Nigerians in the US Press --- Olu Oguibe
Ekenlor Idi
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
SECTION: Section E; Part 2; Page 34; Column 4; Leisure/Weekend Desk
LENGTH: 318 words
HEADLINE: ART IN REVIEW;
'Insertion'
BYLINE: By HOLLAND COTTER
BODY:
'Self and Other'
Apex Art Curatorial Program
291 Church Street
TriBeCa
Through tomorrow
Organized by the Cornell University art historian Salah Hassan, this
sharp little exhibition brings together four internationally minded
artists of African birth or heritage, each of whom offers a
first-person take on what being African means.
Zineb Sedira, London-based and of Algerian descent, photographs
herself looking wraithlike in a white Muslim robe and veil against a
white ground. She also brings an aggressive edge to the idea of
self-obliteration in a short video, "Don't Do to Her What You Did to
Me," in which a woman's passport photo is stirred in a beaker of
water until it dissolves.
Berni Searle of South Africa, whose background is African and
European, photographs parts of her body smeared with brightly colored
spices, as if to claim a heritage and suggest ideas of exoticism and
consumption that the term "colored" implies. Hassan Musa, from Sudan
and now living in France, uses a bit of art-historical surgery to
graft the head of the Mona Lisa onto the female torso of Courbet's
"Origin of the World," producing an effect of monstrousness often
attributed in the West to African art.
Division and wholeness are the themes of a piece by Olu Oguibe --
artist, poet and editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art
--
who was born in Nigeria and now lives in the United States. His
austere, shrinelike installation consists of enlarged prints of his
own childhood portrait, but shown in duplicate as if depicting
identical twins, one of whom in this case is a surrogate for the
artist's dead brother. Such commemorative practice has roots in
Yoruba tradition, as a way of keeping the past intact.. In this
instance it also hints at the kind of divided but mirrored self-image
that living between cultures, as all these artists do, can create.
HOLLAND COTTER
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: May 19, 2000
Document 39 of 46.
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"We are accustomed to live in hopes of good weather, a good harvest, a
nice love affair, hopes of becoming rich or getting the office of chief of
police, but I have never noticed anyone hoping to get wiser...."
........... Anton Chekhov.
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