SCI-CULTURA

Paul Sika, easily the hottest  artist out of the African continent right now, has today launched his new photobook, At the Heart of Me –> see his website and check out the trailer.

The befittingly self-proclaimed ‘Andy Warhol’s grandson’ refuses to fit in a box (he negates that there is such a thing as a box) and this is reflected in his newly published photobook, where his inimitable vibrant images are presented, juxtaposed with prose that tells stories behind the people, locations and moments that played a part in creating his images, as well as stories of Paul Sika, the mortal, as he expresses his thoughts, his dreams, his encounters, his questions and his philosophies and sometimes how they relate to global ongoings.

It is laudible that Sika explicitly refrains from explaining the stream of consciousness that informs and inspires the sets that he creates for his photo shoots and the subsequent photomaking* that births his trademark colorful explosions of intense theatrical art depicting urban African life as it has, to my knowledge, never been portrayed. He allows the onlooker the freedom to plunge in and decipher the meaning from wheresoever their soul takes him/her. Sika’s style may be likened to that of Dave Lachapelle but with this collection, he reinforces the mark that he’s created that left me thinking he isn’t like Dave Lachapelle, he is like Paul Sika.

It is hard to miss Sika’s naming of names – names that are brands – which admittedly I initially (mis)interpreted as the revelation of a desire to be recognised and iconographised and aptly positioned on the popular culture pedestal in their midst. But as I continued to turn the pages, it occurred to me that perhaps Sika names these names as an acknowledgment to the inspiration he draws from them. After all, this is At the Heart of Me that shares his desires, his heart. His inner heart’s desires.

At the Heart of Me is not one to be devoured hurriedly or without consideration. After all he is offering a glimpse into the core of him (as I understood the title), which deserves in the very least steadfast attention. It is to be leisurely savoured, gradually absorbing the 36 images and prose, one at a time. That the narrative doesn’t follow the predefined storyline sequence – beginning, middle and end – is a positive as one may leisurely dip in and out of his works randomly, perhaps revisiting them and seeing something new, or again yet differently, or both, or… It is your unique journey.
Put your lateral-thinking cap on (Sika is an avid connector) and get into the word play and rhymes that he weaves, revealing a poet (who knew?) as he challenges concepts and actions.

My personal take from Sika: the seemingly confident and unwavering creative exploration of passions and ideas is about getting into the flow. This includes flowing with life to where it may take you, which may sometimes mean not getting what you want. But that in itself could take you to an even more exciting place.

If there was a box, Sika wouldn’t fit into one anyhow.

*photomaking is a term Sika has coined for his post-production of ‘single-frame films’.

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You still want more, right?

See a recent interview of Sika with CNN Inside Africa’s Isha Sesay, in response to recommendations via social media sites like Twitter. There is also a write-up on CNN Inside Africa, with a slideshow to whet your appetite for the book.

Stocktown Africa is a documentary portrait about the lively,creative and social contemporary culture blossoming in Africa’s big cities today. Stocktown Africa will bring you face to face with the new urban Africa, where fashion creators, mobile phone journalists, cultural entrepreneurs, music producers and guerilla filmmakers define what it is to be young, talented and passionate in Africas 21st century.

I’ve watched the trailer a few times already and can’t wait to see it in full. (ht @gkofiannan)

Check out their page on FB.

Through African Eyes: The European in African Art, 1500 to Present caught my eye (ht my girl S.A.I.) as it is not the immediate representation of African art that comes to mind. Inevitably the arrival of the Europeans in Africa was expressed and immortalised in art. It is curious what was and what wasn’t drawn or sculptured. What was the use or value (not just monetary) of these products.

For centuries Euro-American eyes have been trained on Africa. We’ve scanned it from afar, surveyed it up close, put it behind glass; looked and looked, wonderingly, acquisitively, disdainfully, fearfully. But we rarely seem to be aware that during all that time Africans have been looking back at us — wonderingly, acquisitively, disdainfully, fearfully.

The exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts is curated by Nii Quarcoopome, who leads the Department of Africa, Oceania and Indigenous Americas at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

More and slideshow

Bamako, Mali © David Adjaye

Urban Africa

The renowned architect David Adjaye has beaten me to one of my dreams, but has left me even more inspired to visit each of the 53 African capitals and get a taste for life there. Adjaye refers to the advent of digital camera as an architect’s sketch book – taking a host of images and reflecting on them later. His Urban African exhibition, which is a representation of these cities, with the exception of Mogadishu, is not just about the images of the buildings that he records, but about the context in which they exist – the people and the spaces which they inhabit – civic, commercial and residential (formal & informal) – which is strongly tied to their history. I found this exhibition to be not about photography per se – it wasn’t about the composition and other technicalities a skilled photographer may look for – but about using photography as a tool in a significant step towards demystification of this huge continent, from which images of war and poverty are mostly seen and thus define the continent in people’s minds.

I must say though I found the projection of a few large scale images to be more powerful than a rectangular room with what seemed like thousands of images. But perhaps that is the point exactly. How can you digest the richness of all of urban Africa in a single day?

If you can, do see Adjaye’s Urban Africa at the Design Museum. Until 5th September 2010.

Adjaye’s interview with Mark Coles on the BBC World Service arts & culture show, The Strand.

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Image © British Museum

Kingdom of Ife: 12th to 15th Century

The Kingdom of Ife sculptures at the British Museum is a transporation through time to a representation of exquisite skill and elegance that left the Europeans who first saw it denying it could have been done in Africa, and speculating it was transported there by a lost tribe of Greeks. Sigh.

Waldemar Januszczak [The Sunday Times art critic] writes about the excavations of these objects in 1910 and how they were the defining moment for African art, re-writing the story of art and understanding of civilisation. “Everything we knew about African art was wrong.”

The delightful life-sized and life-like bronze head sculptures, which are undoubtedly the highlight of this exhibition, left me awe-filled. It was as if I had just had an unspoken but real interaction with someone from circa 14th century. And once I has stepped away from their hypnotic stare, to think that someone’s hands made these objects of beauty and elegance centuries ago is mind blowing.

The Kingdom of Ife (pronounced ee-feh) was a powerful, cosmopolitan and wealthy city-state in West Africa (in what is now modern south-west Nigeria).

Ife flourished as a political, spiritual, cultural and economic centre in the 12th–15th centuries AD, and was an influential hub of local and long-distance trade networks.

The exhibition features superb pieces of Ife sculpture, drawn almost entirely from the magnificent collections of the National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Nigeria.

The artists of Ife developed a refined and highly naturalistic sculptural tradition in stone, terracotta, brass and copper to create a style unlike anything in Africa at the time. The technical sophistication of the casting process is matched by the artworks’ enduring beauty.

The human figures portray a wide cross-section of Ife society and include images of youth and old age, health and disease, suffering and serenity.

The Kingdom of Ife exhibition is on until 6th June 2010. Absolutely not one to be missed.

Nandipha Mntambo, “Europa,” 2008

Contemporary African Art Since 1980 [by Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu] is the first major survey of the work of contemporary African artists from diverse situations, locations, and generations who work either in or outside of Africa, but whose practices engage and occupy the social and cultural complexities of the continent since the past 30 years. Its frame of analysis is absorbed with historical transitions: from the end of the postcolonial utopias of the sixties during the 1980s to the geopolitical, economic, technological, and cultural shifts incited by globalization.

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Moving between discursive and theoretical registers, the principal questions the book analyzes are:

What and when is contemporary African art?

Who might be included in the framing of such a conceptual identity?

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It periodizes and cross references artistic sensibilities in order to elicit multiple conceptual relationships, as well as breaks with prevailing binaries of center and periphery, vernacular and academic, urban and non-urban forms, indigenous and diasporic models of identification.

