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11/10/2006

100% Africa

Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao

Group Show

From 12 October 2006 to February 2007, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao will be hosting 100% Africa, an exhibition of works by 25 artists living and working in 15 sub-Saharan countries that illustrates the diversity and richness of current modes of expression in contemporary black African art. This exhibition is generously sponsored by Seguros Bilbao, a company member of Grupo Catalana Occidente that has collaborated with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao since its inauguration. The participation in this latest initiative provides Seguros Bilbao a new occasion to reaffirm its support to the art world.

This unique, quite unprecedented exhibition features the most important works from the Contemporary African Art Collection (CAAC) owned by collector Jean Pigozzi and considered one of the world’s finest private collections of modern art from the African continent. Also included are several artworks created exclusively for display at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

Occupying all seven galleries on the Museum’s third floor, 100% Africa is an explosive fusion of black Africa’s tradition and beliefs, its past and present, as seen in the work of several generations of African artists. Paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings, installations and videos combine to give the visitor an unusual and most enlightening viewpoint on contemporary art in Africa.

Presented in a very distinctive setting created by prestigious Italian designer Ettore Sottsass, working with Marco Palmieri, this selection blends works by internationally-renowned artists such as the great portrait artist Seydou Keita, painters Che'ri Samba, George Lilanga and Richard Onyango, encyclopedist and universalist Fre'de'ric Bruly Bouabre' and the unclassifiable Bodys Isek Kingelez and Romuald Hazoume', with others by younger, highly promising artists like Mansaray, Titos Mabota, Pathy Tsingele and Dakpogan.

The Contemporary African Art Collection
"Before 1989 I had no idea that Africa housed such a wealth of contemporary creation." This was Italian art collector Jean Pigozzi’s considered reaction to the historic and controversial international exhibition Magiciens de la terre, held that year at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, which for the first time brought together contemporary artists from several continents in an attempt to open Western eyes to other directions and currents in contemporary art history.

After Magiciens de la terre, philanthropist Jean Pigozzi, with the help and support of curator Andre' Magnin, began to create the Contemporary African Art Collection. For the last fifteen years, the sheer diversity of the Collection, with thousands of works from the full range of art disciplines in its archive, combined with rigorous, demanding and independent research work done throughout black Africa, has made the CAAC a world benchmark.

In the African cultural context, where contemporary art museums, collectors and galleries are very thin on the ground, the CAAC has played a crucial role in achieving international recognition for modern African art, thanks largely to a two decade-long process of direct cooperation with, and supervision of, a broad range of sub-Saharan artists. Since 1986, when curator Andre' Magnin began preliminary research for Magiciens de la terre, African artists have become much less isolated, in particular with the introduction in Africa of new technologies, which have enabled creative spirits of all kinds to contact each other, get organized and take part in the world’s leading contemporary art events. From its headquarters in Geneva, the CAAC organizes and takes part in individual and group exhibitions in modern and contemporary art museums the world over.

The Western slant

For decades, the very idea of contemporary African art was distorted by the West’s view of things. By 1914, virtually the whole of Africa had been carved up and subjected to European colonization. Apart from politics and economics, the dominion of a handful of European nations was also clearly cultural. As in other “underdeveloped" countries, African art was relegated to the condition of folklore and crafts, the category of contemporary art being reserved for artists in Western countries. However, Africa too had its own Academy-based modern art, very much a product of colonial and post-colonial teaching, although neither the quality of the art, or its very existence, ever received international recognition.

It was not until the late 1980s that the West began to look at contemporary art from a universal viewpoint, and trace intercultural relationships between all the continents. From 1986, the artistic production of the “forgotten continents", Africa, South America, Asia and Oceania, was subjected to systematic exploration. This research made the landmark exhibition Magiciens de la terre possible. What Magiciens de la terre did was to reveal a host of surprising, free and completely unknown works to the world. Since then, a whole, previously ignored slice of contemporary creativity began to take its rightful place in world art history.

An intimate, private art for the whole world

The exhibition mounted at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao brings together internationally acclaimed artists and many younger, particularly promising creative spirits. Some of them live in cosmopolitan areas with up-to-the-minute knowledge of the latest trends and currents, while others, from rural areas, are steeped in the more profoundly rooted African traditions. 100% Africa includes artists capable of inventing authentic “intergalactic machines" for imagining and evoking other worlds, and others, particularly sculptors, with their roots in their native lands, who find their inspiration in African traditions, beliefs, tales and legends.

