Kings County by Stevenson

KINGS COUNTY

KINGS COUNTY NJIDEKA AKUNYILI CROSBY MELEKO MOKGOSI WANGECHI MUTU PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA WITH AN ESSAY BY TEJU COLE

9 OCTOBER – 22 NOVEMBER 2014

Today Brooklyn, as Kings County is more commonly known, counts 2.5 million inhabitants, measures 474 square kilometres, and by itself would be the fourth largest city in the United States if it was not part of New York. It traces its roots back to Breuckelen, a 17th century settlement established by the Dutch West India Company, named after a city in the Netherlands. In 1664 the English gained control of the territory, and in 1684 they combined Breuckelen with five other former Dutch towns into Kings County, establishing a political entity which survives to this day. Brooklyn is a place of immigrants, its demographics ever shifting. Complex layers of class are superimposed on both historical and newly established ethnic enclaves. Because everybody who lives there is, in some way, from somewhere else, it has been a theatre of imagination and invention, and Brooklyn as an idea, or a metaphor, has been as important in this process as its physical characteristics. Perhaps as a result, it has attracted an urban creative community of a nature and scale not seen elsewhere in New York – a community that, in turn, has affected the idea of Brooklyn in real and imaginary ways. Brooklyn is often associated with gang violence and artisanal food, but its lived experience is infinitely more complex, and resists such narratives as much as it invites them. The term ‘Kings County’ is unfamiliar to many outside New York, and its archaic, colonial associations suggest an imaginary place. The artists in this exhibition are all, in different ways, invested in this imaginary place, and use the idea of Brooklyn as a backdrop to the making of their art. Nigerian writer Teju Cole, who contributes an essay to this catalogue, describes Brooklyn, specifically its Fort Greene section, as the only place on the planet where he does not stand out. Moreover, he says that the friendships he has forged in the borough have allowed him to imagine an Africa unburdened by the artificial borders imposed by the Berlin Conference. For Wangechi Mutu Brooklyn was a place to live while getting an education in Manhattan, and now it has become her second home. Meleko Mokgosi was specifically drawn to Sunset Park and its history of manufacturing, as well as its large South American population. Curiously, the other two artists have left the neighbourhood since the exhibition was conceived: Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Njideka Akunyili Crosby both moved to Los Angeles this year, but often reflect the timbre of Brooklyn social life in their work. On one level, Kings County is about four immigrants (from Botswana, Kenya, Nigeria and California) in a place of many immigrants. More fundamentally, however, Kings County is about the symbolic potential of geographic locations – about how imaginary places can affect the real world, and vice versa.

Born 1982 in San Bernardino, California; currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Sepuya lived in Brooklyn from 2002 to 2014.

PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA

Perhaps most perplexing in the work of Paul Mpagi Sepuya is how it keeps shifting between the deeply personal and highly formalist, treating bits of nothing in the corner of his studio with the same reverence as the nude bodies of the artist and his friends. His installations pierce through the veil of the exhibition as a final, sanitised presentation of distilled ideas, and as a result fail to give guidance about what matters most to him. Previously, Sepuya’s specific point of interest has been the studio, and how it becomes both a site of production and a social space where bonds of friendship are forged. Exhibiting in Cape Town, however, forced him to think about the dynamic of installing an exhibition, rather than the dynamic of producing work. Sepuya was unable to travel to South Africa, instead relying on a series of Skype conversations with the gallery team to convey his ideas and determine the final installation.

Studio Work 2010-2014 Installation with C-prints [Desktop, May 19 (2011); Self-portrait, June 3 (2011); Self-portraits (Studio Practice) diptych (2011); Self-portraits (Studio Practice) diptych (2011); Studio, after Tony, January 11 (2011); Studio, April 12 (2011); Studio, April 19 (2011); Studio, April 26 (2011); Studio, April 26 (2011); Studio, April 26 (2011); Studio, April 26 (2011): Studio, April 29 (#1) (2011); Studio, April 29 (#2) (2011); Studio, February 8 (2011); Studio, July 20 (2011); Studio, March 15 (2011); Studio, September 15 (2011); Self-portrait, December 9 (2010)], laser posters [all Studio, April 12 (2011)], wood and found objects

Born 1983 in Enugu, Nigeria. Akunyili Crosby moved to the United States to attend university in 1999, settling in Brooklyn in 2012; she relocated to Los Angeles in 2014.