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The main claim of this book is that contemporary African art can be best understood by examining the tension between the period of great political changes of the era of decolonization that enabled new and exciting imaginations of the future to be formulated, and the slow, skeptical, and social decline marked by the era of neo-liberalism and Structural Adjustment programs of the 1980s. These issues are addressed in chapters covering the themes of “Politics, Culture, Critique,” “Memory and Archive,” “Abstraction, Figuration and Subjectivity,” and “The Body, Gender and Sexuality.”

In addition, the book employs sidebars to provide brief and incisive accounts of and commentaries on important contemporary political, economic and cultural events, and on exhibitions, biennales, workshops, artist groups and more. Rather than a comprehensive survey, this richly illustrated book presents examples of ambitious and important work by more than 160 African artists since the last 30 years. This list includes Georges Adeagbo Tayo Adenaike, Ghada Amer, El Anatsui, Kader Attia, Luis Basto, Candice Breitz, Moustapha Dime, Marlene Dumas, Victor Ekpuk, Samuel Fosso, Jak Katarikawe, William Kentridge, Rachid Koraichi, Mona Mazouk, Julie Mehretu, Nandipha Mntambo, Hassan Musa, Donald Odita, Iba Ndiaye, Richard Onyango, Ibrahim El Salahi, Issa Samb, Cheri Samba, Ousmane Sembene, Yinka Shonibare, Barthelemy Toguo, Obiora Udechukwu, and Sue Williamson.

Gawk at more amazing & diverse images courtesy of BoingBoing.

Contemporary African Art Since 1980 is available on Amazon. Mine’s in the post

Hat tip @Matathia via @Potash on Twitter.

Following my recent post, which was an attempt to dissect the challenges that contemporary African artists face, the good folks at FOCUS10 – Contemporary African Art Fair wrote in to highlight a contemporary art fair that is geared to African artists. I am not in any way connected, I am simply passing on the message – if interested, do check it out and be the judge.

Please note the deadline is December 1st, 2009

For more information, you may contact FOCUS10:

info@focus10.ch

Bon chance!

I am still pondering on the contents of a link Potash posted on Twitter a while back, entitled ‘African artists poor unlike their cousins’ by Osei G. Kofi.

Among the many godchildren of Globalization is the art business. It has grown from several hundred million dollars a year into a multi-billion dollar industry in a little over a decade. Bad news is that Africa is missing out on this bonanza.

Today art, especially contemporary art, brings together a vast, growing community of savvy artists, dealers, curators, galleries, museums, auction houses, publishers, film makers and internet designers in an exciting new marketplace where everyone seems to gain enormously. Unfortunately Africa and Africans are sadly locked out of this burgeoning business.
And this time it is not due to any machination by “blood sucking western capitalists” of the post-colonial order but by Africans’ own failure to cotton on to a good thing — even when it stares us in the face.

Kofi exemplified the Art Basel summer 2009 fair as evidence for this observation, citing the works of renowned European, American and Asian artists as well as art collectors of the same origin, juxtaposed by the conspicuous absence of established contemporary African artists, despite the well known African influence on high-end art works. Kofi deducts the reasons to be:

1. Africa has been slow, too slow, in professionalising art…The entire East and Central African region has two commercial galleries of international standards, the venerable Gallery Watatu and its comely upstart, RaMoMa, both in Nairobi.

2. Africans, rich Africans, refuse to buy art. The concept of “putting money on the wall” is alien to them.’

Kofi went on to defend buying art as a ‘gilt-edged investment’ and using Nairobi’s Gallery Watatu, the oldest art gallery in sub-Saharan Africa, as a case in point to demonstrate that had its location been in London, New York or Tokyo, it would not be financially strained.

The big question is: WHY?

