ANGAZA AFRIKA - AFRICAN ART NOW

Oktober Gallery

The exhibition brings together major works by 12 artists who best represent the innovative and dynamic artistic practices across the African continent and the African diasporas and launches the book, Angaza Afrika – African Art Now - a highly visual survey of contemporary African art compiled by Christopher Spring, curator of the African Galleries at The British Museum, and published by Laurence King.

Angaza Afrika, translated from the Swahili to mean ‘Shed light on Africa’ or ‘Look around Africa’, is comprehensive in its range. Each work will be a stunning visual and physical manifestation of the artists’ energy and spirit, such as Rachid Koraïchi’s Sufi- inspired black and white appliqué work and the beautiful work of South African artist Karel Nel, who sets vast leaves from the Coco de Mer palms in atmospheric, elemental architectural spaces.

Other featured artists include Romuald Hazoumé, whose immense installation Dream (2007), consisting of a boat made from petrol canisters, placed in front of a panoramic photograph won the documenta 12 prize; El Anatsui, who with his magnificent cloths made from thousands of glimmering bottle tops was one of the highlights of the 52nd Venice Biennale and who will transform Channel 4’s 50ft logo, situated in front of their London Headquarters, with an installation in June 2008; Owusu-Ankomah, whose drawings were chosen by Giorgio Armani for his Emporio Armani (PRODUCT) RED capsule collection and Abdoulaye Konaté who has been shortlisted for the Artes Mundi 2008 Prize.

DUMDUM Virtual reality

"THE WINTER SHOW" AT AFRONOVA

The Winter Show' features a selection of works by African artists, including Dominique Zinkpe (Benin), Samson Mnisi (South Africa), Mouna Karray (Tunisia) and Mohamadou Ndoye Douts (Senegal).

AFRONOVA
Opens: July 18
Closes: September 6

RENCONTRES D'ARLES - SAMUEL FOSSO

"beau, chic délicat, facile à reconnaître lui aussi , Fregoli de l'autofiction, grave et ludique à la fois"
Christian Lacroix

VOUS SEREZ BEAU, CHIC, DELICAT ET FACILE À RECONNAÎTRE.

Comme dans toutes mes oeuvres, je suis à la fois le personnage et le metteur en scène. Je ne me mets pas moi-même dans les photographies. Mon travail est basé sur des situations spécifiques et des personnages qui me sont familiers, des choses que je désire, que j'élabore dans mon imagination et qu'ensuite j'enterprète.
J'emprunte une identité.
Pour y réussir, je me plonge dans l^état physiue et mental nécesssaire.
C'est une façon d'échapper à moi-même.
Un passage solitaire.
Je suis un homme solitaire.

Samuel Fosso

Né en 1962 à Kumba. Vit et travaille à Bangui (République Centrafricaine).

exposition organisée avec le soutien de Cultures France / Département Afrique et Caraïbes en création, dans le cadre de la diffusion des 7e Rencontres africaines de la photographie de Bamako, la Jean Marc Patras - galerie, Paris représentant exclusif de Samuel Fosse et lePrince Claus Fund for Culture and Development, Pays-Bas.

les rencontres d'Arles

WORLD PRESS CARTOON

The silent wave
Alfredo Sabat

Winner, First Prize, Editorial Cartoon section, World Press Cartoon,
Winner, First Prize, United Nations Correspondents Association “Ranan Lurie” Award,

ROMUALD HAZOUME - Uncomfortable Truths – the shadow of slave trading on contemporary art & design

Uncomfortable Truths will address the ways in which the legacy of slavery informs contemporary art and design in a display of a series of works throughout the museum’s public spaces. This exhibition of new and specially commissioned work will commemorate the bicentenary of the Parliamentary abolition of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, seeking to reassess the human cost of slavery.

'DAN AYIDO-HUEDO, RAINBOW SERPENT' ROMUALD HAZOUMÉ, V&A LONDON

(photo©Artist)

LE MUSEE NATIONAL DU MALI

L'histoire du Musée National du Mali remonte à l'époque coloniale. Elle est intimement liée à celle de l'Institut Français d'Afrique Noire (IFAN), crée en 1936, à Dakar, avec vocation de développer la recherche dans les territoires colonisés. La création, en 1951, d'une section locale de l'IFAN au Soudan est à l'origine du Musée que l'on appelait alors musée soudainais de l'IFAN. Construit en « banco stabilisé » et inauguré en 1982, le bâtiment actuel du musée est inspiré des formes de l'architecture traditionnnelle. D'un côté les salles d'exposition, de l'autre, les services administratifs et techniques.