NJIDEKA AKUNYILI CROSBY

A sense of nostalgia and longing pervades the work of Njideka Akunyili Crosby. In her pictures, intricately constructed interior spaces reveal complex interior lives, often pensive, almost gloomy. Flat colours are contrasted with panes of Xerox transfers of found photographs, both from (historical) magazines and Akunyili Crosbyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s family albums. These transfers provide texture, literally and figuratively, to otherwise universal domestic scenes. Usually the subjects of the portraits are Akunyili Crosby and her immediate family. In Mama, Mummy and Mamma the woman seated at the table is her sister, while in both Nyado: The Thing Around Her Neck and Harmattan Haze we see Akunyili Crosby and her husband. The portrait of the two children is an experiment: it marks the first time she has used people she does not know, though something about them seems deeply familiar. It is also unusual in that it skirts the edges of sentimentality rather than darkness; it asks whether we are capable of looking at the image without being blinded by the smiling children.

p11 Harmattan Haze 2014 Acrylic, colour pencils, charcoal and transfers on paper 211 x 213cm

p13 Nyado: The Thing Around Her Neck 2011 Acrylic, colour pencils, charcoal and transfers on paper 206 x 207.5cm

p12 The Beautyful Ones series #3 2014 Acrylic, colour pencils, charcoal and transfers on paper 155 x 107.5cm

p15 & 16-17 (detail) Mama, Mummy and Mamma 2014 Acrylic, colour pencils, charcoal and transfers on paper 211 x 266cm

Born 1982 in Francistown, Botswana. Mokgosi moved to the United States to study in 2003, and settled in New York in 2012. He lives in Manhattan and has a studio in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

MELEKO MOKGOSI

In this series, Meleko Mokgosi reproduces real museum wall texts of exhibitions showcasing ‘modern’ as well as ‘classical’ African art, and superimposes his own comments on them, tirelessly highlighting the problematic assumptions that underlie most writing about art and Africa. The text in the work Walls of Casbah II was taken from an exhibition of photography titled Walls of Algiers: Narratives of the City at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2009. ‘Note how there is no mention of people, of cultures, of things that are not there for immediate profit’, is one of Mokgosi’s milder observations. An exhibition of beadwork titled African Beaded Art: Power and Adornment at Smith College Museum of Art in 2008 formed the source for the second installation. A question on its panels sums up the impetus for Mokgosi’s series of text works: ‘What becomes of the institutionalized presentation of other cultures once imperialist ambitions are officially fixed as the past?’

p19 (installation view) & 20-21 Adornment II 2014 Inkjet and charcoal on linen 8 panels: 61 x 45.5cm each

p22-23 Walls of Casbah II 2014 Inkjet and charcoal on linen 8 panels: 61 x 45.5cm each

Born 1972 in Nairobi. Mutu moved to the United States in the early 1990s to pursue tertiary studies. She settled in Brooklyn in 2000, and has lived and worked there ever since.

WANGECHI MUTU

Wangechi Mutu is primarily known for her collages of otherworldly beings – seductive dreamscapes of monstrous, mutilated, hybrid forms. Coinciding with this exhibition, she has a solo show at her London gallery titled Nguva na Nyoka, which is Kiswahili for ‘Sirens and Serpents’. The End of eating Everything, starring the musician Santigold (perhaps best-known for contributing vocals to the Jay Z song Brooklyn We Go Hard), is her first animated film, and was commissioned by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. In the film, Santigold plays a Medusa-like creature that embodies the impact of greed and materialism on the planet. As is the case with Mutu’s collages, the work derives its power from the juxtaposition of the optimism and beauty inherent in the creative act with the violent and destructive capacity of humanity.

The End of eating Everything 2013 Animated video, colour, sound Duration 8 min 10 sec

Teju Cole was born in the United States in 1975 to Nigerian parents, and was raised in Lagos. He lives in Brooklyn.

TEJU COLE

AT HOME IN BROOKLYN

On their way to the moon in late 1972, the crew of the Apollo 17 space shuttle took a photograph of the earth. This was the famous â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;blue marbleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; shot. It was the first time we saw our planet in its entirety: a serene blue circle against the blackness of space. Here, in one picture, was the totality of human experience. The four artists in the exhibition Kings County grew up after 1972, in a world that, globalized for centuries, had now seen itself as a contained whole. These artists share with each other one particular crossing point: each of them is an instance of what happens when Africa meets Brooklyn. Africa is physically enormous, and Brooklyn, by comparison, tiny. But the energy flows between the two are substantial. This is worth thinking about, not only because it gives a picture of the world right now, but because the works of Wangechi Mutu, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Meleko Mokgosi suggest a special potency in this particular crossing point.