The following are brief conversations I had with Potash of A Kenyan Urban Narrative and Young Global of My Global Hustle on Twitter to get you warmed up. I’m posting them here as I’d very much like to move the discussion to a more specific audience that has an interest in African art, in a space that’s not limited by word count.

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What are your views? What do you think explains our [Africans] slowness to (1) professionalise African art and (2) buy African art on the African continent?

Scramble for Africa © the artist; Photo: Stephen White

Yinka Shonibare is a Nigerian-British multi-media artist (photography, painting, sculpture, installations) uses his work as a platform to explore the issues that construct identity – globalization, colonialisation, trade, migration – raising the question of cultural authenticity. His instantly recognisable allegorical trademark has become the headless Victorian mannequin adorned in ‘African’ fabric (i.e. Dutch wax / ankara) that is made in The Netherlands and purchased in Brixton market in South London.

I think the fact that he carries the Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) title, Royally bestowed upon those who have given outstanding service to the community that merits public recognition, is in itself symbolic of the irony of the past in the present given that the British Empire is redundant and the country of his birth is a former British colony.

My personal favourite was an installation in the National Gallery’s Scratch The Surface exhibition which was to commemorate the bicentenary of the parliamentary abolition of the slave trade. “Colonel Tarleton and Mrs Oswald, shooting” depicted 2 life-sized headless mannequins dressed in Georgian garments made from ‘African’ fabrics shooting a pheasant, in reference to their social status and their enrichment from the trans-atlantic slave trade. The mannequins were placed where the subjects’ portraits would be in the gallery. (More here)

Shonibare’s mid-career survey is currently at the Brooklyn Museum (until September 2009). Also Party Time: Re-imagine America at the Newark Museum (until January 2010) (hat tip Krispy who has uploaded images on Flickr)

If you’re thirsty for more Shonibare, see the recent NYT review, write up on his book Double Dutch, and his website which could do with updating.

Shadowy collection by Tord Boontje, using a hand-weaving technique employing the plastic threads traditionally used for making fish nets © yatzer.com

Oh la la! The thing about the M’Afrique exhibition by Moroso, an Italian avant-garde furniture-making company (hat tip Timbuktu Chronicles), is that it’s an innovative, contemporary body of work that shouts art. The ubiquitous safari-chic/colonial look is beautiful, yes, but a bit predictable and safe. And I’ve never been a huge fan of animal print cushions. The M’Afrique collection, by various designers has got me excited about furniture. Either I am getting old or this is something that’s fresh, new and breaking boundaries of what Afro-inspired furnishings can look like.

The African continent is extraordinarily rich in creativity, materials and ideas that are sources of inspiration and nourishment for us. When applied to design, they engender products which exude tradition and modernity, innovation and history, form and beauty. I think there is so much of Africa and in this event my intent was to showcase the creativity of a few of the great artists and personalities of contemporary African culture. Going beyond the stereotypes that present Africa as a tragic or, at best, exotic experience, we want to highlight some aspects of contemporary African culture, which is in effect comparable to global culture. Looking at Africa through the eyes of contemporary art, photography, architecture and design is perhaps the most appropriate way of approaching this vast, powerful continent, so creatively rich and diverse that today it is still one of western modernity’s greatest sources of inspiration.

-Patrizia Moroso

Do-lo-rez by Ron Arad, Moroso’s iconic design upholstered in African fabrics © yatzer.com

More images of the M’Afrique exhibition with complementary text here.

African Digital Art is the brainchild of Kenyan digital artist Jepchumba, who seeks to bring together a collective of the inspiring works of other African digital artists, thus filling a gap in the blogosphere.

The term digital art is permeating through the web even though the precise definition is unclear. Digital art covers a wide range of artistic production; audio/visual production, animation, interactive projects, websites, short films, graphic art and design.

African Digital Art is an online collective, a creative space, where digital artists, enthusiasts and professionals can seek inspiration, showcase their artistry and connect with emerging artists.

Definitely worth a look and do register if appropriate by clicking on the image.