Contemporary art in resonance with traditional metallurgy

The aim of this exhibition is not to reflect the full range of iron objects and sculptures from Africa, as it is the case for the exhibition “Frapper le fer” of the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac. It’s about to compare the simple yet sophisticated shapes of objects from traditional African iron metallurgy (coins, medicine sticks, weapons, shields, etc.) with modern and contemporary African sculptures in the same metal.

The relationship between the ancien and the modern is complemented by the recent iron sculptures by two young Beninese artists invited for a creative residency at the Blachère Foundation earlier in the year, Marius Dansou and Rémy Samuz. Drawings by Soly Cissé, photographs by J. D. Okhai Ojeikere, prints on Dibon by Mansour Ciss, but also Confluences of El Anatsui, flamboyant wall sculpture made of strips of aluminium and copper wire that refers to Ghanaian Kente textiles, and Dexu Adüna dʼAlexis Peskine, a deep portrait of a young man literally nailed to black wooden boards, constitute a discreet resonance to the iron sculptures, old and contemporary, of the exhibition

This exhibition in Apt includes the art centre of the Blachère Foundation, the painted exterior walls of the building, the garden treated as a sculpture park and the Gabriel Péri square in Apt with the Universal Prayer of Ndary Lo, already presented on the Parvis of the Popes’ Palace in Avignon in 2017.

Remy SAMUZ one of the exhibited artists was born in 1982 in Cotonou, Benin, where he lives and works. Since childhood, he has been creating miniature sculptures of all kinds of characters. This passion, misunderstood then, earned him to be considered as a strange child. He decided to devote himself to art only in 2003, while he was following a training in general mechanics, and develops a technique in braided wire, giving a lot of rigidity to his sculptures while maintaining a great lightness.

Trans-fer

Fondation blachère

Exhibition of contemporary art from Africa

From 5th December to 26th September 2020

zi les Bourguignons, 382 Avenue des Argiles, 84400 Apt

France

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At 15.6 m x 25 m and comprising eight vertical panels – this wall-hanging sculpture is one of the largest the artist has made to date. Inspired by the limitless possibilities of the blank canvas and adopting the method of weaving to create a tapestry – Anatsui uses aluminium bottle tops and various alcohol by-products as paint to create abstract strokes, shapes, and patterns. 

In this process of abstraction, the artist represents the fluidity of life and geographical identities. It is said that at times of global turmoil, abstraction takes on heightened significance. This ideology is represented here in TSIATSIA – searching for connection as Anatsui adopts abstraction as the language to seek globalised networks of new energies and reformed progressive narratives. In 2013, with TSIATSIA – searching for connection, El Anatsui was awarded the prestigious Charles Wollaston Award. Anatsui has also received numerous other honours for his work: In 2014, he was made an Honorary Royal Academician and was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 2015, he was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 56th Venice BiennaleAll the World’s Futures; and in 2016, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Cape Town, and was honoured with the Praemium Imperiale Award for Sculpture in 2017.Anatsui embraces both the formal and conceptual properties of found materials to convey rich and complex narratives pertaining to colonial and postcolonial economic endeavours and cultural exchanges in Africa and the amalgamation of histories through trade. In this sense, Anatsui uses discarded and abandoned materials as a layered means to express rich histories. It is the materiality and essence of the individual fragments that give TSIATSIA – searching for connection visual impact.

In this same way – paradoxically, Anatsui’s tapestries are both weighty and light in appearance. This luminous gold tapestry draped across the architectural fabric of Zeitz MOCAA, cascading down four floors of the museum, uses the concepts of consumption and transformation as a means to unite humanity— celebrating a plurality of cultural influences through the universal language of abstraction. The installation is presented in collaboration with October Gallery, London.

