line drawn face carries a dense wrap of hair piled high supporting a turn table. Handwritten text trumpets from the subject’s ear: “We originate in loss. Our lost ones line the sea. We need to get back to them – become amphibious mammals like polar bears and platypuses. Our land aint Africa but the sand that is our ancestors bones.” Nearby haunting blue lines in The proof, an undersea volcano, attraction, extraction, distraction (2017) suggest faint veins outlining horizontal figures – a reminder of the catastrophic loss of life created by the transatlantic trade of enslaved Africans.

An extensive exhibition catalogue, printed with seventeen different covers, deserves credit for largely avoiding the trap of commissioning European voices to speak on behalf of the continent’s experiences. Babacar Mbaye Diop of Senegal contributes a useful overview of sub-Saharan contemporary art events, while “Notes Towards a Lexicon of Art and Place” written by Cape Town-based Sean O’Toole provides an insightful challenge to the exhibition’s somewhat unwieldly curatorial premise.

The two parts of the exhibition title deserve their own critique. Alpha Crucis is considered the brightest star in the Southern hemisphere. Invisible from the Northern Hemisphere, it is part of the Southern Cross constellation and – from Oslo, or anywhere in Europe – requires a physical reorientation to witness in person. Contemporary African Art in its vastness is an even trickier nomenclature. Hardly invisible to the northern hemisphere, the selected artists, for the most part, represent well established identities in a global art market hardly invisible to the northern hemisphere. In this aspect Alpha Crucis (curated in a pre-Covid world, of course) feels a little out of touch.

Alpha Crucis – Contemporary African Art

Astrup Fearnley Museet

Oslo, Norway

31 January – 6 September, 2020

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The deep, blue pigments used throughout both artists’ works conjures references not only to jazz and the blues, but the Atlantic ocean and the deeply interwoven histories of Black people on all sides of it, as well as the literal colour blue. Indigo dye has been traditionally used in textile making in both the Caribbean and West Africa, and appears here in paint and ink, along with gentle washes of lighter shades of blue. 

Of the two artists in this exhibition, Andrew Pierre Hart directly makes reference to music in his work, exploring “the symbiotic relationship between sound and painting”. Hart’s large scale paintings have a dense layering of frenetic brushstrokes and white marks which appear to be a scratching or scraping away.

The artist only begins work after being inspired by a piece of music, and refers to his painting process as a ‘release’ onto the canvas. I could feel a one-ness between the rhythmic brushstrokes and the music playing in the gallery. Human figures also appear in vividly coloured nightclub scenes in the paintings bass experiment (sisters) it works in our town (s1:e1) and bass experiment, the blue night sequence (s1:e1), the latter also featuring a shadowy figure holding a gigantic speaker. Hart seems to be as interested in nightlife culture as in the sonic aspect of the music itself.

While Hart’s paintings have a vigour and spontaneity to them, the detail in Watkiss’s illustrations suggests a slow and intentional process of art making. The female figures in each drawing are modelled on Watkiss herself, and are repeated without being identical. They are adorned with garments decorated intricately with unique designs, which include geometric and floral patterns, as well as symbolic references to various West African spiritual and cultural practices.

The World Has Four Corners features a bowl similar to vessels used in the religion Ifa, while the head of the figure in Knowledge Keeper is crowned with a headdress decorated with carvings resembling Nok sculptures. Watkiss is the daughter of a dressmaker, and her work brings to mind a lineage of Black women artists working with textiles and garments, including those as notable as Jae Jarrell and Faith Ringgold. In this case, the clothing is rendered on paper rather than on fabric.

The works together with the musical backdrop, serve to create an imagined, alternate Black existence outside of conventional notions of reality. What is initially a serene atmosphere, builds in intensity with closer observation of the work; the music seems to crescendo as the viewer approaches the installation at the rear of the gallery, where the speakers are located. Traces of Memory is a series of eleven cyanotypes on paper, mounted directly onto the gallery wall which has been painted a deep blue.

Each cyanotype features a blue silhouette of a female figure with hair styled in bantu knots – a figure who is first seen in The Empress, another piece displayed in the exhibition. Each rendering of this figure varies by the patterns with which it is decorated, which appear to be constellations. The music soars, inviting you to gaze deeply into the starry sky within each silhouette, a nod to the multitudes of magic and possibility within each of us. Stepping away from the mesmerising combination of sound and visuals was like blinking my eyes open from a daydream. I felt for a moment that I had travelled through space and time.

