Monday 11 April 2016

IWALEWAHAUS, Bayreuth, Germany



20-21 May 2016
7pm
  
IWALEWAHAUS
Universitat Bayreuth
Wölfelstr.2
95444 Bayreuth
GERMANY

Including:
Abdoul-Ganiou Dermani (Togo) | Amina Zoubir (Algeria) | Euridice Kala (Mozambique) | Laura Nsengiyuvma (Rwanda) | Lerato Shadi (South Africa) | LucFosther Diop (Cameroon) | Mouna Jemal Siala (Tunisia) | Mounir Fatmi (Morroco) | Said Rais (Morroco) | Wura Ogunji Natasha (Nigeria)


Special Thanks to Nadine Siegert

(c) Mounir Fatmi, Darkening process, 2014


Friday 3 April 2015

Blackness and whiteness


Blackness and whiteness
By Yvette Greslé
South African Art critic and writer

This text was written as a presentation for a panel discussion at the Ben Uri Gallery on Monday evening,  17 March 2014. The panel and the conversation with the audience accompanied the exhibition ‘Still Fighting Ignorance and Intellectual Perfidy: Video Art from Africa’; curated by Kisito Assangni. The panel was hosted by David Glasser (Ben Uri Chair) and included Kisito Assangni, Dr Marie Rodet (Lecturer in African History, Convenor Film and History, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and myself, Yvette Greslé. A catalogue was published by Ben Uri, and is available from the gallery.

Blackness and whiteness. One screen separated into two, and the slow tempo of a piano score: Claude Debussy’s ‘Clair de lune’ (originally titled ‘Promenade Sentimentale’, and renamed after Paul Verlaine’s 1869 poem ‘Clair de lune).  The place made visible to us, in the two screens, is identical. Without context this place could, in fact, be many possible places. In the background an apartment building is visible. I see trees, iron railings and a walkway: significations of the urban. Some motorbikes are chained to the railings. On the right hand side, in each of the screens, is a wall. The wall in ‘screen 1’ (on the left hand side) is empty except for shadows cast. But in ‘screen 2’ (on the right hand side) three white plaster moulds of human faces appear. Eyes are closed, and there is no way of knowing the subjects to which these inanimate objects refer. They remind me of death masks or the masks that functioned during colonialism as part of a scientific discourse of racial types. I see a woman, the artist Michèle Magema. In ‘screen 1′, she is wearing a white dress and her face is painted white. I resist the language of race: Why should I refer to her as a black woman, or even think of her as black? Already the sedimented violence of  blackness and whiteness begins to creep up on me insidiously. Now the woman comes closer, disappears and re-emerges in the opposite screen: she has turned around and I see the back of her head, her shoulders, and the sleeves of her white dress. Her movements are slow and deliberate: she turns to face the three white masks suspended on the wall. Her face is no longer obscured by white pigment, and in this disjuncture I register subtle displacements of time. She faces the masks, then she envelops one of them in her hands: in a gesture of love she leans forward to kiss its immobile mouth. She appears frozen in time while on the screen opposite she once again begins her walk, her promenade. She stops, and faces us, again masked by the white substance, and then, simultaneously, on the screen opposite she pulls away from her kiss, and walks away from us. The work, a performed, self-conscious promenade, is titled ‘Interiority-Fresco IV: The Kiss of Narcisse(e)’, (2010). The myth of Narcissus and Echo is familiar: a tale of unrequited love and eternal punishment. In Ovid Echo was condemned by the goddess Juno to repeat only the last words that were spoken to her. Narcissus, punished for not returning Echo’s love was compelled to fall in love with his own reflection. He died unable to detach himself from his reflection in a pool of water. In Magema’s video where are Narcissus and Echo? Are their presences registered, ambiguously, in the gestures, and repetitions we see? In watching this work, I am drawn back to one of the texts, that for me, is foundational to a discourse on race and trauma: Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks (first published in French in 1952). The text searched for a ‘new humanism’ as it sought to comprehend the violence of race: ‘The white man is sealed in his whiteness. The black man in his blackness. We shall seek to ascertain the directions of this dual narcissism and the motivations that inspire it’. (Fanon, English translation, 1967: 9-10).  I watch Magema’s video: focusing on its cinematic registering of blackness and whiteness;  its Debussy soundtrack; its imagery; the performances it stages, its visual strategies of doubling and repetition. As I watch, the work opens up spaces that cross time, geography and space. It resists a singular, absolute narrative. It is opaque while we may associatively begin to imagine our interpretations. Art’s poetic imagining produces in me a porous sense of history, geography, space and place. Fanon cites Sartre’s Orphée Noir: ‘sometimes the poetic impulse coincides with the revolutionary impulse, and sometimes they take different courses’. (Fanon, English transl. 1967: 134).

