STILL FIGHTING IGNORANCE AND INTELLECTUAL PERFIDY
VIDEO ART FROM AFRICA curated by Kisito Assangni
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STILL FIGHTING IGNORANCE AND INTELLECTUAL PERFIDY
VIDEO ART FROM AFRICA curated by Kisito Assangni
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Curated By Kisito Assangni © Copyright Ben Uri 2014 Edited by Alix Smith Ben Uri 108a Boundary Road off Abbey Road London NW8 0RH www.benuri.org.uk Ben Uri Gallery and Museum Limited Registered Museum 973 Registered Charity 280389 Registered Company in England 1488690
Designed by Alan Slingsby editionpublishing.co.uk
All rights reserved. Any copy of this book issued by the publisher as a paperback is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including these words being imposed on a subsequent purchaser.
Detail illustrations Front cover: Interiority-Fresco IV Michele Magema Back cover: Kwa Baba Rithi Undugu Rehema Chachage
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. British Library cataloguing-inpublication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-0-900157-46-2
We thank Manya Igel of Manya Igel Fine Arts for her Preferred Partnership which allows Free Entry to all our exhibitions in 2014
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Said Afifi (Morocco)
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Nirveda Alleck (Mauritius)
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Nicene Kossentini (Tunisia)
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Jude Anogwih (Nigeria)
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Kai Lossgott (South Africa)
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Younes Baba-Ali (Morocco)
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Michele Magema (D. Congo)
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Rehema Chachage (Tanzania)
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Nathalie Mba Bikoro (Gabon)
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Saidou Dicko (Burkina Faso)
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Victor Mutelekesha (Zambia)
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Ndoye Douts (Senegal)
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Kokou Ekouagou (Togo)
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Saliou Traoré (Burkina Faso)
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Mohamed El Baz (Morocco)
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Guy Woueté (Cameroon)
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Dimitri Fagbohoun (Benin)
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28
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Metamorphosis Of The Linguist #2 Perfect Match STOP!
Call for Prayer – Morse
Kwa Baba Rithi Undugu Le Petit Berger
Train Train Medina Taller Man
FUCK THE DEATH Black Brain
Wanja Kimani (Kenya)
Buttons Myopia
Read these roads
Interiority-Fresco IV Hide & Seek
Shadow Of My Shadow
Johan Thom (South Africa)
The Illumination Traffic mum
Le dilemme divin
Ezra Wube (Ethiopia)
Gela 2
Samba Fall (Senegal)
Oil man
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Art, identity and migration Ben Uri is very proud to present ‘Still Fighting Ignorance and Intellectual Perfidy’ this March 2014. The exhibition was first brought to our attention when curator Kisito Assangni approached the museum to share his work and discuss a potential collaboration. We immediately recognised the strength of both the artistic merit and social message of the project. Through his presentation of this series of short and engaging films, Kisito Assangni confronts some of the stereotypes that are still too often associated with African Art and its presentation in ‘the West’. This exhibition demonstrates how contemporary African artists are utilising and negotiating digital practices and exploring the medium of video art in their work. The use of video art as a medium is key to the project’s message. However, it is also the content of the films that also resonate greatly with the work of Ben Uri. As a museum that explores the three key themes of Art, Identity and Migration, Ben Uri is committed to supporting the work of artists who are exploring notions of identity, cultural heritage, and displacement.
