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.

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The study of a dispersion of a people throughout the world

The exhibition RELATIONS: Diaspora and Painting presents the work of twenty-seven artists who address questions of diaspora from diverse perspectives. The word diaspora derives from the Greek term diaspeirein, which means to disseminate, and describes populations dispersed from their native area. This migration can be forced or voluntary. Some people, such as exiles and refugees, are obliged to leave their country of birth due to war, human rights violations, economic crisis, ecological disaster or for other reasons. Others choose to emigrate because of work or educational opportunities or in response to changes in their lives.

This group show explores the complex and multiple meanings of diaspora, its condition, and its experiences as expressed through painting. “The questions and concepts of diaspora are of deep, personal interest to me as a person of colour born in Canada of mixed Asian heritage,” says curator and managing director Cheryl Sim.

The wide spectrum of productive interpretations and relations that are generated by experiences of diaspora remain unfixed, providing endless engagement with the notions of kinship and identity in a world of advanced globalization and migration. Given the open-ended and discursive nature of the subject, the show is by no means an attempt to be exhaustive but, rather, endeavours to open up ideas and encourage dialogue.

A strong presence of African diasporas

The curator has chosen to highlight the voices and experiences of artists from multiple diasporas. There is therefore a strong presence of Afro-descendent artists, including Julie Mehretu, an Ethiopian-American artist born in 1970, Yinka Shonibare a British-Nigerian artist born in 1962, and Shanna Strauss, a Tanzanian-American artist exploring issues of cultural heritage. Her work Bee Keeper, is a portrait of her Bibi or grandmother. Bibi is a guardian of memory. She tells her community the story of Leti, a female soldier who fought alongside men against the German colonizers* of Tanzania. The way in which Shanna’s Bibi tells the story of her community, in words or song, resembles the work of bees as they gather pollen from flower to flower and work together to produce honey. Her stories travel constantly amongst those who listen to them.

About the PHI Foundation

The PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art Established in 2007 by Phoebe Greenberg, the PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art, formerly known as DHC/ART, is a non-profit organization dedicated to the presentation of contemporary art. Housed in two heritage buildings located in the heart of Old Montréal, its programming has met with critical acclaim both at home and around the world. Each year, the PHI Foundation presents two to three major exhibitions, a series of public events, special collaborative projects and a forward-thinking education program.

International in scope yet responsive to the Montréal context, the Foundation’s programming is offered free of charge to reinforce its commitment to accessibility, while fostering a discussion on how contemporary art is invested with the topics and ideas that reflect and touch our everyday lives.

The PHI Foundation’s Department of Education offers inclusive programming and innovative interpretive tools that encourage exploration and understanding of contemporary art. In providing platforms for exchange related to the exhibitions presented by the Fondation, we encourage critical dialogue informed by diverse perspectives. Concerning the present exhibition, we can find a multitude of tools including the RELATIONS tool, the family kit “diaspora relations and paintings” or the reading circle: diaspora fictions. This allows visitors to develop in depth certain key concepts explored by the exhibition.

RELATIONS: diasporas and painting

PHI Foundation for contemporary art

From 8th July to 29th November 2020

451 et 465, rue Saint-Jean

Montréal (Québec) H2Y 2R5 Canada

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An abstract woman painted in black sits on top of a red goat. She wears a delicate lace top while on her head are stitched together leather straps that hang down like hair. The work, entitled The Journey (2020) by DRC-born Cape Town-based artist Patrick Bongoy, becomes more interesting when we see that she is depicted with the same hooves as the goat. It was displayed on the wall of Ebony/Curated, a gallery with branches in Franschhoek and Cape Town, during the eighth edition of the Investec Cape Town Art Fair. The work, made with hessian, acrylic and rubber inner tubes, portrays the artist’s signature whimsical world that explores themes of migration, alienation and loss of one’s homeland. Also a fashion designer, Bongoy’s work speaks directly to today’s global state of environmental crisis. “My work speaks in response to the global reality of literal and figurative environmental pollution,” he says. Hard to miss after his startling sculpture of a figure at this year’s inaugural Stellenbosch Triennale of a man made in disused rubber hunched over as if trying to free himself from the confines of a pieces of fabric. The piece, which sold in the range of $6,000 and $10,000, was indicative of a strong presence of socio-political work at the fair, challenging present and past ideas of identity and historical narratives as the African continent jets into a new future.