When Kisito Assangni asked me to write for this exhibition I was first of all compelled by the title he chose: STILL FIGHTING IGNORANCE AND INTELLECTUAL PERFIDY. My text is a conversation with this title. It is also a dialogue with this idea of video art that is African. What does this all mean?

I looked up ‘Perfidy’ in my Roget’s Thesaurus and it generates a vocabulary of betrayal: ‘faithlessness, unfaithfulness, infidelity, and unfaith’. Dropping it into Google generates all kinds of synonyms: ‘treachery, duplicity, deceit, disloyalty, falsity, double-dealing, dishonesty’.  It has a 16th century origin, according to Google, perhaps why it sounds to me as though it belongs in another time. Kisito’s use of the word suggests, in my imagination, a relationship to time and a relationship to history. It made me think of the artist Kara Walker, who showed recently at the Camden Arts Centre, and how she stages her exhibitions via a language associated with other times and places – but now in the present. Her work speaks to the violence of race and histories of slavery. But these histories are not simply of the past. They live on in traumatic residues, and in contemporary forms of prejudice, violence and relations of power.

Time and history seem, to me, to be embedded in how Kisito staged this exhibition. Time and History are embedded in its title. When Kisito says STILL FIGHTING IGNORANCE AND INTELLECTUAL PERFIDY do I know what he means, historically speaking? I confess that at the time of writing I assumed that I knew what he meant. We both know that ‘Africa’ – which is far from homogeneous – is the site of innumerable contested narratives about what it is ‘it’ means. We refer to
 video art produced in a relationship to the African continent as African video art. Why is this? Do we refer to video art produced in relationship to Europe or North America as European or American. The same goes for how race is persistently deployed in relationship to artists whose history reaches back to the African continent. They are persistently described not simply as artists but as African-American artists or Black British artists or Black artists. Perhaps there will come a time when the continuous re-inscription of Africa’s exceptionality, and the related re-inscription of race, and racial categories forged out of de-humanising histories (even as they are still necessarily strategically mobilised) are no longer embedded within how it is artists and their work are viewed.

Kisito’s title produced emotion in me. It produced anger. It informs how I relate to the continent from which I come. It informs how I relate to race, prejudice, and violence. In South Africa this was, historically, stretched to its absolute limits. It still exists traumatically and concretely in the present. In the UK I see familiar narratives constellating around particular figures: the figure of the immigrant, the foreigner, and the figure of the black man.  On Friday I listened to a panel at Tate Britain, staged around John Akomfrah’s ‘The Unfinished Conversation’:  his three-screen exploration of the personal archive of Stuart Hall.  The conversation is unfinished not only in Hall’s sense of the ever-shifting identities and ethnicities always in a process ‘of becoming’. The work of figures such as Hall and indeed the work of those relegated to the category post-colonial is unfinished. The world is moving forward. New political challenges emerge: the relationship to advanced capitalism and technologies generate new struggles and again transform our relationship to the world. But many struggles look the same. The curator and scholar David Dibosa, who was in the audience, at the John Akomfrah event, referred to ‘political affect’. We are still fighting. We are still feeling. Although who the ‘we’ is, and how the fight takes place, and where, does not appear to be that certain. In the world I occupy the fight takes place through art, through writing, through scholarship, through finding ways to make that art, writing, scholarship legible and visible. As a curator Kisito is doing something important. He is provoking me (us) to ask questions, and he is enabling me (us) to think about a body of artists all of whom have relationships to multiple places, geographies, histories, languages, political conditions. It is not possible to think of the world in terms of fixity or homogeneity which is why current discourses on the immigrant and the foreigner are so peculiar. Historical colonialism, and related patterns of migration both to and from the continent; the resistance to colonialism; and the way in which it is imprinted on European-African relations (broadly speaking) changed everything. It and its aftermath and its legacy fundamentally shifted relationships to language, to thought, to economies, to social and political relations, to cultural practices, to identity-formation and so forth. It produced fights which are still going on today.

