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 painter Amadou Sanogo pays a lot of attention to the nature of the support, from simple fabric to very thick artisanal cotton canvases from the suppliers of Bogolan. The canvas, its irregularities, its defaults .. are an essential element in his work.

The canvas is laid on the floor without a frame in the middle of the studio. Standing in front of the canvas, Amadou Sanogo uses a pencil, his fingers, or directly a tube of acrylic to draw some figures and shapes that are always located in the center of the canvas. Everything is built and balanced around these figures according to his experimentations with colours. The colour of the background, specially prepared for each painting is very often monochrome. It is applied at last and eliminates all the elements that are not essential to him anymore. 

Beyond an apparent simplicity, the artworks of Amadou Sanogo have an undeniable graphic strength accentuated by the presence of objects, signs, circles, dots, lines … all these elements have a meaning and add to the narrative. 

With his education, traditional and family values, Amadou Sanogo draws his inspiration from a cultural, political and social context that continuously makes him wonder and that he views with a critical eye. He is an artist of the world deeply invested and engaged in the Malian society between tradition and modernity. 

Amadou Sanogo was born in 1977 in Segou. His ancestors were Sénoufo, noble and farmers. They founded the commune of Zangorola in the area of Sikasso in the south of Mali that belonged to the Kingdom of Kénédougou (Country of light). Its kings Tiéba and Babemba Traoré are acknowledged and respected for being the last opponents to the colonial army lead by the French in Mali. Amadou Sanogo is happy to talk about his origins: “to know where we go we need to know where we are from”. He is the heir of this land full of history, symbol of resistance and endowed of a rich artistic patrimony. 

Obstinate, Amadou Sanogo did not follow the path he was supposed to. Instead of becoming an engineer, he chose to study at the Institut National des Arts in Bamako while “a noble should not indulge in the activities of a griot”.

He learns the traditional technique of Bogolan, iconic fabric of the Malian culture, before turning to painting. Annoyed by the academic training, Amadou Sanogo decides to pursue his own plastic research and develop his own language. His singularity leads him to collaborate with Simon Njami and Pascale Marthine Tayou in 2006. Abdoulaye Konaté, artist and director of the INA supports him. 

Humanist and freethinker, he is also fed by tradition, which constitutes a source of knowledge, wisdom and inspiration to him. He takes a great interest into Bambara proverbs that are for him essential to the understanding of the Malian culture in its whole diversity. Since his youngest age, he is respected by his relatives for his ability to listen and his objectivity.

Committed and federating, he opens in 2014 the Atelier Badialan in the heart of the wahhabite area where he welcomes young artists. For the first time in Bamako, artists are able to independently finance their own studio, living and working together, creating in emulation, in freedom and sharing their knowledge to the public. 

→ MAGNIN-A Gallery

Amadou SANOGO at MAGNIN-A Gallery
26th January – 30th March 2019

118, Boulevard Richard Lenoir 75011 Paris +33 (0)1.43.38.13.00
Tuesday – Saturday 2-7pm

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