The eighth edition of Investec Cape Town Art Fair returned to its home at the Cape Town International Convention Centre, with a new mission to endow the fair with a stronger African focus. “This is an international art fair where we bring in galleries from Europe and the US but we tried this year to focus more on galleries from the African continent,” said fair director Laura Vicenti. 

Out of the fair’s 107 exhibitors this year, 49 galleries were from the African continent and 58 were international, underlining a greater emphasis on the local. In previous years European blue-chip galleries such as Perrotin and Galerie Templon participated. Such names were replaced this year with new galleries from North Africa and the Middle East, including Lawrie Shabibi from Dubai, Galerie Veronique Rieffel from Ivory Coast and Tunisian Yosr Ben Ammar Gallery and AGORGI, among others. In addition, leading museums and institutions from around the world were present, including A4 Arts Foundation, ANO Institute of Contemporary Arts, FOLIO by Alserkal Arts Foundation, Fondazione Merz, Friends der Pinakothek der Moderne, Iziko South African National Gallery, the Centre Pompidou, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, The Norval Foundation, Palais de Lomé, Skissernas Museum – Museum of Artistic Process and Public Art, Tate Modern African Acquisitions Committee, WEDGE Curatorial Projects, Yerevan Biennial Art Foundation and Zeitz MOCAA.

Yet the challenging socio-economic landscape did provide cause for concern for many participants as well as the fair’s management. How does one host a contemporary art fair in a country where the local currency continues to plunge? 

“The economic landscape of South Africa is challenging,” said Vicenti. “Local collectors are very supportive but it is true that they are facing an economic crisis in South Africa so I tried to balance the situation by having international collectors from all over the world. The number of international collectors increased this year. In comparison to last year there is no comparison. But I am trying hard to have more collectors from Africa.” 

Local dealers were divided, however, on whether the buying power was coming from South Africa or abroad. “Of course we are happy when people from elsewhere come to South Africa to buy art—but the most exciting thing about this year’s Cape Town Art Fair was that the vast majority of our sales were to South Africans,” said Joost Bosland, a director at Stevenson. “It is amazing to see local support for our artists grow year on year.”

South African powerhouse galleries Stevenson, Blank Projects, SMAC Gallery and Goodman Gallery all reported swift sales on the first day of the fair. At the booth of Stevenson was an all-star group showing of emerging and established artists from the continent, including Meleko Mokgosi, Robin Rhode, Zanele Muholi, Neo Matloga and Paulo Nazareth and Simphiwe Ndzube. The gallery reported swift sales in the range of $2,000 and $75,000 and the works, like that of Bongoy’s, once again married the otherworldly and magical realm of dreams with the references to the often harsh reality of the present. 

Several of the fair’s biggest sales took place at Goodman Gallery’s booth, which confirmed approximately 25 sales in total on the opening day ranging from $2,000 to $500,000. The booth showed a line-up of some of their biggest names, including Ghada Amer, Yinka Shonibare…“We had a great diversity in terms of the spend and also the collectors that acquired the works,” said the gallery’s Anthony Dawson. “This is thanks hugely to Fiera Milano, the organizers of the fair who have cultivated a great program and collector base that is not only diversifying audiences to contemporary African art but bringing new brand new collectors into the country.”

“Cape Town is a stronghold for a lot of German citizens who have holiday homes here and they often come to the fair,” continued Dawson. “In addition, through the Italian organizers many Italian collectors were also in attendance but there seems to be strong focus of people from Western Europe coming more and more to Cape Town. We also had collectors from Angola and Nigeria as well. Overall, I’d say the majority of collectors were European.”

Taking place concurrently were two auctions for contemporary and modern art in Cape Town: The Aspire x Piasa Auction, which took place on 14 February and Strauss & Co’s Contemporary Art sale, which took place the day after. The former told of the first time a South African auction house had teamed up with a European equivalent to host a sale of African art on the continent. “Both auction houses made a big effort to bring French collectors to Cape Town which also added to a new audience in the city at the fair,” added Dawson. “With Piasa’s francophone influence we also so collectors arrive from West Africa that the South African audience has never been exposed to.”