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South African artist Athi-Patra Ruga’s current exhibition at WHATIFTHEWORLD presents work in two techniques often associated with the aesthetics of church and home.

Part one, Interior/Exterior, includes five panels made in stained glass, an apprenticeship Ruga began relatively recently, first exhibiting the medium in 2013. Part two, Dramatis Personae, uses the textile technique of petit point, a mainstay of the artist’s practice for the past fifteen years, in four new works accompanied by one photographic portrait. Across media, Ruga’s aesthetic of strong primary colours defines portraits informed by his complex myth-making of identities historically uncelebrated.

Stitch and glass are far from Ruga’s only materials – performance, photography, video and printmaking make appearances in his earlier work. But here, he communicates content that has become familiar to performance and photography in the materials of craft. Viewers may recognise characters from earlier works such as The BEATification of Feral Benga (2017-), a performance tribute to the Senegalese cabaret dancer Francois “Feral” Benga who worked at the Folies Bergère in Paris during the 1920s. In stained glass Ruga clads the figure in A Sight/Site For Contemplation (2020) with a plume boa. In its backwards glance, the work offers the only gaze of the whole exhibition that is overtly directed at the viewer.

In fact, each of the faces in the stained glass series have a solemnity which suggest – despite the potential for voyeurism – that the subject is far more preoccupied with thoughts of their own. Literally pierced as the title suggests, Yellow Bone (2020) – a vernacular reference to mixed black ethnicity – sits in profile. Sections of stained glass detail the musculature of thigh and arm, while the torso and head are covered in a continuous pattern of painted lace. The (presumably) leather cuffed and harnessed Swazi Youth After (2019) and spandex suited The Speller, The Killer (2020) both look beyond the viewer to points on their lower right.

In contrast, Castrato As [the] Revolution (2020) is credited as Ruga’s imagined self-portrait. Erect penis in hand, his eyes of are concealed behind censor’s tape. “By blackening out his eyes,” the exhibition catalogue offers, “Ruga as a draftsman performs a theatrical self-erasure or self-censorship as a poignant mimicry of the violence enforced by the state, religious and political stakeholders, historians, critics, and gate-keepers.” Collectively, the group suggest little interest in who may be watching them.

Stitch is used to construct the works in Part Two, with one exception: the character Inyanga Yenkanga (2020) who appears in both a photographic portrait and textile.¹ Dramatis Personae revolves around a complex narrative of characters based in Azania, the ancient Greek name for southeast Africa.

The works are part of Ruga’s ongoing Lunar Songbook Cycle, which the exhibition catalogue describes as a “trans-media body of work informed by Southern African astronomy and a more ecological way of recounting time”. Characters emerge from a mix of literary equivalents originally published by Lovedale Press, a printing press in the Eastern Cape started in 1823, and ancient Greek myths. In the exhibition catalogue, Ruga’s inspirations are recounted in a text credited as a collaboration between Lindsey Raymond and the artist. Reading this information is not only crucial to understanding the series but – I would argue – a further formal outcome of the research and invention Ruga employs as an artist.

I will risk stating the painfully obvious: the stained glass portraits of Part One are male; the textile portraits of Part Two are female. Even to write this observation feels like a failure of the first test of understanding nonbinary identities that have, until recently, enjoyed limited representation in craft materials. But reworking to make anew, rather than wholesale avoidance of historical associations seems to be a place Ruga occupies with intention.

Ruga’s narratives of ultimately triumphant female protagonists draw storylines both from Greek mythology and characters from the Lovedale Press books; as alternatives to the biblical narratives of stained glass Ruga’s glass panels instead hold identities the exhibition catalogue acknowledges to be “unrecorded, misrepresented, and forgotten in history”.

Ruga’s portraits celebrate identities previously denied. While unplanned, in this exhibition – adapted online because of the pandemic – stained glass is well served by the backlighting of online viewing; textiles fair less favourably in photographic documentation and here is no exception.

While the coloured light cast by the stained glass intended to reach my body in the gallery is impossible to replicate online, with the support of the comprehensive exhibition catalogue it remains feasible to access a good portion of Ruga’s work through our computer screens. That in itself feels apt. This is an exhibition far more interested in what is possible, than dwelling on what is not.

Interior/Exterior ⁄ Dramatis Personae – a Saga in Two Parts

Athi-Patra Ruga

WHATIFTHEWORLD

2 July – 5 September, 2020

Cape Town

South Africa

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