Milan | Yards of Image | 9 February – 2 April 2017
From 9 February to 2 April 2017, the gallery Yards of Image in Milan hosts the collective curated by Silvia Cirelli, WE CALL IT “AFRICA”. Artists from Sub-Saharan Africa, an exhibition entirely dedicated to the complex and multifaceted artistic panorama of the countries of the so-called Sub-Saharan Africa.
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The choice of the title is provocatively to dwell on how many times a forced geographical or generational specificity is used, circumscribing or even worse "ghettoizing" a particular creative scene. WE CALL IT “AFRICA” therefore represents the attempt to explore the various and different "Africa", the countless cultural and aesthetic universes that populate this multifaceted panorama, emphasizing the relationship between art and contemporary society.
Dimitri Fagbohoun (Benin), Bronwyn Katz (South Africa), Marcia Kure (Nigeria) and Maurice Mbikayi (Democratic Republic of Congo) are the interpreters invited to tell, for the first time in Italy, the many contaminations in art of highly topical themes, focusing on sociocultural issues, identity and geopolitics, particularly representative of the complex African reality.
These artists already boast important international participations: Dimitri Fagbohoun was among the protagonists of the collective The Divine Comedy at the MMK Museum in Frankfurt in 2014; Marcia Kure is part of prestigious public collections such as those of the Center Pompidou in Paris, del British Museum di Londra e del Smithsonian National Museum of African Art di Washington; Maurice Mbikayi is a finalist of the Luxembourg Art Prize 2016; while Bronwyn Katz won in 2015 il Sasol New Signatures Merit Prize (South Africa) with video Ground Reminder, also presented on this occasion.
They open the exhibition, the works of the Congolese Maurice Mbikayi (‘74), whose artistic practice focuses onimpact of technology on the African social fabric, and on the sad reality of electronic waste dumps that are literally poisoning Africa. To installations made entirely with recycled technological materials, the artist combines works that investigate the theme of dandyism in Congolese everyday life, a widespread phenomenon that it adopts, in addition to a certain eccentricity in clothing, also a specific ethical model.
The works of Marcia Kure (‘70), which instead questions the effects of post-colonialism and the consequent fragmentation of identity and society, a fragmentation that is also projected in the expressive modalities she herself chose. Its, it is in fact an aesthetic vocabulary that focuses on a multifaceted imaginary where forces in continuous contrast coexist, opposite elements that cancel each other out, they generate an overbearing tension - linguistic and conceptual -, attributable to the allegory of a "broken" inheritance and memories of a restless nature.
The intertwining of suggestions often in contrast with each other also returns to the artistic practice of Dimitri Fagbohoun (‘72), that ranges between sculpture, videos and installations, pushing towards a grammatical eclecticism that enhances themes such as the memory, politics, religion and the poetic dimension of existence. In a visionary narrative that plays on the balance between the visible and the invisible, the artist confronts the vulnerability of the human being, exploring the processes of creation and destruction.
The exhibition ends with the young woman Bronwyn Katz (‘93), that amazes with an artistic research with a complex immersive power. At the heart of his stylistic code, the importance of the land as a custodian but also guardian of the South African cultural memory, a memory that hides the scars of a history that has seen first colonialism and now a ferocious economic neo-colonialism. The sensorial aspect is dominant in the aesthetic plot of this talented performer, capable of unveiling with timid urgency, a universe that from private, it soon becomes collective.
WE CALL IT “AFRICA”. Artists from Sub-Saharan Africa
by Silvia Cirelli
9 February – 2 April 2017
Inauguration: Thursday 9 February 2017
Yards of Image
Via Atto Vannucci 13, Milan
Free admission
Hours: Tuesday – Saturday: 11 – 19; Mondays and public holidays by appointment
Info: +39 02 91638758
info@officinedellimmagine.it
www.officinedellimmagine.it
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