africa art

Yinka Shonibare, MBE (1962) Nigeria/Britain

Yinka Shonibare (born 1962) is a British-

Nigerian artist living in the United Kingdom. His work explores cultural identity,

colonialism and post- colonialism within the contemporary context

of globalisation. In 2005, he was

appointed a Member of the Order of the British

Empire, or MBE, Member of the Most

Excellent Order of the British Empire, an

honorific title within the British order of chivalry.

To be an artist, you have to be a good liar. There’s no

question about that. If you’re

not, you can’t be a good artist. Basically, you have to

know how to fabricate, how to weave tales, how to tell lies, because you’re taking

your audience to a nonexistent space

and telling them that it does exist. But you have to be utopian in your approach. You have to create visions that don’t actually exist yet in the world—or that may actually someday exist as a result of life following art.

Double Dutch, 1994, mixed media with wax cloth

Dutch Wax cloth is a kind of cloth that is recognizable as “African” and yet is actually cloth inspired by

Indonesian batik (wax resist dyed) cloth produced by the Dutch for the African market.

Double Dutch was Shonibare’s first use of this material, one that would become a signature for his work.

Shonibare, The Swing (after Fragonard), 2001

The Swing is an 18th-century Rococo painting by Jean-Honoré Fragonard

Much of Shonibare’s work can be described as sculptural installation.

Very theatrical, playing on themes and concepts and in this case well known images from Western art history, but

with “African” Dutch wax cloth.

Shonibare, Last Supper (After Leonardo), 2012

Shonibare, Scramble for Africa, 2003 Based on the 1884-85 Berlin Conference, when European powers divided up Africa for colonization

Scramble for Africa (2003) and Black Gold (2005-6)

Why do you think Shonibare makes his figures headless? In this piece, it could be a a critique of the audacity and hubris of European powers to think they had the right to exploit Africa.

Black Gold (2005-6)

Shonibare's early paintings comprise small square canvases presented in a grid format upon a square or rectangular background color. More recently, they have featured small roundels on circular or oval painted backgrounds; and his latest works, with their glistening black splatter forms across the gallery wall, break down the idea of the border or edge altogether. Referencing "black gold," or Africa's rich oil resources, splatter paintings such as this one also recall the extravagant splashes and drips of the American abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock--to which they form a playful response.

Shonibare: “Well, Un Ballo in Maschera, believe it or not, was inspired by the current global situation, particularly the war in Iraq. I was thinking about King Gustav III of Sweden, who was fighting many wars on many fronts—with Russia, with Denmark—and spending a lot of money; as a result of this high spending, his population was impoverished, suffering. He was also an actor and a dandy, and he started the art academies in Sweden. He modeled himself on the French court and only spoke French. But he was fiddling while Rome was burning. There was a conspiracy to kill him. He loved masked balls, and he loved the theater, and it was while he was at one of those balls that he was assassinated. So I used him as a metaphor for power and its deconstruction.”

Shonibare explores the idea of film as a "moving tableau" or animated painting with luminous surfaces, sumptuous attention to detail and strong compositional effects. His first film, Un Ballo in Maschera, takes its title from Giuseppe Verdi's 1859 opera, inspired by the assassination of the Swedish King Gustav III at a masked ball in Stockholm in 1792. An elaborate costume drama featuring performers in Dutch wax ball gowns, frock coats and ornate Venetian-style masks, Shonibare's film represents his most technically complex project to date. Aristocracy and play, frivolity and excess are themes within the film.

Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball), 2004

October 12, 2017: breaking ground at

NMAFA for Shonibare Sculpture

Shonibare, Wind Sculpture VII, 2014 National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian, Washington, DC

https://africa.si.edu/ windsculpture/

Sokari Douglas Camp (1958-) Nigeria/Britain

Sokari Douglas Camp's work reflects her Nigerian heritage as well as her life in London. She is best known for her kinetic life-size welded steel portraits of Kalabari masquerade performers

and audiences drawn from her return visits to her homeland in Buguma,

Nigeria. As you will see in the interviews on Blackboard, she is soft

spoken and yet, while her work is often playful, it also has a deadly

serious side in response to current events, the devastating impact of oil

exploitation in the Niger Delta region, the execution of environmental activist

Ken Sarowiwa, the HIV-AIDS crisis, 9/11 and the imposition of sharia law

in northern Nigeria.

Like Shonibare, Camp was honored with the Most Excellent Order of the

British Empire (CBE)

The Kalabari hold different types of wakes for Christians and non-Christians. Church Ede is Sokari Douglas Camp’s memorial to her father, Chief Ngogo Obene George Douglas of Buguma, who died in 1984. Ede is a Kalabari word meaning “bed for lying in state”; church indicates the bed is for a Christian wake.

