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This exhibition focuses on four contemporary
African artists who use their image in the execution of their
work, or inscribe their own bodies into its final configuration.
Conceived as installation works and influenced by ideas of
performance art, the works of these artists have primarily
been motivated by the quest for self-representation, or negotiation
of self-identity. Because these artists live and practice
between two or more cultures, their works often investigate
the intersections of autobiography, self and the other. Like
other contemporary non-white artists active in the West,
these artists address the objectification of the non-white
body and question its imaging/imagining in Western culture.
The term "insertion" embraces all the multiple
layers of meaning inherent in this word, sexual or otherwise.
It refers to the complex manner in which these artists "insert" images
of their bodies into their work. In the Western imagination,
non-Western bodies are often objectified, exoticized and
viewed with a mixture of fear and desire. Hence, inserting
one's self or body into the work may also be an act of counter-penetration,
an assertion of one's own subjectivity in response to objectification.
Insertion can also be used to assert one's presence in the
face of presumed absence. In some cases, insertion is also
a strategy to signify that racial and cultural differences
in Western society-or "otherness- are inscribed on the non-white
body.
In the work of these artists, the simulacrum of
the person portrayed (in this case willfully inserted) functions
as a surrogate presence rather than a physical likeness,
allowing the artist's body-image to transcend the conventional
boundaries of verisimilitude, i.e. objective or literal likeness.
Hence, self-portraiture becomes a form of self-representation
determined by terms formulated by others, or knowingly based
on their expectations.
This exhibition introduces four artists whose
work embodies the notion of insertion as self-portraiture:
Hassan Musa, Olu Oguibe, Berni Searle, and Zineb Sedira.
These four artists share a number of common traits, among
them a strong affinity to post-modernism, and the language
and techniques of contemporary global art. In fact, their
work can only be understood within the parameters of such
discourse and practices. Also, like all artists engaged in
non-object-oriented form of production, these artists display
a strong affinity to photography, in both its artistic and
documentary uses. And finally, all four of these artists
create installation art as a means of creating significant
sites in which various aspects of the self (imaginary, emergent,
or residual) can be explored. In Africa and the African Diaspora,
the intersection of race and gender is perhaps one of the
most striking aspects of the art created by contemporary
artists. It is this intersection which provides the inevitable
determinants of the individual perspective, and which informs
the powerful images on display in this exhibition.
ZINEB SEDIRA: BEHIND THE VEIL
The art of Zineb Sedira is clearly autobiographical,
but not without universal appeal. Born in 1963 to Algerian
immigrants, the London-based artist was brought up in the
suburbs of Paris following the Algerian liberation from France.
The events of this turbulent period and the resulting animosity
towards the Algerian community have been a driving force
throughout Sedira's work.
Sedira's Self Portrait I, (1999) is
about the veil and the Muslim female gaze. The veil here
serves as a metaphor for a "veiling the mind" whether through
censorship or self-censorship; its absence represents a willingness
to face dilemmas and to negotiate the multiple layers of
one’s consciousness. The eyes in Self Portrait 1 are
voyeuristic and powerful rather than compliant. The physical
veil in the photographs has been gently effaced to emphasize
the eyes, and to let the body merge into the background,
like the walls of the whitewashed houses that become another
metaphor for the veil. By escaping their mask, they subvert
the role of the veiled woman. "Open to be gazed at, it is
also the part that is free to look, to think without being
judged, silent sight, silent witness... to see but not be
seen."
In Made in England: Miss Holmes, 1999,
Sedira transgresses the traditional codes of dress among
North African Muslim women to explore issues of cultural
memory, sexuality and nostalgia. As in earlier works, Sedira
uses Islamic geometric designs to re-claim a traditionally
masculine art form. By covering the 1960s' stiletto-style
high heels, with Islamic Arabesques, Sedira re-territorializes
the feminine, and "inserts" it into a masculine form. As
a fetishized form, the high heels may signal subordination,
while emphasizing erotic allure. The repetition of Islamic
patterning provides Sedira with a means of continually re-positioning
herself, her cultures, as "it plays with clear and unclear,
between existing and disappearing."
Don't do to her what you did to me I (1998),
is a video installation which reinterprets the tradition
of Islamic healing charms, using a mixed media of ink, water,
and passport photographs of a woman's face. The title of
the work comes from a phrase uttered by a woman on the verge
of death, used to exorcise the conflicts between Western
and Muslim cultures. Mothers often use it to protect their
young girls from becoming 'too French,' rather than good
Muslims.
The art of Zineb Sedira draws our attention
to the problematics of cultural appropriation and questions
our understanding of fixed categories of East/West, and our
perception of gender and sexuality in Muslim societies. It
questions our ability to sustain a permanent position either "inside" or "outside" of
a place, a culture or a memory.
BERNI SEARLE: COLOR MATTERS
As a South African of native African and German/English
descent, Berni Searle was categorized as "colored" during
the Apartheid era–a fact which drives much of her work today.