Kisito locates this exhibition in relation to a geography, and in relation to art objects that exist in relation to a continent. I thought I cannot speak on behalf of Kisito or the artists or anyone here tonight. One of the greatest lessons to be learnt from the texts and theoretical positions relegated to the category post-colonial is the question of who speaks, how one speaks and for whom. Great violence has been enacted in the process of speaking for an Other. Great violence is still enacted in the speaking for and on behalf of an Other. There is no greater trauma then the obliteration of the voices of human beings. This obliteration can happen, again as post-colonial texts have demonstrated, via language, via representation, via ephemeral, apparently innocuous gestures in everyday encounters. I thought I cannot speak on behalf of a vast, heterogeneous continent but I can speak from myself, from my own subjectivity, and my own relationship to three places: South Africa, the Indian Ocean and the United Kingdom. One of the most striking aspects of the post-colonial is the practice of writing from the self, the practice of writing about tangible, political and social experiences not as theoretical abstractions removed and detached from everyday life. No one who emerges out of apartheid South Africa can ever again close their eyes to race and violence. In South Africa the violence of self/other relations was stretched to its absolute limits. The trauma, historical and personal; social and political, cannot simply be swept under the carpet. After that migrating to London does not mean you escape race and prejudice. It is right here now as we speak.

And then I thought, why are we now in the 21st century speaking about fighting ignorance and intellectual betrayal while we are looking at video art made in relation to the African continent. Why? To quote from the text I wrote for Kisito: ‘Why is it that – in the wake of prolific work by twentieth century scholars, curators, artists, writers, and critics – we need to draw attention to the category African video art as if it is something unusual, idiosyncratic and unexpected?’. If we have indeed moved into a space after the post-colonial then why are having this conversation at all?

There is the dialogue staged by Kisito, by my text and by Marie Rodet’s text. Marie’s text draws attention to another fundamental issue the relationship of art and capital so powerfully staged by Isaac Julien’s multi-screen video installation PLAYTIME screened recently at Victoria Miro. But aside from these dialogues there are those generated by the artworks all of which have the capacity to make us think about things in ways that we may not have necessarily anticipated. What are the particular capacities of video art? Does the category African do necessary work right now, at this moment? It doesn’t matter to me where an artist is from. I am interested in art’s capacity to complicate theory, to make us aware of the assumptions we make. Art can test, question, scrutinise, and make us think. But art also functions in the more amorphous territories of affect, emotion, memory and this is it power. It makes us feel, and what happens when feeling enters politics?

References

Akomfrah, J. ‘Stuart Hall: The Unfinished Conversation’ at Tate Britain (26 October 2013 – 23 March 2014) http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/display/bp-spotlight-john-akomfrah-unfinished-conversation Last accessed 19 March 2014.

Hall, J. (Introduced by Clark, K). Hall’s Dictionary of Subjects & Symbols in Art. London: John Murray, 1974 (my edition is a 1992 reprint), p. 219.

Fanon, F. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967,  pp.9-10 and p. 134. Originally published in French under the title Peau Noire, Masques Blancs, Paris: Editions Du Seuil, 1952.