The fair was also the place to forge long-term business relationships. First-time participant Galerie Veronique Rieffel from Cote d’Ivoire who showed a series of haunting works by Swiss-French photographer Manuel Braun of an Ivorian dancer in Egypt said she sold works largely to European collectors passing through Cape Town in the range of €3,500 and €6,000. “I forged excellent relationship with local collectors which deserve to be deepened,” said Rieffel. “I have formed a very beautiful partnership with a gallery in Cape Town, South gallery, and we have agreed to continue to show Braun’s work with them in situ.”

The recent edition of Investec Cape Town Art Fair testifies that a buoyant market for African contemporary art in South Africa can be achieved even during the most economically challenging of times—but through a concerted effort of local and international collectors, galleries and artists. 

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The Armory Show is New York City’s premier art fair, and a leading cultural destination for discovering and collecting the world’s most important 20th- and 21st-century art. Staged on Manhattan’s Piers 90, 92, and 94, The Armory Show, supported by Lead Partner Athena Art Finance, will open to the public March 7–10, 2019 features presentations by leading international galleries, innovative artist commissions, and dynamic public programs. Since its founding in 1994, The Armory Show has served as a nexus for the international art world, inspiring dialogue, discovery, and patronage in the visual arts. 

“A TOP DRAW FOR HEAVY-HITTING COLLECTORS, GALLERISTS, CELEBRITIES AND ART LOVERS”

NEW YORK TIMES 

The Armory Show’s 2019 edition (that celebrates its 25th anniversary this edition) will present 194 galleries from 33 countries, bringing together an unparalleled presentation of international galleries in central Manhattan. This year will also welcome 59 new exhibitors. Here is a short selection of exciting works from Africa and its diaspora, that you can expect to see at the show. 

AJARB BERNARD ATEGWA represented by Jack Bell Gallery ( London, England)

Ategwa’s works are large format and mimic the scale of cityscapes and public space. His paintings work as sequences in a larger narrative describing the chaos of his hometown, in Cameroon, where he was born. Moving between the taxi stands, newsagents, bars, roadside markets and fleeting moments of respite, the artist offers snapshots of everyday life. His vivid colour palette and graphic style speak the language of advertising familiar to Douala’s inhabitants. With great skill the artist weaves together urban scenes, sounds and smells to create a rich sensory immersion.

Jody Paulsen represented by SMAC Gallery (Cape Town, South Africa)

Jody Paulsen was born in Cape Town, South Africa where he currently lives and works. Working in textile, particularly felt, Paulsen, explores themes related to his understanding within the context of contemporary, material culture. His work speaks of the process of production as he creates vast, elaborate tapestries and colourful collage works. Various shapes, colours, logos and fonts reference the current age of capitalism and experiences of global culture that shape concepts of gender, sexuality and identity.

Zak Ové represented by Lawrie Shabibi Gallery (Dubai, UAE)

Ové seeks to reignite and reinterpret lost culture and mythology using new-world materials whilst at the same time paying tribute to both spiritual and artistic African identity. Constantly finding unpredictable ways to express recognisable, traditional African forms his practice explores African identity, the African diaspora and African history.

Tiwani Contemporary (London, England) will present works from Virginia Chihota 

Introspective in nature, Virginia Chihota‘s work is deeply influenced by personal experiences – landmark and everyday. In a reflection on intimacy and the human figure, she has addressed themes such as childbearing, childrearing, marriage, kinship, bereavement and faith. Having trained as a printmaker, Chihota’s use of screen-printing is as confident as it is original. She mixes printing techniques with drawing to produce unique works of striking formal complexity. She was born in 1983 in Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe and she lives and works in Podgorica, Montenegro. 

Mariane Ibrahim Gallery presents a solo booth dedicated to Haitian-American female artist, Florine Démosthène

Florine Demosthene was born in the United States and raised between Port-au-Prince, Haiti and New York. Démosthène earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Parsons the New School for Design in New York and her Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College, City University of New York. Using non-traditional materials like glitter and mylar, her work evoke a strong animated struggle, a fight over existing power. The superpositions of her alter-egos, reflect the resilience of the pre-fabricated codes of aesthetics dictated by a set of behaviors. One cannot escape the commodification and fetishization of the black body. The Artist is exposing a new physical paradigm, using gender and social attributes to escape determinism.

