A favourite of mine, The Nairobi Gallery, has a new exhibition opening on Friday 10th September, 2010.

In Kenya, photography as a medium has been important, but rather as press, fashion and advertisement photography and studio photography. Photography as a medium has been rarely used by Kenyan artists.

Mwangalio Tafauti which translates to ‘A Different Perspective’ promises that much thought has been taken into the curation and presentation of projected images by an array of Kenyan photographers whose work blurs the lines between documentary and art.

They include Antony Kaminju, Barbara Minishi, Boniface Mwangi, Jakub Barua, James Muriuki, Jim Chuchu, , Miriam Syowia Kyambi, Sam Hopkins, Wambui Mwangi.

On a side note, check out photography + poetry collabos by Wambui and others: Koroga, which really deserves it’s own post.

Mwangalio Tafauti runs until 12th December 2010. It’s highly unlikely that I’ll eat my words: not one to miss.

Rather than post  pictures from the day, or write – and I am still reflecting on the experience -this collage came to mind.

The image on the right from the book “Kenyatta A Photographic Biography” by Anthony Howarth is  © Forota (used with permission), whilst the one on the left is by yours truly at the National Museum in Nairobi

The text on the main image says ‘Kenyatta, Mboya and Kibaki are overwhelmed with joy on hearing that K.A.N.U. had won the election.’ (Kenyatta is not seen in this cropped image)

That this image has the then future President Kibaki who wanted to leave a legacy of a new constitution and that the young man represents the people whose life will be affected by the new constitution are some of the thoughts that this image invoked for me.

I wonder if Kibaki’s heart leapt for joy just as he did back then in 1963 when the Kenyan people voted for the constitution at 4th August referendum.

STINGO is a creative collabo between 5 Kenyans who are at the forefront of contemporary creative expression (ht African Digital Art)

Styling: Kepha Maina and Sunny Dolat
Makeup/Grooming: Kangai Mwiti
Photography: Jim Chuchu
Production: Lucille Kahara

Stingo? Stingo means “style” – or at least, it did, sometime in the 80s.

Check out their photography projects so far. I’m willing to bet they’re ones to watch.

Kenya’s Nubians Then and Now is an advocacy campaign for basic rights, inclusion in Kenya’s census, and the issuance of Kenyan ID cards for Nubians.

The exhibition shall portray the statelessness and the denial of citizenship on Nubians in Kenya with rare historical photographs and documents from their personal collections.

This is particularly of interest as it explores migration, integration and identity issues by a community who are now naturalised and have children who are Kenyan by birth, and on the other hand acceptance of the “foreigners” by the then and present-day inhabitants, who themselves are likely immigrants from other parts. I hope this exhibition will draw parallels to other communities – there are Kenyan Somalis so why not Kenyan Nubians? – and perhaps other countries.

Until 14th August 2010 at the GoDown Arts Centre

Update August 2010:

This exhibition was incredibly educational and layered (just as I like them). It chronicled the Nubian community’s presence in pre-independence Kenya to present day. Ironially, the Nubians named the place where they settled: Kibra (present day Kibera) which means ‘land of forest’. They remain the only community that buries their dead in Kibera, their home. Relatedly, a quote that stood out for me was “To be from Kibera meant that you were Nubian. Now, to be from Kibera means you are from a slum.”

If you missed it, do check out the Nubians in Kenya website which has more details, as well as Greg Constatine’s slide show with accompanying interviews

::Video exhibition::[Congolese photographer and filmmaker Sammy Baloji]

Mémoire addresses colonial violence, shattered dreams of independence and the postcolonial political fallout that exists within the current Democratic Republic of Congo. Infused with provocative attention to detail and a depth of intellectual content, Baloji’s work casts a powerful spotlight on contemporary Congolese reality giving it a new reading of the present. The motives power, exploitation, memory and trauma and its marks on bodies and landscapes are recurrent in his work.

