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AfricanColours, Press Centre, Chester House, Koinange street, Nairobi, KENYA P.O. Box 56814 -00200, phone + 254 20 250373, +254 020 2211624 njoroge@africancolours.com or maggie@africancolours.com
LOOKING AT OURSELVES
Jimmy Ogonga: it is typically common for Kenyans of Western origin, ‘born and bred in Kenya’ not knowing a word, or barely being able to speak coherently in Swahili! This is indeed a sorry state for a country that claims to have any cultural conscience. ReadMore
AFRICAN FEMINISM
Ngcobo: I’m inspired by the search for identity that most Africans are looking for. I am an African woman and believe in African Feminism which is different from European Feminism and African American Womanism in that it looks at the situation of African women living on the African continent. ReadMore
LOCAL ART
The National Gallery of Zimbabwe has held annual exhibitions to showcase the new and the best of local art for more than forty years and continues to herald the future of art in Zimbabwe and to spotlight the excellence of the present. The "Heritage" is the highlight of the National Gallery's calendar and is a common meeting ground for professional and amateur artists, the self-taught and the formally trained. It is the springboard from which young artists launch their careers. ReadMore
WOMEN EMERGING
Fine artists from East Africa (Uganda and Kenya) discuss visual elements within their work addressing issues and developments affecting women, both personal and societal, in East Africa and beyond. Emphasis is given to the Uganda Women's Movement from the late 20th century to the present. ReadMore
On-line exhibition: *The complete collection of over 40 new works along with written materials can be viewed on-line at theartroom-sf.com/WomenEmerging.htm
PART OF EXISTENCE
Goddy Leye: "When you are born, your parents give you a name. Then the "priest" gives you another name during "baptism". Then your friends give you another name in school or on the playground.Then the state gives you an ID card or a passport. When do you label yourself?"
DESCENT
"Black and White Copies is an artist project initiated by Angolan-born, Dutch artist Antonio Miguel Petchkovsky. As the title of the project suggests, it looks at interrogating notions around identity – race, authenticity, original and copy. The very questions: “who am I?” or “to whom and where?” are especially pertinent to Petchovsky whose name is of Portuguese and Russian descent and who is considered white in Angola while black in Portugal."
MY HERITAGE
our ancestors "I do not see myself as just another artist. Being an artist is my heritage. It is part of my existence, as being Ncoakhoe (Bushmen) is part of my existence. I am very serious about my tradition and my culture. I cannot understand why people who do not care for tradition can be an artist, because that is what it is all about." [source: www.africaserver.nl]
SIGNS OF SOCIAL POSITION
"There was a time when a man was judged and respected by his seat, now it is by his car." Far from being simple usual objects, these seats carry important symbolic values. Generally considered as strictly personnal, one does not lend them, and in some cases they become true objects of cult. Made exclusively for the owner and following specific criteria, they are signs of social position and political functions. [source: www.tamarin.com]
THE CITY
The project 'Africas: the artist and the city 2001' curated by Pep Subirós, presented by the centre de cultura contemporània de barcelona spain, takes as its starting point a vision of Africa as a highly contradictory reality, bringing together in an intense and sometime explosive mix, a variety of temporalities and cultural traditions, concentrating and manifesting the extremes of the problems and potentials of our world. read info
THE LAND
An Exhibition on ‘LAND’ at the Unisa Art Gallery, Pretoria, South Africa. In this exhibition, humankind’s perception of ‘land’ and her intimate relatedness and interrelatedness with this phenomena is poetically transcribed and contested on various levels - land as symbol and metaphor, as spiritual entity, as place of belonging and self realization, a claimed place of ownership and boundaries, evidence of former existence and traces of human endeavor, land as victim of pollution, exploitation and greed - land as scarred surface and raped source – land as evidence of ancient geological rifts and huge natural forces – land as haven to harbor and harness life – land as platform or stage from which human nature is launched. [source:www.unisa.ac.za]
SITE SPECIFIC ART PROJECTS
The word !Xoe denotes 'home-land' or 'home-place' in the language of the !Xam, a nomadic San hunter-gatherer people who once inhabited the Great Karoo. The !Xoe project was curated and hosted by the Ibis Art Centre in 1998.