Why Brooklyn? I’ve heard a rumour – it can be hard to verify these things, but this one rings true – that in France some people describe fashionable situations, clothes or cuisine, as ‘très Brooklyn’. The borough has become a place on the desire-map, corresponding to certain narrow notions and pinned to perhaps just one meaning, just as San Francisco has a meaning, and Las Vegas has a meaning, and Greenwich Village used to have a meaning. This ‘Brooklyn’ is code for young, fashion-forward, hipster. The idea is perhaps grounded in some reality. But this code is also limited to a tiny section of the actual borough of Brooklyn. Maybe the idea became popular because there was a need for such a place after the young and creative were priced out of Chelsea and the East Village. In any case, it’s important to remember that there are bigger, more important and longer-lasting Brooklyns: immigrant Brooklyn, working-class Brooklyn, nonEnglish-speaking Brooklyn, historic preservation Brooklyn, Jewish Brooklyn, Arabic Brooklyn, black Brooklyn. These Brooklyns cover a vast geographical territory, yet they have significant overlap with each other. Brooklyn is my home. It is where I pay rent, it is where my books are, as well as many of my friends. But it is also, significantly, the place in the world where I feel the least like a stranger. When I’m in Brooklyn, at least in certain parts of it, I feel that no one can walk up to me and demand to know what I’m doing there. Anywhere else in the world, even in Lagos where I grew up, I’m not so sure. This is interesting, since I own no property in Brooklyn and have no ancestors buried there. But I do have a metaphysical confidence in the place. This confidence is no less real for being all in my head. Sunset Park, where I live (and which Meleko Mokgosi has cited as an inspiration), is a particular Brooklyn: industrial, Chinese and Hispanic. But when I stand at the corner of Fulton Street and South Portland Avenue in Fort Greene, I experience a different sensation. Standing at that intersection, behind me is the Greenlight Bookshop. Across the street is the Ethiopian place where I dine with friends. On the opposite corner are the French brunch place and the Cuban bar. To my right is the imposing mural of the Notorious B.I.G., a local boy made good. Around and about are small businesses as well as multinational ones, and the houses where people live, and their dozens of languages.

The people on the street are white, black, and everything in between. Close by is the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts. These signifiers all map onto something of personal value for me. I may protest the overbearing onslaught of capitalism inside this space, and yet it is probably the one place in the entire world where I look utterly normal, whether Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m clean-shaven and in a suit, or bearded and in a warm-up jacket. It is where, I feel, no one could accost or challenge me about being a foreigner. Possibly this sense could also be true in parts of Manhattan, or in London, or Los Angeles, or Lagos. In my experience, it feels most complete on that street corner in Brooklyn. I detect a shared sense of at-homeness in the works of Mutu, Akunyili Crosby, Sepuya and Mokgosi. They are visionary artists because they remind us that the imaginary places they conjure in their work are part of the real world. One of the key background facts of these artists is the complicated forms of paperwork that allow them to be resident in the United States and to have links to the African continent. This ever-present but rarely declared bureaucratic hum is the core of the artistic postcolony. No coherent contemporary history of African art is possibly without an account of its international participants. And this internationalism is very much dependent on who has which papers to allow them to stay where. Wangechi Mutu has, since the mid-1990s, been dismantling optical notions of purity or singularity. In her work, hybridity is the rule. Her collages are literal meeting points: of the organic and the technological, the historical and the futuristic, and the stereotypical and the re-definitional. In common with the other artists in this show, she makes work of great sensual impact, images that far exceed their thematic concerns. Paul Mpagi Sepuya works primarily as a photographer, but his are photographs that consistently ask questions of photographyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s procedures. Using the studio portrait as his starting point, he explores the continuities between friendship and artistic labour. He also makes space where, until quite recently, only a battle was possible: he grounds his work in gay life and homosexuality. Sepuya, who has a Ugandan as well as American background, is a hyphenated being. But what startles about his work is its ease, clarity, gentleness and candour, especially in his nudes which give new power to that jaded theme.Â