Smith, A. (ed.). Still Fighting Ignorance and Intellectual Perfidy: Video Art from Africa (Exhibition curated by Kisito Assangni: Exhibition Catalogue), London: Ben Uri Gallery, 2014, p.4.




Tuesday 11 March 2014

Beyond the Postcolonial: Video Art from Africa


Beyond the Postcolonial: Video Art from Africa.
By Marie Rodet
Lecturer in African History, Convenor MA Film and History, SOAS London

This set of video art from Africa offers to the spectator a crucial entry key into a new historical atmosphere, in which the cultural legacies of postcolonialism no longer seem to matter much. Indeed, while many African contemporary artists have been much concerned, in the past three decades, by responding to European modernity and cultural neocolonialism, this new generation of African video artists proposes a different stand deeply anchored in their intimate – sometimes violent – daily experiences of globalization and displacement. They are very much preoccupied with being within their time, sharing their own everyday life and their responses to constantly moving environments, more than responding to a (post)colonial past which appears henceforth far from their immediate concerns.

 

If the globalization process sometimes left us with the impression of dissolution of geographical territories or the disappearing of old landscapes of power, these video artists remind us that it was far from being a uniform process, that globalization has often affected the global South differently. In the same way as their predecessors experienced a hangover of the African independences, this new generation of African artists seems to have experienced a hangover of the false promises of a globalised cosmopolitan world in which boundaries of race, ethnicity, class or religion were no longer important. Despite the tremendous hopes sparked by the 1990s’ democratization process on the continent, many Africans continue to be confronted with economic and political distress on a daily basis.

 

The life of African artists is not the one of the Afropolitan that the Western world would like to believe. Their mobility is still constrained by the rules of the market and the increasing fears built in our Western fortresses. The videos convey these often-traumatic experiences of migration and exile, and dislocated identities in the face of the delusion of globalization. They are therefore powerful political denunciations of the fault lines of our systems and definitely offer alternative and more complex views of the world.

 


These videos certainly belong to the globalised world of incessant flows of materials, information, and images. But their intrinsic ubiquity, their simultaneous negotiation of multiple cultural systems and temporalities defy the structures of the contemporary art market which long ignored African art production and then started catching up in a clear attempt to control its internationalisation. Indeed, video art is a very astute arm of resistance against these market structures. It offers its own modes of production and reception. It can be easily transferred, downloaded. Not surprisingly, at the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London last year, there was a complete absence of video art. Video art from Africa do not need to be put on the market to be accessed and valued. They simply need a virtual platform to be visible, as the one in motion masterfully deployed by Kisito Assangni. As such, this exhibition materializes the internationalisation and democratization of arts and information networks of the past decade, but also denounces their fault lines. No one should wonder that the new generation of African artists increasingly favour the video medium to fight against ignorance and intellectual perfidy in the interconnected world that we all live in.

Thursday 20 February 2014

BEN URI GALLERY & MUSEUM, LONDON



13- 30 March 2014

BEN URI MUSEUM
108a Boundary road
London NW8 ORH
UK
www.benuri.org.uk

Including:
Said Afifi | Nirveda Alleck | Jude Anogwih | Younes Baba-Ali | Rehema Chachage | Saidou Dicko | Ndoye Douts | Kokou Ekouagou | Mohamed El Baz | Samba Fall | Dimitri Fagbohoun | Wanja Kimani | Nicene Kossentini | Kai Lossgott | Michele Magema | Nathalie Mba Bikoro | Victor Mutelekesha | Johan Thom | Saliou Traoré | Guy Woueté | Ezra Wube.

PV: Thursday 13 March > 6.30 - 8.30pm
Panel discussion: Monday 17 March > 6.30pm
with David Glasser (Chair, Ben Uri Gallery) | Yvette Greslé (South African Art critic and writer) | Dr Marie Rodet (Lecturer in African History, Soas London) | Kisito Assangni (Independent curator) moderated by curator Alix Smith.