We operate in a world where large communities of people continue to experience forced migration and exile from their countries of birth. Ben Uri welcomes the opportunity to work with Kisito Assangni to exhibit this important show in London and would like to thank him and all of the 21 exhibiting artists involved. Thank you to 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 and Ezra Wube. We also thank Yvette Greslé, Arts Writer and PhD candidate, History of Art, University College London and Marie Rodet, Lecturer in African History and Convenor Film and History at The School of Oriental and African Studies, for their contribution to this catalogue and our Talking Art discussion event. David Glasser CEO and Chairman Alix Smith Learning Programmes Manager Ben Uri
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CURATORIAL STATEMENT
Beyond the clichés Project [SFIP] is a multi-national exhibition process and a platform for critical thinking, researching and presenting African video art. This exhibition presents a selection of African video art that stands beyond the clichés that remain associated with the dark continent and the postcolonial image. It seeks to bring viewers closer to idiosyncratic readings of African video art and its thematic concerns which are largely ignored. ‘Still Fighting Ignorance & Intellectual Perfidy’ contextualises African video art within a larger cultural framework. Reflecting an age of inter-cultural migration, [SFIP] presents African video artists who live in Africa, Europe and USA whilst providing a meeting point
for knowledge and interest in the relationship between self and society. Most works address issues of alterity, identity, tolerance and social relationships as artists reflexively consider their sense of place and belonging in an increasingly interconnected world. From experimental video to short film, this show focuses on aesthetic and methodological perspectives of fighting ignorance and intellectual perfidy in contemporary African art. The project tells Africa’s story by African new media artists as seen through the lens of the relation between tradition and modernity. Kisito Assangni Curator
Kisito Assangni is a Togolese-French curator and producer who studied photography, art history and museology. Currently living between London, Paris and Lomé, his practice primarily focuses on psycho-geography and post-globalisation impact on contemporary African cultures. His projects have been shown internationally, including the Whitechapel Gallery, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Arnot Art Museum, New York; Torrance Art Museum, California; Musée des Arts Derniers, Paris; Malmo Konsthall, Malmo, Sweden; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; National Centre for Contemporary Arts, Moscow; Pori Art Museum, Pori, Finland; Motorenhalle Centre for Contemporary Art, Dresden, Germany; among others. Kisito has participated in symposia, talks and events at numerous international venues. He was also a member of the jury for the Award Letters From The Sky in Cape Town (South Africa) as well as the 28th Prix Videoformes in Clermont-Ferrand (France). Kisito is the founder/curator of Time is Love Screening – international video art program and [SFIP] project.
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Why are we still fighting ignorance? 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,
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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.
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
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 Still Fighting Ignorance & Intellectual Perfidy — Video Art From Africa 5
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Beyond the Postcolonial: Video Art from Africa 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,
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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.
medium to fight against ignorance and intellectual perfidy in the interconnected world that we all live in. Marie Rodet Lecturer in African History and Convenor Film and History at The School of Oriental and African Studies
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 does not need to be put on the market to be accessed and valued. It simply needs 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
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Metamorphosis Of The Linguist #2 4:58, 2010 Referring to the German philosopher Nietzsche’s Human All Too ❝ Human, the film talks about the place of imagination according to our conception of reality especially in North Africa
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Said Afifi (Morocco) Said Afifi lives and works in Tetouan. Winner of the Institut National des BeauxArts in Tetouan in 2008, and the Canadian School Cégep de Matane specialty “digital production” in 2010. His work moves freely between multiple mediums: interactive installations, photography or video . He aspires to explore the possibilities offered by new technologies. The question of the paradox is central to his artistic approach. Something that led him to attempt to decipher the world from his own world without the influence of others to be banned. Said has participated in national and international exhibitions. Born and lives in Morocco. http://said-afifi.blogspot.com
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Perfect Match 6:32, 2006 Perfect Match attempts mostly to render certain intrinsic feelings into real ❝ situations, whereby the personal and the public are fused into one whole
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Nirveda Alleck (Mauritius) Nirveda Alleck is a contemporary artist living and practising in Mauritius. Her work is usually a combination of personal history fused with a more extended view of the world space in which we live and the psychological and sometimes romantic notions of existence and spaces of time. Taking usually a “felt” moment as a starting point, she attempts mostly to render certain intrinsic feelings into real situations, whereby the personal and the public are fused into one whole. Alleck works with a range of medium: Painting, Installations, Video and Sound, and lately she has been involved in the implementation of a major public art project in Mauritius. Alleck has exhibited at Times Square Gallery, New York; Tramway, Glasgow; Dakar Biennale; Temporary Art Centre, Quebec; AVA Gallery, Cape Town (South Africa) … Born and lives in Mauritius. www.nirvedaalleck.com