Searle’s art explores the struggle between the individual
and the community, and the formation of identity. Here, as
in most of her installations, Searle attempts to excavate
the neglected history of South African women as a means of
recovering from European colonialism and the problematics
of race, class and gender which it left behind. As Searle
herself notes:
One of the legacies of colonialism and apartheid
has been that he self is or has been experienced, more often
than not, as a site of conflict. The testimonies that have
emerged from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission glaringly
demonstrate this point. [. . . .] Working with images of
the self offers a necessary and important stage in the deconstruction
of cultural and gendered identity.
Searle's mixed media Color Me, is an
autobiographical installation series that both celebrates
the rich and overlapping strands of the artist's heritage,
and refuses to be bound by it. Color Me features a
series of enlarged photographs of the artist's naked body
smeared with spices of various shades of red, yellow, white
and brown in a way that resists any definition of identity
that is static, or delineated into neat categories. In several
photographs, the artist gazes directly at the viewer -- a
confrontational gesture that challenges the viewer's position
in terms of the 'exotic gaze.' Searle's unique use of spices
references the thriving spice trade in the Cape Dutch colony
in the 17th century, as well as her mixed heritage. However,
there is also the uncomfortable suggestion that the spices
have the ability to smother or suffocate.
In A Darker Shade of Light, Searle continues
to explore the processes and issues in her earlier work,
focusing on the body as a site on which various processes
are inscribed and mapped. In a series of Polaroids, Searle
shows the most sensitive parts of her body stained with Egyptian
henna. In the images, the darker marks left by the process
of staining recall bruises and hints of trauma, while the
light boxes on which the photographs are displayed evoke
forensic investigative techniques. By darkening her body
and inviting scrutiny, Searle interrogates and challenges
the racial hierarchy of color constructed by the Apartheid
system.
OLU OGUIBE: SURROGATE PRESENCE
The central image in Olu Oguibe's installation Brothers
II, 2000, is a double-exposed photograph of a child
whose anonymous presence and innocent gaze demand reflection
and silent contemplation. Although the photograph depicts
the artist himself as a child, it primarily functions as
a surrogate presence for Oguibe's younger brother who died
more than twenty years ago. Brothers II continues
the work begun in Buggy (Memorial to an Unknown Child),
1997 in which Oguibe's image serves as a surrogate image
for his brother. However, in Brothers II the artist's
image represents both his own, and his brother's image.
Oguibe's work evokes the unique photographic tradition of
surrogate representation, as practiced in certain African
societies. Among the Yoruba of Nigeria, for example, the
tradition provides the living twin with a faux image
or effigy of the dead twin, thus anchoring his spirit in
the world of the living. Since Oguibe and his brother were
not twins, this work extends the tradition beyond its original
parameters, and focuses on memory rather than metapsychology.
Though Brothers II is certainly autobiographical,
its universal appeal is clear. The child in Buggy or Brothers
II is every mother's child. Both evoke the lingering
presence of the beloved dead and affirm the transition from
grief to celebration, an experience all humans can to share.
As Oguibe himself has eloquently noted:
[D]espite the alienation and segregation and desensitization
that have today become prevailing parameters of our lives,
there is a corner deep inside all of us where we are still
able to connect, and to share in one and other's moments
of rapture and distress.
Indeed, such universal humanistic concerns are recurring
themes in all the facets of work created by this Nigerian-born
and New York-based artist, whose interests range from poetry
to art criticism, and has himself curated a number of groundbreaking
exhibitions.
HASSAN MUSA: GRAPHIC CEREMONIES
The critical appropriation of classical Western masterpieces
is an ongoing theme in the art of Hassan Musa, a Sudanese-born
now living in France. In Self Portrait as Saint Sebastian,
1999, Saint Sebastian of the Sunflower, 1999, and Family
Album, 1998, Musa takes on the martyrdom of San Sebastian,
a central theme in Renaissance art, and processes it into
a surrogate image that criticizes the hegemonic presence
of Western culture. The ambiguity associated with the images
of Saint Sebastian–commonly depicted as a handsome youth
pierced by arrows–allows the artist to replace him with such
latter-day icons as Che Guevara and Van Gogh, whose lives
evoke complex reactions of guilt and blame no less powerful
than those created by Saint Sebastian's act of martyrdom.
In The Origin of Art, 1998, a complex work that
references Western art history, Musa attaches the head of
Da Vinci's Mona Lisa to Courbet's most controversial
and transgressive work, The Origin of the World, 1866.
By juxtaposing these popular but diametrically opposed masterpieces
of Western art, Musa creates a powerful criticism of capitalist
culture, its construction of the female body, and the course
of Western art history as a whole.
Musa's large paintings are usually executed in textile ink
on printed cloth, creatively blending the designs of the
fabric with his own painting. Through this he inserts his
own presence in a manner that draws attention to the endless
possibilities of any art work, and to art practices outside
of Western-sanctioned aesthetics.
Salah M. Hassan
©2000 |