Free admission!




Tuesday 28 January 2014

MARRAKECH BIENNALE, MOROCCO


26 February - 31 March 2014

MARRAKECH BIENNALE
Marrakech
MOROCCO
www.marrakechbiennale.com

Including
Said Afifi | Nirveda Alleck | Jude Anogwih | Younes Baba-Ali | Rehema Chachage | Saidou Dicko | Ndoye Douts | Kokou Ekouagou | Mohamed El Baz | Samba Fall | Dimitri Fagbohoun | Wanja Kimani | Nicene Kossentini | Kai Lossgott | Michele Magema | Nathalie Mba Bikoro | Victor Mutelekesha | Johan Thom | Saliou Traoré | Guy Woueté | Ezra Wube.

(c) Black brain, Dimitri Fagbohoun, 2011

Monday 6 May 2013

KUNSTHALLE SAO PAULO, SAO PAULO, BRAZIL



19 May 2013

KUNSTHALLE SAO PAULO
Rua Dos Pinheiros, 411
05422-010 SAO PAULO
BRAZIL
www.kunsthallesaopaulo.com

7pm

Including
Said Afifi | Nirveda Alleck | Jude Anogwih | Younes Baba-Ali | Rehema Chachage | Saidou Dicko | Ndoye Douts | Kokou Ekouagou | Mohamed El Baz | Samba Fall | Dimitri Fagbohoun | Wanja Kimani | Nicene Kossentini | Kai Lossgott | Michele Magema | Nathalie Mba Bikoro | Victor Mutelekesha | Johan Thom | Saliou Traoré | Guy Woueté | Ezra Wube

Thursday 28 March 2013

MOTORENHALLE CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART, DRESDEN, GERMANY



3 April 2013 

MOTORENHALLE
Wachsbleichstr 4a
01067 DRESDEN
GERMANY
www.motorenhalle.de

8 - 10pm

Including
Said Afifi | Nirveda Alleck | Jude Anogwih | Younes Baba-Ali | Rehema Chachage | Saidou Dicko | Ndoye Douts | Kokou Ekouagou | Mohamed El Baz | Samba Fall | Dimitri Fagbohoun | Wanja Kimani | Nicene Kossentini | Kai Lossgott | Michele Magema | Nathalie Mba Bikoro | Victor Mutelekesha | Johan Thom | Saliou Traoré | Guy Woueté | Ezra Wube

Wednesday 13 March 2013

VIDEOFORMES, CLERMONT-FERRAND, FRANCE



20 - 23 March 2013

28th edition of VIDEOFORMES
64 rue Lamartine
63000 Clermont-Ferrand
France
www.videoformes.com

Including
Said Afifi | Jude Anogwih | Rehema Chachage | Saidou Dicko | Kokou Ekouagou | Samba Fall | Dimitri Fagbohoun | Wanja Kimani | Nicene Kossentini | Michele Magema | Victor Mutelekesha | Johan Thom | Ezra Wube

Monday 25 February 2013

MALMO KONSTHALL, MALMO, SWEDEN



2 March - 7 April 2013 

MALMO KONSTHALL
C-Salen
S:t Johannesgatan 7
250 80 Malmo
Sweden
www.konsthall.malmo.se

Including
Said Afifi | Nirveda Alleck | Jude Anogwih | Younes Baba-Ali | Rehema Chachage | Saidou Dicko | Ndoye Douts | Kokou Ekouagou | Mohamed El Baz | Samba Fall | Dimitri Fagbohoun | Wanja Kimani | Nicene Kossentini | Kai Lossgott | Michele Magema | Nathalie Mba Bikoro | Victor Mutelekesha | Johan Thom | Saliou Traoré | Guy Woueté | Ezra Wube