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STOP! 2:04, 2009
❝ The video simply interrogates the concept of identity, mobility and migration 12
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Jude Anogwih (Nigeria) Jude Anogwih is a multimedia artist and Co-curator of Identity: An Imagined State, living and working in Lagos, Nigeria. His work has been featured in several international art exhibitions and projects such as the Festival International d’Art Video de Casablanca, Morocco; Festival Miden, Kalamata, Greece; SMBA, Amsterdam; Old News #6 Malmo, Lagos, Copenhagen, New York; Geo-graphics, Brussels; COLOGNEOFF VII, Madrid; Orbitas, Houston, USA. Recent curatorial projects include The Green Summary at Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos; Contested Terrains at Tate Modern, London and CCA – Lagos with curator Kerryn Greenberg (Tate Modern). He is a founding member of Video Art Network, Lagos. Born and lives in Nigeria. www.vanlagos.org
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Call for Prayer – Morse 3:06, 2011 Call for Prayer – Morse is a sound installation consisting of a loudspeaker ❝ broadcasting the Muslim call to prayer in Morse code at prayer times corresponding to the city of exposure. This project is marked by the reflection on a form of temporal de-contextualisation between Arab and Western Culture
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Younes Baba-Ali (Morocco) Younes Baba-Ali is a multi-disciplinary artist holding a masters degree in Fine Art from the Ecole Supérieure d’Art, Aix-en-Provence, France. Sound material and its conditioning are central elements of his artistic work. Younes has had shows at Bozar Museum, Brussels; Kunsthalle, Mulhouse, France; Haus fur elektronische kunste, Basel, Switzerland; Sabrina Amrani Gallery, Madrid. Born in Morocco, lives in Belgium. www.younesbabaali.com
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Kwa Baba Rithi Undugu 1:23, 2010 Kwa Baba Rithi Undugu explores the themes of ‘voice’ and ‘voicelessness’. ❝ Sculpturally made transistor radios containing audio/visual data that has been particularly chosen, and intentionally interfered with as a result leaving the viewers with two choices; to either ignore the content of the work, that they may perhaps not even understand or relate to (which seems to often be the fate for the voiceless individual), or to try to listen and engage with what is being said by this voice that speaks from a place of ‘difference’
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Rehema Chachage (Tanzania) Rehema Chachage is a Mixed Media artist – working mostly in video and sculptural installations as well as performance-based in Dar Es Salaam. She graduated in 2009 from Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town where she received a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art degree. The themes explored in her work are very much determined by her situatedness, but the most prominent ones are “rootedness” and “identity” – being a stranger, the outsider, the other, alien and often voiceless-most of which have been inspired by the social alienation that she experienced in the four years she spent as a cultural “foreigner” and a non South African, black female student in a predominantly white middle class oriented institution. She was one of the selected 42 African artists to participate in this year’s Dakar Biennale, this after a stint as a resident artist at Akiyoshidai International Art Village in Japan and the Nordic Artists’ Centre Dale in Norway. Born and lives in Tanzania.
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Le Petit Berger 5:14, 2011 The animation translates the social reality into subtle images which are ❝ beyond denouncing the cruel conditions of living in the Sahel countries. Also a poetic homage to one of the most precious resources in the world
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Saidou Dicko (Burkina Faso) Saidou Dicko is a self-taught artist working with video, photography and painting. He exhibits and screens his work extensively in an international context, including the Design Museum, London; Foto Museum, Antwerp (Belgium); Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama (Japan); Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon; Fondation Blachere, Apt (France); Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg (South Africa). Born in Burkina Faso, lives in France.
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Train Train Medina 7:02, 2001
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Ndoye Douts (Senegal) Ndoye Douts graduated from the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Dakar. While painting is his favourite mode of expression, Douts also works in film and in sculpture. His works have been shown internationally at such institutions as Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum Kunst Palast, Dusseldorf (Germany); Bekris Gallery, San Francisco; IFAN Museum, Dakar. Born in Senegal, lives in France. www.ndoyedouts.com
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Taller Man 2:20, 2011
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Kokou Ekouagou (Togo) Kokou Ekouagou attended the University of Lomé, Togo. His video narratives and installations are propelled by a desire to reflect on the classifications and constructs of everyday reality. His videos were showcased at Centro d’Arte Contemporanea Ticino, Bellinzonna (Switzerland); Hexagon Space, Baltimore (USA); Galerie Lucrece, Paris; Savvy Contemporary, Berlin; Raffles Institute, Shanghai. Born and lives in Togo. www.kokouekouagou.blogspot.com
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FUCK THE DEATH 11:10, 2011 This piece deconstructs the reality built by the media ❝ before transforming it to better understand it
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Mohamed El Baz (Morocco) Mohamed El Baz explores the notions of borders and territories in his work, especially those that would raise barriers between individuals. El Baz plays upon three themes in his work: the everyday, the autobiographical and the playful. The work itself is nomadic and transforms itself according to the context. His works have been shown at the Moderna Musset, Stockholm; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Johannesburg Art Gallery, South Africa; Hayward Gallery, London. Born in Morocco, lives in France.