TSIATSIA – Searching for connection

Exhibition curators: Julia Kabat, Alistair Kennedy
Exhibition dates: February 2019 – December 2019

ZEITZ MOCAA
V&A Waterfront, Silo District, S Arm Rd,

Waterfront, Cape Town, 8001, South Africa
 http://zeitzmocaa.museum/

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After the great success of its inaugural exhibitions Africa Is No Island and Second Life (27 February – 29 July 2018), the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (MACAAL), Marrakech, announced recently the opening of its new exhibition, Esoteric Writings.

The exhibition Esoteric Writings is an invitation to a personal interpretation of singular artworks from all quarters of the African continent. These artists – whether self-taught or formally trained – endeavour to reclaim some heritage threatened by oblivion or other animist aesthetic through the exploration of properties of wood (Prince Twins Seven-Seven, Ali Maimoun, El Anatsui, Ahmed Chiha, Abderrahim Trifis), or the mythologisation of textile (Abdoulaye Konaté, Joël Andrianomearisoa). Each of the artists in the exhibition proposes his or her own visual language. If an exact decryption of the graphic (Abdelmalek Berhiss, Najia Mehadji), numerary (Marcel Gotène, Houssein Miloudi), or literary (Frédéric Bruly Bouabré) codes might escape the casual viewer, one needs no cultural or religious references to appreciate the narrative force and formal power behind these works.

Esoteric Writings thus brings together nearly thirty artists with as many visual and sound expressions that derive their essence from mythology, cosmology, or mysticism, each inspired by the culture of origin of its creator.

The exhibition also represents an opportunity to pay homage to Boujemâa Lakhdar, renowned ethnologist from the Essaouira (Morocco) region and the only artist to have represented the Maghreb in the groundbreaking exhibition Magiciens de la Terre (Centre Georges-Pompidou, 1989). Through his interest into the bonds between the region’s inhabitants as well as spiritual and esoteric aspects of Jewish-Arab and Amazigh culture, Lakhdar funnels his attraction to magic and the supernatural into a formidable and multidimensional body of work (Astrolabe musical, 1985, Le Totem de la Pensée, 1987, Table-Aigle, 1983).

So, from the souiri painters of Essaouira (Mohammed Tabal, Ali Maimoun, Regragui Bouslaï) to the Oshogbo school – at the centre of Yoruba civilisation – as represented by Prince Twins Seven-Seven, not to mention the Poto-Poto school from which Marcel Gotène (Congo) emerged as a major figure, Esoteric Writings reconfigures the fantastic, symbolic, and spiritual universe as if to reconstruct a secular past through powerful visual allegories.

Esoteric Writings presents a group of creators from multiple backgrounds, working in diverse mediums yet born of the same land, and in so doing proposes to reveal the hidden underpinnings of their common history. 

Participating Artists:

• El Anatsui (Ghana)
• Joël Andrianomearisoa (Madagascar)
• Farid Belkahia (Morocco)
• Abdelmalek Berkhiss (Morocco)
• Regragui Bouslai (Morocco)
• Frédéric Bruly Bouabré (Ivory Coast)
• Ahmed Chiha (Morocco)
• Emo de Medeiros (France – Benin)
• Abdellah El Atrach (Morocco)
• Mohamed El baz (Morocco)
• John Goba (Sierra Leone)
• Marcel Gotène (Congo)
• Hassan Hajjaj (Morocco)
• Aissa Ikken (Morocco)
• Abdoulaye Konaté (Mali)
• Boujemâa Lakhdar (Morocco)
• Ahmed Louardiri (Morocco)
• Ali Maimoun (Morocco)
• Najia Mehadji (Morocco)
• Houssein Miloudi (Morocco)
• Zina Saro-Wiwa (Nigeria)
• Mohamed Tabal (Morocco)
• Prince Twins Seven Seven (Nigeria)
• Dominique Zinkpè (Benin)

Esoteric Writings

27 September 2018 – 6 January 2019

Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Madeen

Al Maaden, Sidi Youssef Ben Ali, 40000 Marrakech

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