Le désert du Sahara ressemble à un terrain vague inquiétant depuis le découpage fantaisiste de ses frontières. 

D'une rive à l'autre de cet océan de sable, des hommes scrutent les étoiles à la recherche de leur pacte de mémoire égaré par une aventure coloniale fossoyeuse d'histoires. 

D'une rive à l'autre, des tornades sèches véhiculent l'esprit des peuples riverains qui bâtissaient ensemble des royaumes et des empires avec la matrice du désert. 

D'une rive à l'autre, une communauté, par devoir, a retrouvé sous les dunes un serment profané par des ladres drapés dans les oripeaux du Juste. 

D'une rive à l'autre, une communauté exhume la promesse d'éternité des réseaux d'échanges et des chemins de vie.

D'une rive à l'autre, des compagnons raniment la profession de foi des convoyeurs du désert qui charriaient l'or et le sel, les cultures et les technologies, la connaissance et le savoir, le spirituel et le religieux, l'amitié et l'amour. 

D'une rive à l'autre, les vents de sable dispersent des murmures de désir. Des compagnons tenaces empruntent les sillons de lumière. Du Nord au Sud ils se font face, complices. Ce sont tous des artistes.

Croire en cette communauté d'artistes qui affronte ses démons et autopsie son histoire, c'est croire que le salut d'une société s'appuie aussi sur l'art.

N'Gone Fall

Contact Zone

Musée National du Mali

AFRICAN ARTISTS LURE COLLECTORS, FAIL TO MAKE AUCTIONS

(Bloomberg) -- Africa is the best-kept secret in the contemporary-art market, dealers say.

Works by the artists El Anatsui and Romuald Hazoume have sold to U.S. and European museums and private collectors for as much as $450,000 at the October Gallery, London, and the Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. At auction, neither artist has fetched more than $10,000, according to Artnet, which tracks salesroom results.

``African art is still mainly a gallery-based market,'' said Elisabeth Lalouschek, artistic director of the October Gallery. ``It has yet to become part of the international auction scene.''

Works by a dozen of the continent's leading contemporary artists are on show at the gallery to coincide with publication of ``Angaza Afrika: African Art Now,'' by Chris Spring, curator of the British Museum's African galleries.

El Anatsui, a Ghanaian sculptor whose hangings made out of thousands of flattened metal bottle tops were lauded by critics at last year's Venice Biennale, is represented by a new 12 foot-wide ``cloth'' -- as his works are known -- reserved at $300,000, Lalouschek said.

The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, and the Pompidou Center, Paris, are among the museums that have bought El Anatsui cloths, according to Spring.

``I have quite a long waiting list of buyers,'' Lalouschek said. ``I get e-mailed requests every day.''

Three photographs of motorbike-riding gas-smugglers, issued in an edition of six, by Benin-based Hazoume, are priced at 3,000 pounds ($5,900) each. In 2006, the British Museum paid the October Gallery 100,000 pounds for Hazoume's slave ship installation, ``La Bouche du Roi,'' made using more than 300 black plastic gas cans, according to an annual report published in 2007 by the Art Fund.

`Big Stuff'

``It's big stuff for the right names,'' said Giles Peppiatt, director of African art at the London-based auction house Bonhams. ``But trying to develop the auction market for African contemporary art is hard work.'' Gallery prices don't automatically translate into high prices at auction, he said.

``There isn't a large enough stable of good artists, and there just isn't enough money in Africa at the moment,'' he said.

Africa has just four billionaires, according to Forbes Magazine's 2008 Rich List.

In January, the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York's Chelsea held a sell-out show of 13 bottle-top cloths by El Anatsui, priced at $125,000 to $450,000, said Claude Simard, co-owner of the gallery.

``Nobody's putting major works by El Anatsui up for auction,'' Simard said. ``It's not like the market for Indian or Chinese art. Collectors buy these works because they love them, not as an investment.''

Jumbo Work

El Anatsui will produce a new cloth for Shainman, measuring up to 30 foot wide, that will be exhibited at the Art Basel fair, previewing on June 3, he said.