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Black Brain 4:02, 2010 Brain deals with the misuse of the natural resources that belong ❝ toBlack all of humanity. It questions the unequal economic relationship between North and South, as well as the market for raw materials
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Dimitri Fagbohoun (Benin) Dimitri Fagbohoun makes installations, photos, media art and films. By applying abstraction, Fagbohoun seduces the viewer into a world of ongoing equilibrium and the interval that articulates the stream of daily events. Moments are depicted that only exist to punctuate the human drama in order to clarify our existence and to find poetic meaning in everyday life. His works have been displayed at Mac/Val Museum, Paris; Treignac Projet, Treignac (France); Vus d’Afrique Festival, Montreal; Bamako Biennale, Mali; Festival Panafricain d’Alger, Algeria. Born in Benin, lives in France. www.arts-works.com
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Oil man 1:00, 2008 Man examines our consumerist behaviour and the entailing consequences ❝ forOil our neighbours and for the planet. In an almost playful way, which evokes the aesthetics of video consoles or computer games, Samba Fall outlines a terrifying world of consumers of all races and societies 28 Still Fighting Ignorance & Intellectual Perfidy — Video Art From Africa
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Samba Fall (Senegal) Samba Fall studied fine arts and animation in Senegal as well as in Norway. He uses the creative freedom provided by digital animation in order to examine and reflect upon human behaviour. Fall has shown his work at the Design Museum, London; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (Finland); Arad Art Museum, Arad (Romania); Pol’s Potten Gallery, Amsterdam; Dakar Biennial, Senegal. Born in Senegal, lives in Austria. www.sfall.com
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Buttons 2:03, 2010 The film weaves a story which comments on the idea of ❝ home and displacement, memories and imaginations
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Wanja Kimani (Kenya) Wanja Kimani is a visual and performance artist and writer based in Addis Ababa. Her current visual practice weaves stories and visual histories, which comment on the idea of home and displacement, memories and imaginations. She is currently developing two series of works entitled, Objects of Memory and Utopia, which explore and reflect upon the fragility of memory and imagination. Her work functions as a medium by which the artist and participants are able to understand the past and locate the present. She imposes elements of her own life into public spaces, creating a personal narrative where she is both author and character. Her work is trans-medial encompassing performance, installation, film, sound and text. She has presented lectures on art and politics at cultural and educational institutions including University of Cambridge, UK; Uppsala University, Sweden and at the British Council, Ethiopia. Her work has been featured in international exhibitions in Europe, Africa and Asia. In 2012, she took part in Dak’Art – Biennial of Contemporary African Art, Dakar, Senegal and at the 4th Short Video Biennial at the P74 Centre and Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia. Born and lives in Kenya. http://wanjakimani.weebly.com
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Myopia 3:13, 2008 This experimental film explores the confusion and disorder of ❝ identity by juxtaposing opposing dualities with origin in the theme of religion, generations or culture and heritage
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Nicene Kossentini (Tunisia) Nicene Kossentini is a photographer and filmmaker living in Tunis. Graduated from the Institut Supérieur des Beaux-Arts in Tunis and the Université Marc Bloch in Strasbourg, she attended the Studio National des Arts Contemporains Le Fresnoy and Gobelins l’ecole de l’image in France. Mindful for her heritage and past, Kossentini seeks to uncover the lost relationships and buried truths of her culture and origins. Her work has been presented at various venues across the world: Musée du Quai Branly, Paris; Museum of Tunis Kheireddine Palace, Tunis; Kunstnernes Haus, Oslo; CAN, Neuchâtel (Switzerland); Selma Feriani Gallery, London. Born and lives in Tunisia. www.nicenekossentini.com
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Read these roads 3:58, 2010 Read these roads investigates the inner workings of the ❝ human body and the personal element in green politics
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Kai Lossgott (South Africa) Kai Lossgott is a Cape Town-based artist, writer, curator and poet whose personal practice currently focuses on exploring green politics and systems theory through experimental film, performance and drawing, for instance his engravings in plant leaves. His work has been widely exhibited, such as the Museum Africa, Johannesburg; Arnot Art Museum, New York; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Museum of Contemporary Art Maracaibo, Venezuela; Austin Museum of Art, Texas; Casoria Contemporary Art Museum, Naples, blank projects; Cape Town. His curatorial projects include the internationally touring artists’ film programmes CITY BREATH and LETTERS FROM THE SKY. Born and lives in South Africa. www.kailossgott.com
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Interiority-Fresco IV 4:10, 2010 The exploration of the feminine identity displaced through ❝ time, memory, and history, reflects an image of a woman with a new identity that is totally detached from exoticism
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Michele Magema (D. Congo) Michele Magema received an MA in fine arts from the Ecole Nationale Superieure d’Arts Paris-Cergy. A key focus for her is articulating a permanent exchange between her Congolese culture and her adoptive French culture through videos and installations. Prestigious institutions worldwide have shown her work: Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hayward Gallery, London. Born in D.Congo, lives in France.