Until 7th August 2010 at the Goethe Institute
(ht Nairobi Now)

© Zanele Muholi

It’s been a new experience to be in a fear-filled environment where a seemingly majority out rightly condemn people’s private life choices as immoral, ‘unAfrican’ and at worst condemn them to death.

Photography is growing as a profound medium of expression by the African lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) community who want to be heard through our eyes.

South Africa’s Zanele Muholi has carved a niche with her work, including her recent exhibition, Faces and Phases. (ht Blacklooks who has blogged her review)

The viewer is invited to contemplate questions such as: what does an African lesbian look like? Is there a lesbian aesthetic or do we express our gendered, racialised and classed selves in rich and diverse ways? Is this lesbian more ‘authentic’ than that lesbian because she wears a tie and the other does not? Is this a man or a woman? Is this a transman? Can you identify a rape survivor by the clothes she wears?

See the entire set here

Also, relatedly, see The secret lives of Uganda’s gay community by Glenna Gordon.

© Leah Gordon via The Guardian

Kanaval: Vodou, Politics and Revolution on the Streets of Haiti described as “performance ethnography” and occupying “a space between documentation, public memory and the phantasmic theatre of the historic imagination”,  is a captivating photoessay of images taken over 15 years, by Leah Gordon of carnival revellers in Jacmel, before the earthquake decimated Haiti.

It is reviewed by the UK Guardian’s Sean O’Hagan where he explores pertinent issues around photography –  the dynamics between the subject and the photographer, and of consequence, the audience who bearing their own preconceptions and lack of contextual understanding, make judgements of a captured moment suspended in time.  I find this to be of great interest, given the far-reaching misconceptions surrounding vodou and the objectification of its practice. In addition, one can’t help wondering about the people in the images – where are they now? Did they survive the earthquake? etc.

The problems of photographing such an event are myriad and, by now, well-documented: the fetishisation of the other; the representation of the “raw” and the “exotic” through so-called sophisticated eyes; the inevitable cultural disjuncture that takes place when images such as these enter the art world via galleries and auctions. Gordon, I think, has managed to circumvent many of these problems of representation and commodification by making her photographs neither one thing nor another: neither reportage nor portraiture – nor, indeed, cultural voyeurism posing as anthropological investigation.

How exactly, though, do we, as viewers, participate in that ongoing conversation? What is it about the images that allows us to be curious onlookers rather that cultural voyeurs?

Source

Kanaval slideshow

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.

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.

Two young Africans that I hold with much admiration and respect, who also happen to be dear friends,  Sheila Ochugboju and Joshua Wanyama, are the founders of Africa Knows. I imagine that they put their heads together to brainstorm how they can combine their gifts – Sheila’s an eloquent communicator and Josh a talented photographer – to contribute to the cheetah generation’s revolution: re-branding Africa. Et voila, Africa Knows was born.

Their long term vision is to create a network of photographers and creative writers who share the same passion, vision and drive to tell African stories from an African perspective. If this resonates with you, contact Sheila & Josh. The images and text are with the aim of starting a conversation. With you. Be heard.

If you don’t know about Africa Knows, get to know … I’ve lifted the following from the “About” section.

Our Purpose: To tell a different story about Africa. The Re-branding of Africa.

The story everyone knows and yet no one knows.

Africa Knows is about the challenges, triumphs, dreams and nightmares of being an African in a 21st century city that is straddling several revolutions at the same time – the technological revolution, the agricultural revolution, a democratic resurgence and a post-colonial identity crisis complicated by old ethnic tensions.

Africa Knows about its own land and its own people more than any international media agency can ever know. Africa tells its own story to those who want to listen with their hearts and their heads. This is the beginning of a new identity, starting with Kenya and for Africa as a whole.

Using the tools of digital media and social networks, Africa Knows will bring together the best of photojournalism drawn from across the continent and the most active and creative new writing to tell a different story of itself.

This project will grow through naturally evolving networks to capture thoughts from across Africa…because Africa Knows that it is the cradle of all mankind.

So there you have it. Africa Knows. Do you know?