Distant Relatives / Relative Distance

[Moira de Swardt]

The thinking behind the new exhibition at Johannesburg's Standard
Bank Gallery curated by Michael Stevenson is the conceptual link of
dialogue and exchange between six African artists who now live and
work in places other than Africa. These six artists are all
"citizens of the world" or "Afropolitans".

A full colour and fairly detailed catalogue is available at R100.

My overwhelming impression of the exhibition is not of "African art"
in any stylised sense, but rather the work of six artists,
Barthelemy Toguo, Odili Donald Odita, Owusu-Ankomah, Julie Mehretu,
Senam Okudzeto, Wangechi Mutu, who simply happen to be African in
origin. This is an important distinction, because the
patronisingly politically correct idea of promoting "African art"
conveys a sense that African art is somehow inferior and that it
needs special protection. This exhibition shows six fairly diverse
artists at work, but makes no effort to "be African" or, indeed not
to be African. The work just is.

There were two additional features which are obviously not covered
in the catalogue, one a performance art scene of a pile of bricks
with a "worker", dressed in construction worker's clothes, draped
over it. Another was a chalk drawing and oranges exhibition. One
was allowed to take the oranges home with one if one felt so
inclined. This is a good thing because the gallery is going to
smell peculiar by the end of the exhibition if there are still
oranges left there then.

Bathelemy Toguo was born in Cameroon in 1967 and lives and works in
Paris, France as well as in Bandjouri, Cameroon. One of his most
interesting works didn't make it into the catalogue, but it was a
series of four works entitled "The Accused", "The Judge", "The
Plaintiff" and, while I have forgotten the title of the last work, I
think it was "The Judgment". Most of his works involve incomplete,
amputated figures with inconclusive gestures in order that he does
not "restrict their potential to define beauty and life itself".

Odili Donald Odita was born in Enugu, Nigeria, in 1966 and he now
lives and works in New York and Philadelphia, USA. The catalogue
says of his work: "Odita has evolved a distinctive style of painting
that explores the subtleties of colour, shape and form by creating
fields of tilting and angular horizontal bars of flat and
contrasting colour." It then goes on to explain the imagery.

Owusu Ankomah was born in 1956 in Ghana and now lives and works in
Lilienthal, Germany. His works are bold black and white creations
using various symbols, with interspersed figures in motion,
magnificently textured. They work exceptionally well on a large
scale and I would assume that there is a ready market for them in
the corporate world. This is the artist whose work features on the
poster advertising the exhibition.

Julie Mehretu was born in 1970 in Addis Ababa to an Ethiopian father
and American mother of European descent, and is now based in New
York. She has only three works on display, prints, all very similar
in feel and texture, yet each one very rich in detail and form. The
catalogue describes them as ". encapsulate the frenetic and
fragmented energy of cities, buildings and structures through
layered mark-marking in patterns recalling explosive and centrifugal
forces." Of all the works on display I was most attracted by these
three prints.

Senam Okudzeto was born to an African American mother and a Ghanaian
father in Chicago but grew up in Ghana. She now lives and works in
London, Basel and Accra. Most of her works are small, but there were
some large scale works on display, amongst them large-scale nudes
which address sexuality and visibility. Some of the works are
fragmented body parts. Of her works I liked the miniatures the
best, but the fragmented body parts are actually more interesting
artistically and conceptually.

Wangechi Mutu was born in 1972 in Nairobi and raised in Kenya, spent
two years at a school in Wales and furthered her studies in thee
USA. Her medium was a video entitled "cutting" filmed somewhere on
the US/Mexico border.

The exhibition is on until 2 December, 2006.

[Peter H.M.Brooks]

Moira de Swardt wrote:
> This is an important distinction, because the
> patronisingly politically correct idea of promoting "African art"
> conveys a sense that African art is somehow inferior and that it
> needs special protection.
>

Yes, that's a good point. It would be as insulting to genuine artists as
Black Executive Enrichment and Ethnic Cleansing of the Workplace are
to genuinely able candidates.