``The market will develop eventually,'' Jean Pigozzi, the world's leading collector of African contemporary art, said in a telephone interview. ``But it really has to come from local collectors, or if rich African Americans start to buy this material, it could also become big.''

Pigozzi, who lives in Switzerland, said he has amassed more than 10,000 works of African contemporary art over 20 years.

``Africa is the last place the auction houses haven't got their teeth into,'' said the London-based dealer John Martin, director of the Gulf Art Fair, in a telephone interview. ``The galleries don't want to release works by the top internationally established names to the salerooms, and the people who buy these works don't need to be reassured by high auction prices.''

(Scott Reyburn writes about the art market for Bloomberg News. Any opinions expressed are his own.)

“Multiple Entries-Africa and Beyond 2001-2008”

By Rosa Maria Falvo

“…And the waters rolled on,
and what was old was new, and what was new never came to stay,
but to skim the gates of change,
forever new, forever old and new:
Once-upon-a time,
Never the same, Always at last the same…”
[Kwesi Brew, Ghanaian poet]

As this poem evokes the activities of all living beings and of all phenomena, celebrating the continuity of life throughout the past, present and future, so too does Virginia Ryan’s work, inspired by a kind of “transcultural” reflection, recall the tide of change and transformation. It captures an old world and reinvents a new one suspended between reality and illusion, as it builds on a series of experimental possibilities and projections. This exhibition represents a response to the “local life-force” of the west coast of Africa, a place of slavery and gold, which has become a focal point for transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary, linking the organic with the inorganic, and fusing borderlines of land and sea, history and culture. (more....)

WORLD PRESS CARTOON

Imigração ilegal e a UE

Cristina Sampaio - Portugal

LA BOUCHE DU ROI - ROMUALD HAZOUME AT BRITISH MUSEUM

La Bouche du Roi: an artwork by Romuald Hazoumé was created between 1997 and 2005 by Romuald Hazoumé, an artist from the Republic of Benin, West Africa. Literally translated as ‘The Mouth of the King’, the title refers to a place in Bénin from where many thousands of slaves were transported to the Americas and the Caribbean.

However, La Bouche du Roi is primarily a warning against all kinds of human greed, exploitation and enslavement, both historical and contemporary. A profound and thought-provoking artistic statement by artist Romuald Hazoumé, it is made from a combination of materials, including petrol cans, spices, and audio and visual elements, the artwork’s arrangement recalls the famous 18th-century print of the slave ship, the Brookes, which was used to great effect by Abolitionists.

A recitation of Yoruba, Mahi and Wémé names, the terrible sounds and smells of a slave ship, and a video of black market petrol-runners in modern Benin are other elements which combine to make La Bouche du Roi a truly remarkable and thought-provoking work of art in which the connections between past, present and future are made profoundly real.

Horniman Museum
5 December 2008 – 1 March 2009

LA BOUCHE DU ROI Exhibit (Quick Time)

REPORTERS SANS FRONTIERES - POUR LA LIBERTE DE LA PRESSE

LA LIBERTE DE LA PRESSE AU QUOTIDIEN

ZWELETHU MHETHWA

by Ashraf Jamal

Modus operandi:

It is the interface between the lived world and "image-making" that drives Zwelethu Mthethwa. This he achieves through photography and pastel drawing. In both mediums it is the empirical - the re-presentation of an actual event or scene - that is key. This doesn't make Mthethwa a realist however. The framing of the work is self-aware, poised, keenly attuned to the dictates of the pictorial. Hence "image-maker". For Mthethwa "traditional documentary photography treats people as subjects not as human beings". Which is why the artist's work never merely records. Rather, each element in a work is imbued with an aura, a quality that transfigures and ennobles the seen.

Artist's statement:

"I always say that the word 'artist' is not an appropriate word. Art refers to the author, to ownership, it puts you above culture. I would like to be seen as an image-maker. Art is never about one's experiences in a vacuum, but about life at large ... In South Africa we don't really have an audience that is educated in the arts. I'm trying to pull in that audience ... In my photography and pastels I try to restore respect and dignity. People present themselves in the way they want to be seen."

SELLING CIGARETTES TO NIGERIA'S CHILDREN

This is a disturbing story about British American Tobacco (BAT) and its marketing strategy on the African continent.