LAND ARTIST
Strijdom van der Merwe is a south African land artist, land artists are trying to unify art and nature. "Land art encompasses everything - wind, birds, smell, touch. And my work doesn't exist until I find it. In nature, the options are endless, and it's exciting working with materials never thought possible," says Van der Merwe. ReadMore at Artthrob
A STREET VENUE
Rene Klarenbeek selects a venue where he is situating a billboard as a central meeting point for people from all walks of live. Patrick Mukabi and Thom Ogonga continued this idea and started a second billboard project, in Mombassa on 28 September 2001. One of the objectives is to produce daily paintings as a commentary of issues affecting Kenyans and the whole world, either in a positive or negative way. It is a project for the public, to participate in art and to share ideas on cultural issues
WHAT'S AFRICAN ABOUT AFRICAN ART AND THOUGHT
"African Art can and should be assessed according to its function of serving the needs and concern of the whole community, even when works look as if they are the creation of a single individual articulating what on the surface seems merely to be his or her personal idiom." Jennifer Wilkinson
BARRIERS
The stone sculpture has challenged me to find a place for my African culture in my life. “The west in me has said that I cannot understand my culture, that I am a person of a modern world which becomes increasingly “a cultural” in that people are not bound by their cultures, and the barriers have been broken down. The ‘African’ in me says that I can understand my culture by way of my family heritage and through the stones say: “Outside of Zimbabwe I have to move without my own language, I have had to work in white ways, I have to understand European thinking about the sculpture and sculpture generally, which is largely what they know about Western sculpture." Billy Chidyausiku
SOCIAL FABRIC
"Africa, a continent charged with contradictions, where traditions are brought into sharp contrast with a dense urban reality; where time-honoured ways of working are moulded in a convulsive adaptation of the problems of the First World. Artistic creation is one of the foremost exponents of this ambiguity in which social fabric and the historical and cultural substrata are stirred up by a far-reaching transformation of vital spaces." Pep Subiros
IDENTITY TODAY
Africanity - questions and issues: in the October 2001 edition n°41 of the Africultures Magazine
"Mbembe calls for an endogenous gaze that is not the only claim of affiliation, genealogy, or heritage, that is not a rehabilitation of belonging, of difference, of territory, of tradition. But which is what then? This dossier offers a few leads: what if the answer were not as precise as all that? And what if African identity today were quite simply about thwarting projections by deliberately making oneself indiscernible? Not in order to cut oneself off or to go into denial, but, on the contrary, to affirm oneself as an asset to the world." Olivier Barlet
AFRICANISATION OR THE NEW EXOTICISM
"I want to argue that there is a hidden agenda in this obsessive call to Africanize, and I have always been under the illusion that it is no real secret. This is because what hides it is a simple binarism: an insulated, consensual Africa versus an equally insulated and consensual Europe. Or, to put it in more precise terms: an insulated, consensual black Africa versus an equally insulated and consensual white Europe. There are other more precise terms, of course, but at this point let it suffice simply to highlight the binarism which constructs the broad base of talk about Africanization in South Africa today, which in fact makes it respectable and breathtaking. The agenda this binarism conceals is power or, if not yet attained, a desire for it. And there is no discourse about culture and politics that is not at once a discourse about power." Sikhumbuzo Mngadi
AUTHENTICITY
"The title of the exhibition "Authentic / Ex-centric: Africa in and out of Africa" implies a discussion of the demand for »authenticity« and the exotic, which, outside of Africa itself, have determined certain criteria for the acknowledgment and validation of African art. The exhibition emphasizes the reciprocal traffic of ideas and influences between Africa and other parts of the world. The project offers a glimpse into the ways in which African artists have interpreted and translated the aesthetic and social experiences of both historical and post-colonial Africa as part of a global sensibility." Forum for African Arts. Read gallery channel and artthrob [1] [2] [3]
ART SPEAKS ABOUT ALL ASPECTS OF LIVED EXPERIENCES
identity and the artist "Relations between self and others, individual and group, multiple identities and questions of nationalism remain central to contemporary debates on identity and culture."
charting terrain "South Africa is layered with interwoven personal and social histories of many peoples and many fragments of lived experience. And the landscape, a construction formed from history and geography is understood and interpreted in many ways."
spirituality and religion "Traditional African Beliefs are entrenched alongside many organised religions such as Islam, Judaism and different Christian churches.....In traditional African religious practice there is no definitive boundary between material and spiritual existence, and most examples of traditional art are both symbolic and functional."
telling and remembering "The creation, inscription and recording of our stories have emerged strongly in recent South African art. These narrative artworks are usually reliant on figurative imagery from which stories may be read."
politics, ideas and the emergence "Apartheid exerted absolute control over all aspects of our lives: education, identity, religion, political activity, place of work and residence, ownership of and rights to land, social interaction, personal relationships."
[source: Art Gallery [Wits University S.A.]
art and apartheid "What do we paint, photograph or write about? If you think postmodernism is problematic, try postapartheidism."
recycled materials "The presence of recycled materials reflects the impoverished conditions under which many township people have been living for half a century."
return to roots "Artists incorporate the motifs and materials of their forefathers."
personal introspection "Art provides a vehicle to confront personal histories as well as a source for understanding and reconciliation with their past and the new society of which they are a part"
[source: Liberated Voices [Museum for African Art USA]