FESTAD'AFRICA FESTIVAL 2008

Dell'Africa amiamo quella parte mitica, ancestrale, fanciulla che culliamo dentro di noi al ritmo del tam-tam di un tamburo, uno spazio dove si rifugia la nostra mente quando la realtà metropolitana diventa claustrofobica. Dell'Africa amiamo quella parte che crediamo di conoscere. Esiste però un'altra Africa poco conosciuta e valorizzata rispetto alla sua reale importanza estetica e artistica:
E' proprio da questo mondo in parte sconosciuto e portatore di grandi ricchezze, che nasce l'idea e il progetto del CRTscenaMadre: Festad'Africa Festival gemellato con i Festival di teatro Mindelact di Capo Verde e il FITHEB del Benin. (MORE)

MANGE CECI EST MON CORPS

Sundance Film Festival 2008
Tokyo Filmex 2007
Toronto Film Festival 2007
Film Festival Rotterdam 2008

un film de Michelange Quay

sortie nationale le 22 octobre 2008

Eat, for this is my body
A visceral, hypnotic trip that will take us to the spiritual core of the suffering of Haiti. Madame has come to feed the starving black masses and they have come to be fed. This hunger, this desire will bring Madame out into the real Haiti, where she will for the first time see and hear the land and its people, smell the reality of their suffering, the reality of her own body. She will at last touch, and be touched.
Mange, ceci est mon corps
Un voyage hypnotique et viscéral qui nous emmène au plus profond de la souffrance d'Haïti. Madame est venue pour nourrir les masses damnées et affamées de la terre et elles sont venues pour être nourries. Cette faim, ce désir, va emmener Madame au-delà de son isolement vers la réalité d'Haïti, où elle va pour la première fois voir et entendre cette terre et son peuple, sentir la réalité de leur misère, la vérité de son corps. Elle va, enfin, toucher et être touchée.

A film by Michelange Quay – 1st feature - with Sylvie Testud and Catherine Samie – 35mm – 100 minutes – French speaking - with the participation of CNC, Centre images, Fondation Groupama-Gan, Fonds Francophone de Production Audiovisuelle du Sud - Distribution France Shellac – International Sales Memento Films International – In coproduction with Union Films (Haïti) and Les Films à un dollar (France)

RANSOME STANLEY - Gallerie PETER HERRMANN

Ransome Stanley


With his panels, Ransome Stanley makes an original contribution to the art historical debate on the "picture within the picture." The observer is uncertain which spatial plane is being depicted: Are we peering at the little boy with the collar around his neck through an opening in the wall? Is the entire entity a picture hanging on the wall, or are we looking at the reflection of a real person looking into a mirror? As soon as the artist opens up a three-dimensional space that we can apparently enter, we are thrown back into the two-dimensional plane of the picture. Likewise with the drawing: It is impossible to know whether it is on the painted wall – that is, at the centre of a space represented within the picture – or whether it is simply an artist’s drawing on a canvas.

It is not easy to pinpoint Ransome Stanley’s style. His graphic linearity has its roots in early 20th century natural history books, while his equal virtuosity with airy gestural sweeps is reminiscent of the classic Modern. At the same time, he creates planar pictorial spaces whose stark narrative painting style he then disrupts by contrasting it with something two-dimensional.

For his collages, Stanley uses pictures from our collective cultural history. But in contrast to many other artists, he seeks iconographic references not just in all too well-known media images from film and advertising, but rather also in his own African roots. In his pieces, western images of Africa and certain colonially-shaped clichés of the exotic are cheekily presented and merged to form new image creations.

Stanley, who today lives in Munich, was born in 1953 in London, the son of a Nigerian journalist father and a German mother. From 1975 to 1979, he studied at the Merz Academy in Stuttgart and soon became "master student" under Professor Merz. He has presented in numerous exhibitions, most recently in Brussels as part of the large exhibition project, Black Paris – Black Brussels.


Gallerie PETER HERRMANN
6.9.2008 - 11.10.2008

METAMORPHOSIS SOKEY EDORH AT SKOTO GALLERY NYC

Sokey Edorh

Mixed media painting

September 4th – October 11th, 2008

Skoto Gallery

Skoto Gallery is pleased to present Metamorphosis, an exhibition of mixed media paintings by the Togolese-born artist Sokey Edorh. This will be his first solo exhibition in New York City and the reception is on Thursday, September 4th, 6-8pm.

Sokey Edorh’s mixed media paintings consistently balance the dual purposes of visually powerful imagery and intellectually critical analysis to make poignant commentaries on contemporary African social and political realities. His artistic production is constantly informed by the need to work through the implications of language, symbolic systems, and communicative abstraction. He uses an elaborately conceived symbolic alphabet system, invented by him and nurtured within the compass of history, both directly and allegorically throughout his work. The text, which he alone can decipher, draws inspiration from the ideograms that are found on the dwellings of the Dogon hunters in Mali, West Africa, and used in rapturous poetry that are addressed to the harvest gods as divine litany like that of the ancient Egyptians to their gods. To the artist, it is a fit metaphor for the liberation of oneself from dictatorial systems that forbid free expression.