According to the BBC, BAT discovered that it can attract more young African buyers of its product by adjusting marketing strategy to meet their (young people's) needs. Now, there is nothing wrong with marketing one's product to target an audience of possible consumers. However, in this case, BAT allegedly targeted Nigerian and other African children as young as 11 by aggressively marketing single 'cancer sticks' to them. The company also hosted events that targeted young people despite their publicly stated commitments to the contrary. One individual even went as far as describing BAT as "the unacceptable face of British Business". . These acts by BAT are simply unconscionable and are illegal in the West, but somehow, cigarette producers manage to get away with them on the African continent.
The serious health consequences of BAT's actions are already being felt on the continent but it seems the worst is yet to come. In fact,
"[t]he World Health Organization (WHO) predicts that the number of smoking-related deaths in Africa is 100,000 a year, but that that figure is set to double in the next 20 years."
In 2007, Nigeria became the first African country to sue major cigarette manufacturers for the health problems created by their products. This was because of the growing burden of cigarette related health costs on the nation's struggling health sector. In 2006, Lagos State recorded more than nine thousand cases of tobacco-related diseases at its hospitals. The state spent over N2.7 billion treating these cases over the course of just one year. Considering this information, it is no surprise that Lagos State, and the Federal Government of Nigeria, seeks compensation. One of the tobacco companies being sued is none other than BAT.
This new information about BAT's tactics will only provide useful evidence to Nigeria's legal team. Hopefully, health administrators across the continent will also use this knowledge to create effective programs limiting the number of new cigarette smokers in their respective countries. Nigeria, and Africa in general, does not have the luxury of not stamping out cigarettes from our society. We have enough issues to deal with. Being a market for cigarette products, the resulting addiction, cancer and other related problems is not something we need to put on our plate at this point in time.

Nigerian curiosity

THEMBINKOSI GONIWE

Thembinkosi Goniwe
By Sue Williamson

'Ritual', the body of work currently being presented by Thembinkosi Goniwe at the AVA bears all the marks of work prepared for a Masters Degree at the Michaelis School of Fine Art. First of all, there is the subject matter, in which the student generally attacks an aspect of the construction of identity or gender or discrimination, a subject which will always require a number of historical and cultural references. One pictures the student hard at work in the university library researching the subject. Then, there is the student's progress through his or her chosen subject - the earlier work often seeming strained as the student grapples to make the necessary point and get going. In this phase, one can often detect signs of too-direct influences absorbed from lecturers. Then sometimes, as is evident in Goniwe's presentation, near the end there is a breakthrough, light at the end of the tunnel. The student shakes free of the restrictive earlier work and makes it clear that an artist is indeed emerging.

Goniwe's subject is Ulwaluko, the Xhosa male initiation rite in South Africa, in which a youth must be ritually circumscribed and instructed in the ways of manhood in order to be received and perceived as a man. It is a ceremony which, deeply as it is inscribed in the culture, is increasingly being questioned by those who must undergo it. As this is being written, Goniwe is in Philadelphia, preparing to deliver a paper on December 4 on the subject at a conference entitled Art in Service of Constructing Masculinity: Male Initiation in Africa. Part of Goniwe's presentation will be a video in which the artist reenacts the ritual of having the foreskin cut away from the penis, and strong will be the stomachs of the American audience if viewers do not wish to run from their seats rather than witness this moment. The video continues to show the initiate, smeared in the traditional white clay, stretching out his hands to shield his face, gazing in a small mirror, hestitantly undergoing the self doubts and fears which attend this period. It is a powerful re-enactment. Goniwe's video is not on exhibition at the AVA. Instead, blow ups of video stills impressively fill one wall in a strong display which I have little doubt will find its way on to one international exhibition or another within the next year.

On another wall at the AVA are a series of blowups of mock magazine covers, in which the initiate plays cover boy. While these seem to draw too heavily on another African artist, Ike¢ Ude¢'s Cover Girl 1994-5 series, they are nonetheless attractive pieces, well in the contemporary art mode.

Goniwe has undergone his artistic Ulwaluko. So far, so good. It will be interesting to see how he develops.

The show closes November 27

AVA, 35 Church Street
Ph: (021) 424-4348
Fax: (021) 423-2037
E-mail: avaart@iafrica.com
Website: http://www.ava.co.za)
Gallery hours: Mon - Fri, 10am - 5pm, Sat 10am - 12pm