Works by Kapwani Kiwanga presented by Galerie Jerome Poggi (Paris, France)

Kiwanga’s work traces the pervasive impact of power asymmetries by placing historic narratives in dialogue with contemporary realities, the archive, and tomorrow’s possibilities. Her work is research-driven, instigated by marginalised or forgotten histories, and articulated across a range of materials and mediums including sculpture, installation, photography, video, and performance. Kiwanga follows the lineage of surveillance and positions it in relation to blackness in America, from its roots in slavery to the role that technology performs today.

Works by Sadie Barnette presented by Charlie James  Gallery (Los Angeles, CA, USA)

Whether in the form of drawing, photography or large-scale installation, Sadie Barnette’s work relishes in the abstraction of city space and the transcendence of the mundane to the imaginative. She creates visual compositions that engage a hybrid aesthetic of minimalism and density, using text, glitter, family Polaroids, subculture codes and found objects. Recent works engage as primary source material the 500-page FBI surveillance file kept on her father, Rodney Barnette, who founded the Compton, California, chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1968.

Works by Ibrahim El-Salahi presented by Vigo Gallery ( London, England) 

A leader of the Sudanese Khartoum School and the first African artist to have a retrospective at the Tate Modern in London, Ibrahim El Salahi combines European styles with traditional Sudanese themes in his art. El Salahi’s art encompasses and explores a range of compositional forms, including fragments of Arabic calligraphy, but perpetually evokes a transnational, African-influenced surrealism.

ACA Galleries ( New York  City, NY, USA) will present a selection of works by Faith Ringgold

The painted narrative quilts for which Ringgold is best known grew out of these early paintings, and denounce racism and discrimination with their subject matter. Combining quilt making, genre painting, and story telling through images and hand-written texts, the series “The American Collection” (1997) endeavors to rewrite African American art history, emphasizing the importance of family, roots, and artistic collaboration.

James Cohan Gallery (New York city, USA) will present a sculpture from Yinka Shonibare CBE

Over the past decades, Shonibare has become well known for his exploration of colonialism and post-colonialism within the contemporary context of globalization. Working in painting, sculpture, photography, film and installation, Shonibare’s work examines race, class and the construction of cultural identity through a sharp political commentary of the tangled interrelationship between Africa and Europe and their respective economic and political histories. 

Omar Ba represented by Templon Gallery (Paris, France)

Born in 1977 in Senegal, Omar Ba lives and works in Dakar and Geneva. His paintings, produced using a variety of techniques and materials, represent political and social motifs open to multiple interpretations. His artistic vocabulary raises historical and timeless questions while formulating a wholly contemporary artistic message.  Omar Ba’s iconography features personal metaphors, ancestral references and hybrid figures. 

Jack Shainman Gallery (New York City, USA) will present a photography from Gordon Parks

During the late 1940s through the 1960s, Parks produced some of his most renowned photographic essays on issues relating to civil rights. A stoic portrait of Red Jackson, from a 1948 series on the Harlem gang leader, reveals a man seemingly hemmed in by his options as he stares intently out a broken window; the darkness of the interior contrasts forebodingly with the light illuminating him from the street. By showing the individual faces and families behind essentializing headlines of violence and relentless poverty, Parks stressed similarity over difference. His legacy, and the legacy of those he captured, remains very much alive in today’s America.

Richard Taittinger Gallery and Galleria Continua will present a major installation of Pascale Martine Tayou

Pascale Marthine Tayou (b. 1966, Nkongsamba) is an internationally renowned artist whose work is characterized by its variability, since he confines himself in his artistic work neither to one medium nor to a particular set of issues. Already at the very outset of his career, Pascale Marthine Tayou added an “e” to his first and middle name to give them a feminine ending, thus distancing himself ironically from the importance of artistic authorship and male/female ascriptions. His works not only mediate in this sense between cultures, or set man and nature in ambivalent relations to each other, but are produced in the knowledge that they are social, cultural, or political constructions.

The curator’s statement “Plastic bags are helpful, as well as harmful—they carry goods, cross borders, and contribute to plastic pollution. Tayou’s large and visually impressive installation, Plastic Bags (2019), takes ubiquitous objects and uses them to create an artwork that offers a colorful commentary on consumerism and globalism.”

The Armory Show – March 7-10 2019

Piers 90, 92, and 94
New York City

Public Days 

Thursday, March 7, 12pm — 8pm
Friday, March 8, 12pm — 8pm
Saturday, March 9, 12pm — 7pm
Sunday, March 10, 12pm — 6pm

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