Friday 25 January 2013

On African Video Art


                             Kwa Baba Rithi Undugu, Rehema Chachage

Catalogue introduction

Why is it that - in the wake of prolific work by twentieth century scholars, curators, artists, writers and critics - we need to draw attention to the category African video art as if it is something unusual, idiosyncratic and unexpected? Why are we still fighting ignorance and who is committing intellectual perfidy?  Or is this something we imagine we or ‘they’ are doing? And who is the ‘we’ or ‘they’? The questions remain impenetrable, but I only have to listen to the conversations around me to realise that voices both from within the African continent itself, and those speaking out of the so-called western world, continue to naturalise irrelevant ideas about Africa and ‘the west’. All aesthetic production emerges out of conditions of specificity; but specificity is not the monolith of Africa or the West. We inhabit a world that has already witnessed accelerated forms of globalisation, migration and travel (and the ubiquitous phenomenon of the travelling artist, curator, critic and scholar). We know we cannot feel secure in categories that suggest a natural order of things, but we continue to mobilise them. When we’re speaking about identity or any discursive category, it’s no longer enough to draw from the arsenal of strategic essentialism. Any form of essentialism functions merely to evade and inadvertently reinscribe freighted ways of seeing and being and runs the risk of being co-opted in ways that are, at the very least, precarious.  The idea of Africa as it encounters an idea of ‘the west’, is haunted by histories and lived experiences of race, gendered looking and a restless discourse of the other: it remains unclear whether these experiences, either mobilised or veiled, are ever really fully grasped.  In a present where much is at stake in human relations; and so much is contingent upon who looks, writes or speaks, what does it mean to produce art, curate exhibitions, and occupy spaces brought into being by art worlds that move and migrate?
We need to pay attention to how this exhibition is staged and reflect on the conditions that shape its circulation. Who will see the work, and how will this seeing take place? Who will perform the discussions it generates and what will these look like? Who will do the speaking and whose voices will be heard and why? It would be productive to pay close attention not to the category African video art, but to video art that exists in relation to particular conditions and modes of production.  Moving images inhabit spaces shaped by the sensate co-ordinates of movement, duration, pacing, colour, sound, or time. One of the most distinctive capacities of video art is its ability to occupy multiple temporalities simultaneously offering us more than one perspective at the same time. It continues to be arresting to re-visit these elements afresh, to consider the particular capacities of art objects that embody the idea of movement, and to reflect on the meanings produced by each individual work.

The works on the exhibition operate in a number of different ways: they play with the buried surfaces and sounds of digital technology; they deploy animation, performance, music, spoken word and visual layering. They explore the relations between image and text, and open up the possibilities of established genres such as portraiture. My looking recognises the affects and sensations of remembering and forgetting, and it registers the poetics we attach to urban environments, peripheral spaces and the places we inhabit in memory. The works exhibited here are inflected by the experience of migration, and they ask questions about what it means to inhabit multiple languages, geographies and states of being in the present. These are all the familiar territories of contemporary art practice and critical debate - no matter where you are situated in the world. But it is for us – viewer, artist, critic, curator, art historian - to figure out whether these works and the ways in which they are curated do something significant and specific, and whether we might begin to disintegrate the historical monoliths that obscure our vision.

Yvette Greslé
Arts Writer and PhD candidate, History of Art, University College London
http://yvettegresle.wordpress.com

Monday 3 December 2012

Wednesday 14 November 2012

MUSEO/CENTRO ARTE CONTEMPORANEA TICINO, SWITZERLAND


                                                               
Still Fighting Ignorance & Intellectual Perfidy

1 - 2 December 2012 

MUSEO/CENTRO ARTE CONTEMPORANEA TICINO
Via Tamaro 3
6500 Bellinzona
Switzerland
www.cacticino.net

Including
Jude Anogwih | Younes Baba-Ali | Saidou Dicko | Ndoye Douts | Kokou Ekouagou | Mohamed El Baz | Samba Fall | Nicene Kossentini | Kai Lossgott | Michele Magema | Nathalie Mba Bikoro | Johan Thom | Saliou Traore | Guy Wouete | Ezra Wube