What links them all is that, while their creations are impregnated by and intimately associated with African reality, they aspire to worldwide legitimacy. The sheer quality of their works undoubtedly deserves acknowledgement in contemporary art history. One might say that these artists provide snapshots of their surroundings, which then work as a contemporary means of transmitting the knowledge and wisdom inherited from the oral African tradition. This is what the people of Kinshasa (in the republic of the Congo) refer to as radio-trottoir, a Franco-African word roughly equivalent to our urban “grapevine". In Andre' Magnin’s view, 100% Africa underscores the importance of group-related issues proper to the community, proving once again that, despite the artists’ bid for worldwide acceptance and understanding, “the community remains one of the unavoidable realities of life in Africa today."

Among the artists involved in this unique, ground-breaking exhibition on display at the Guggenheim Museum is the great “universalist" artist from the Ivory Coast, Fre'de'ric Bruly Bouabre', creator in 1958 of the Be'te' Alphabet, a system of ideas, linguistic elements and pictograms documenting the oral tradition of his people. This is one of Bruly Bouabre'’s essential works where he illustrates his view that African traditions and reality “possess a radiant beauty that deserves to be interpreted and presented with pride to inform and instruct mankind."

This urge to celebrate the idea of community, coupled with the desire to break down barriers and frontiers, provides the basis for the work of one of the Congo’s most celebrated painters included in the exhibition, Che'ri Samba. Samba is the co-founder, together with Che'ri Che'rin, Moke' and Bodo, of what is known as “Zairian popular painting". “My art is impregnated by my surroundings", says Samba. “It comes from the people, it concerns the people and is addressed to it. Whatever his origins, an artist must make himself understood the world over."

Through the “visionary, utopian cities" that are such a prominent feature of his work, Bodys Isek Kingelez, who lives in the heart of the sprawling, chaotic mega-city of Kinshasa (Republic of the Congo), accepts a commitment at once both aesthetic and poetic to African art. Kingelez uses his cities to anticipate the creation of a new world, one that is open to his community.

Benin-born Romuald Hazoume', well known around the world for his famous “drum masks", finds his inspiration in African history, culture, beliefs and traditions. In his works, petrol drums rescued from garbage heaps—a neatly convenient symbol for consumerism—are transformed into masks, as a means of condemning the corruption on the African continent and stigmatizing the policies of Western countries as regards Africa, which, the artist believes, has been used by the West basically as a “garbage tip."

Sacred African art is also included in the exhibition in the shape of work by the late Madagascan artist Efiaimbelo, considered until his recent death the island’s most prestigious producer of such art, thanks to his ability to transmit to Africa’s younger generations the ancestral knowledge and wisdom of his people. His “aloalos" are traditional sculptures that adorn the tombs of the rich or of African spiritual chiefs, through which the artist paid due tribute to the after-life.

Although African photography went unacclaimed internationally until the nineteen-nineties, in 100% Africa the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is pleased to show some photos by leading photographers Keita, Sidibe', Ojeikere and Depara, whose works bear witness to the history of their countries.

From 1948 to 1962, Mali’s great self-taught photographer Seydou Keita (1923-2001) produced thousands of portraits of the inhabitants of Bamako, the country’s capital. Quite apart from their sociological value, the quality and character of his photographs won him international recognition. He aimed to use these photos, often taken in unusual, highly distinctive settings, to reflect the inner being of his subjects as much as their appearance.

A new generation of photographers emerged in the ebullient ‘50s that was totally involved in cultural and social life; its members played leading roles in society while acting as witnesses to it. The archives of Malick Sidibe' from Mali and Congolese artist Depara, are treasure troves of detailed information on the early years of decolonization in Africa, full as they are of snapshots of daily life and familiar things.

One highly distinctive note is struck by the selection of works by Nigerian Ojeikere, who, all of 35 years ago, embarked with remarkable determination on a very unusual artistic project devoted entirely to recording the diversity and beauty of African hairstyles, which he sees as genuine creations, considering them to be an “age-long legacy." His work unites anthropology, ethnography and, above all, aesthetics.

100% Africa would have been impossible to mount without a profound knowledge and understanding of the historical, political, sociological and cultural context in which artists in black Africa work. The exhibition makes a major new claim for the place in contemporary art history that African artists so richly deserve. Rather than just considering them from the perspective of their origins, we need to appreciate African artists today for the dazzling variety, singularity and sheer power of their art.

Opening: October 12, 2006

Guggenheim Museum
Avenida Abandoibarra, 2 - Bilbao

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