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Hide & Seek 5:33, 2010 With her approach both educative and allegorical, Nathalie Mba Bikoro ❝ highlights the different tones of a society shared between delusions and rituals where self-accomplishment depends on the ability to choose
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Nathalie Mba Bikoro (Gabon) Nathalie Mba Bikoro uses creative arts to introduce alternative independent adaptations of social life and development in communities in Northern Gabon. She currently works as a visiting university lecturer across Europe and Gabon teaching in creative contemporary arts, politics and philosophy. Nathalie is developing many educational interdisciplinary arts projects and collaborations including ArtEvict & DNA Gabon. Her exhibitions have travelled internationally, including Tate Britain, National Portrait Gallery, London; Performing Arts Academy, Helsinki; SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin; Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) Festival South Korea among others. Born in Gabon, lives in Germany. www.nbikoro.weebly.com
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Shadow Of My Shadow 3:39, 2009 The film focuses on the displacement of the human, which is ❝ generated by repressive manipulation and the increasingly visible social and environmental breakdown of cultures
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Victor Mutelekesha (Zambia) Victor Mutelekesha is an artist who was born, raised and received part of his formal education in Zambia. He received art academy education in Norway where he currently lives and works as an independent artist. His focus is oriented towards the displacement of the human, which is generated by the ongoing repressive manipulation and by the increasingly visible social and environmental breakdown of a culture so permeated with wars and injustices in general. Thus, to be able to imagine our place as a locus where the hope for a renewed emancipation of the human is still possible. He has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at the International Culture Centre and Museum in Oslo; the Gallery Palazzo Tito in Venice; and the Henry Tayaly Art Centre in Lusaka. Previous group exhibitions include the 10th Havana Biennial; Gallery Fisk in Bergen; Videoholica video art biennial, Bulgaria; “More than this” Gallery kit in Norway; and Dakar Biennial 2006 and 2012. Born in Zambia, lives in Norway. www.mutelekesha.blogspot.com
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The Illumination 2:03, 2012 investigating the cathartic aspects of art-making and its reception he wishes ❝ toByre-imagine the sublime, or what he likes to term ‘the void’: a space that cannot be accounted for by the limited possibilities of human logic and reason
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Johan Thom (South Africa) Johan Thom is currently a PhD candidate in fine art at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. Well known for his performances, videos and video installations, Thom often subjects the body to extremes in a quest to map its ongoing transformation. Numerous group and solo exhibitions from Venice Biennale, Italy; Museum Africa, Johannesburg; Iwalewa Haus, Bayreuth, Germany; Slade School of Fine Art, London amongst others. Born in South Africa, lives in England. www.johanthom.com
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Traffic mum 10:00, 2009 film work is a reverse anthropology, because his re‑cognition ❝ ofTraoré’s the conditional nature of hospitality, people, places, space and things creates not a new boundary but a frontier for experience
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Saliou Traoré (Burkina Faso) Saliou Traoré’s art practice explores the idea of a reversed development-aid by using video, sculpture, installation and drawing. His work has been presented at Kunsthallen Brandts Museum, Odense (Denmark); IFAN Museum, Dakar (Senegal); Marble Hall, Amsterdam; Expressive Arts Institute, San Diego (USA); Nadja Vilenne Gallery, Liege (Belgium). Born in Burkina Faso, lives in the Netherlands. www.saliouTraoré.nl
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Le dilemme divin 5:31, 2009 The piece questions what people hold back in our modern society, what symbolic ❝ languages are present and how he himself can translate a real emotion or feeling instead of using a formal and faithful rendition of the subject or theme
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Guy Woueté (Cameroon) Guy Woueté lives and works between Antwerp and Douala. He trained in Art and Multimedia at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten. His work (video, photography, installation) is an exploration into the finite and infinite, transcending the limitations of formal academic training by employing a more experimental approach that seeks to push existing boundaries. Guy has participated in several residencies and exhibitions at IFA Galleries Berlin and Stuttgart; SBK Galerie23, Amsterdam; Modern Art Museum, Medellin (Colombia); Museum of Contemporary Art, Algiers (Algeria); Momo Gallery, Johannesburg. Born in Cameroon, lives in Belgium.
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Gela 2 1:57, 2010 Gela 2 defies singular categorization. Viewers witness a ❝ journey through the merging of past and present
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Ezra Wube (Ethiopia) Ezra Wube moved to the United States at the age of 18 and received his BFA in painting from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, and an MFA from Hunter College, New York, NY. His works encompass video, installations, drawing, painting and performance. Ezra had exhibitions at Dreams of Freedom Museum, Boston; MEIAC-Museum of Extramadura, Badajoz (Spain); Rush Arts Gallery, New York; Blackburn Gallery – Howard University, Washington DC. Born in Ethiopia, lives in USA. www.ezrawube.net
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