No less candid are the large-scale paintings Njideka Akunyili Crosby has been making for a few years now. Like Sepuya, she founds her work in exploring personal – and largely autobiographical – intimacies. And like him, there is a freshness to her vision that is the polar opposite of the exhibitionistic or the sordid. Akunyili Crosby’s interest in foregrounding private moments – between her husband and herself, or in the adumbrated self-portraits she’s been doing of late – is counterpoised with (but not in contradiction to) her interest in using family pictures, media images and ‘African’ patterns as the background to her images. Scale is also a key consideration in any reading of Meleko Mokgosi’s work. Bringing contemporary urgency to the vexations of history painting, he gives us new ways to think about 19th and 20th century southern African politics. As with the other artists under consideration here, Mokgosi has technical ability in abundance (and in his case, an especially exhilarating deployment of white space); and like them, he pins that facility to a vision of narrating in colour. He also evinces an interest in text: of its resonances, of its correctibility. ‘Never again,’ as John Berger has written, ‘will a single story be told as though it’s the only one.’ Is ‘Brooklyn’, the Brooklyn of these artists, the Brooklyn of my at-homeness, a movement or a moment? What’s coming next is the usual pressure of capital, and the way ungoverned capital deforms spaces and interactions. Brooklyn is a moment that moves, and the energy will inevitably shift elsewhere. In ten years, the more interesting story could be the Bronx, or Newark, or some distant town far from New York. But that’s the way of the world. No matter what happens next, this present moment will also have happened. More importantly, there will emerge other spaces for the artistic energies of this alternative postcolony. I want to return to the image of the ‘blue marble’. Just one continent is visible from the angle at which that photograph was taken in 1982. It was as though the earth presented itself with an indexical representation of all it contained. The planet puts its best face forward for its first formal portrait, and one continent happens to be visible in its entirety: Africa.

BIOGRAPHIES

NJIDEKA AKUNYILI CROSBY (born 1983 in Enugu, Nigeria) obtained her MFA from Yale

University in 2011. She is the winner of the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award (2013), a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant (2013) and the Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize for Excellence in Painting (2011). Recent and upcoming exhibitions include Bronx Calling: The Second AIM Biennial, Bronx, NY; Cinematic Visions: Paintings at the Edge of Reality, Victoria Miro Gallery, London; and Primary Sources, The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY. She was selected for the Studio Museum residency programme in 2011-2012. MELEKO MOKGOSI (born 1981 in Francistown, Botswana) moved to the United States

in 2003 to study, obtaining a BA Studio Art from Williams College, Williamstown; a year at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London followed. He attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2007, and thereafter obtained his MFA under the mentorship of Mary Kelly in UCLA’s Interdisciplinary Studio programme. In 2012 he was awarded a residency at The Studio Museum in Harlem. He has exhibited at the Botswana National Gallery, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Hammer Museum at UCLA; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon, among other institutions. He was the recipient of the inaugural Mohn Award on the occasion of the Los Angeles biennial, Made in LA, at the Hammer Museum in 2012. (born 1972 in Nairobi, Kenya) obtained her International Baccalaureate at UWC Atlantic College in Wales, graduating in 1991. She moved to New York to pursue her tertiary education, earning a BFA from Cooper Union for WANGECHI MUTU

the Advancement of the Arts and Science in 1996, and an MFA from Yale University (2000). Solo exhibitions have taken place at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Montreal, among other institutions. She has taken part in the biennales of Dakar (2014), Moscow (2013), Kochi-Muziris (2012), Lyon (2009), New Orleans (2008), SITE Santa Fe (2006), Seville (2006), Gwangju (2004) and Johannesburg (1997). PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA was born in California in 1982 to an American mother and

Ugandan father. He has been an artist-in-residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace (2009-2010), the Center for Photography at Woodstock, NY (2010), The Studio Museum in Harlem (2010-2011), and at the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago (2014). His most recent artist publication, Studio Work, was self-published in 2012 and the related body of work has been exhibited at The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, Franklin Art Works in Minneapolis, Boston University’s 404 Gallery, Platform Centre in Winnipeg, and Artspeak, Vancouver. TEJU COLE was born in the United States in 1975 to Nigerian parents, and was raised in

Lagos; he lives in Brooklyn. He is a writer, art historian and photographer, and is currently the Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College. He is the author of two books, Every Day is for the Thief, a New York Times Editor’s Pick, and Open City, which won the Pen/ Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, and a number of other honours.

CAPE TOWN Buchanan Building 160 Sir Lowry Road Woodstock 7925 PO Box 616 Green Point 8051 T +27 (0)21 462 1500 F +27 (0)21 462 1501 JOHANNESBURG 62 Juta Street Braamfontein 2001 Postnet Suite 281 Private Bag x9 Melville 2109 T +27 (0)11 403 1055/1908 F +27 (0)86 275 1918 info@stevenson.info www.stevenson.info Catalogue 81 October 2014 All works courtesy of the artists Works by Wangechi Mutu courtesy of Victoria Miro, London Works by Meleko Mokgosi courtesy of Honor Fraser, Los Angeles © 2014 for works: the artists © 2014 for text by Teju Cole: the author Cover Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Studio Work, 2010-2014, installation view Design Gabrielle Guy Installation photography Mario Todeschini Printing Hansa Print, Cape Town