To the Kalabari, the greatest tribute one can offer someone upon his death is a brass bed. Deciding that steel was the grandest material she could work, Douglas Camp welded Church Ede in steel. Church Ede has two major elements: the bed and the mourners. The body is not physically present but is indicated by a depression in the bed. The mourning women, wearing headties, lace blouses and striped wrappers, stand at either side of the bed. Their hands, energized by electric motors, fan the body with handkerchiefs while the bed shakes, symbolizing the continuance of her father’s vital force in the afterlife.

https://africa.si.edu/exhibits/sokari/church.htm

Camp, Church Ede, 1994

Lisa Aronson: “Among the Kalabari Ijo, injiri is among the many categories of cloths used to adorn the walls of rooms in which the dead are laid in state during the wake. This tradition, known as ede, involves decorating beds with vast quantities and varieties of cloth. Each bed (as many as six or more for high-ranking individuals) is decorated with a different variety of fabric, each type arranged with an impressive degree of artistry and precision. The body will be placed on top of each bed for a designated period of time before being buried. This tradition is the Kalabari's way of honoring the dead by expressing their status and wealth as well as their connectedness with the spiritual realm.” https://africa.uima.uiowa.edu/topic-essays/show/19?start=19

Alali Aru 1985 (festival boat)

The Kalabari observe a 25-year ritual cycle in which masquerades are presented in honor of village heroes, ancestors and water spirits. In December 1984, Douglas Camp attended the centenary festival celebrating the founding of her hometown of Buguma. The celebration recreated the migration of her ancestors to Buguma and featured religious services, dances by women’s associations, a regatta of large canoes and the festival that signals the formal ending of a ritual cycle. The sights, sounds and drama of this and other Kalabari celebrations that the artist witnessed were the inspiration for a series of sculptures that work both collectively and independently—a huge festival boat with masqueraders, musicians and members of the audience.

https:// africa.si.edu/

exhibits/sokari/ alali.htm

Details of Alali Aru (1985) and examples of festival boats

The men’s Ekine association performs masquerades honoring water spirits. The carved wooden headdresses decorated with feathers, cloth and other items represent water spirits and are worn on top of the dancers’ heads to face the gods.

Masquerader with feather headdress, 1987

Big Alagba 1996 Sokari Douglas Camp: “Alagba is a female masquerade, a water spirit that is female. During a masquerade ceremony the Kalabari people of Nigeria perform dances in costumes that hide their identity. There is a seventeen year span of worshipping gods from the sea. Water has a lot to do with Kalabari life because we live on a series of islands in the Niger Delta. Only men can perform these ceremonies but women can watch when they are undertaken in public. Alagba, when she performs, wears a large head-dress. This makes the dancers head so large that from a distance the performer looks like a child because his head-dress is proportionally so much larger than the rest of his body. Alagba has beautiful regalia; feathers, mirrors, Christmas tree balls, tinsel and Alu Bete blue. (A ceremonial cloth with animals and symbols drawn on it.) All these elements added to Alagba’s character of uncertainty and glamour are very endearing. Alagba’s performance also has an edge in that the performer has to be tested to see if he can understand the talking drum. There is more than one Alagba performing when the Alagba Ti (the play / performance) happens. The details of tension, beauty and godliness are very inspiring and electric when remembering Alagba’s performances. Alagba has paddles in her hands rather like small cricket bats or flattened baseball bats. These are used to bang her anklets at certain moments during her performances. The dancer has to control a large head-dress, flowing regalia and to move around a spacious arena without showing that he is a man. Quite a task for any one to achieve.”

Big Alagba and Sekibo 1995 and 1996

Sokari: “Sekibo (a person who dances) is a sculpture that was made to lighten up the intensity of the masquerade characters that made up the show of Play and Display which I had in 1994 at the Museum of Mankind in London. Sekibo represents the men that are part of the secret society that both dance with the masqueraders and dress up as masqueraders. He is a link between the audience and the spiritual world of the masquerade characters. l have always admired how Kalabari men can dress in a traditional outfit of tartan patterned skirts, Victorian night shirts with bowler hats and walking sticks. In this unusually stylish atire they jump and turn in the air following the masqueraders and keep the crowd back whilst sometimes also leading the masquerade procession itself. I hope that together these two sculptures give the viewer a frame for, or a picture of, what a Kalabari performance is like.”

Drummers 1987

Kalabari talking drums: the drummers for a ritual cycle of Alagba’s

performance call out specific dance moves that the dancer must perform exactly as required, including stopping before specific places and honoring

the ancestors in a specific sequence. If the dancer gets is wrong, he may be

carried away in humiliation.

"So you can be in front of the drum house and the drummer will be playing his beat and you with your anklets can do another beat on top of his beat. So you know it's a layered percussional performance that can happen as well, depending on how good you are."

Alagba in Limbo 1996

In Alagba in Limbo, Sokari Douglas Camp illustrates the severity of public humiliation that male performers can experience if they fail to impress the female audience. Alagba is a female deity; thus, the male performer representing her must be able to conceal his gender for the entire performance, while successfully following the drum language to complete the dance. Alagba in Limbo depicts a group of males holding up the body of a failed performer in an disgraced manner, with his costume ripped, displaying his naked body underneath. The masquerader’s private parts are revealed to show his gender, as Sokari Douglas Camp describes, “He has been reduced to a man pretending to be a female god whose costume does not cover his private parts.”

Alagba in Limbo was created in 1996 in response to the execution of environmental activist and writer, Ken Sarowiwa. She felt that her people, her country, democracy, freedom, all were in limbo, like the dancer represented here … humiliated and ashamed.

Alagba in Limbo 1996 Big masquerade with boat and household

on his head, 1996

Mad Cow Busstop Gelede 1995

Yoruba Gelede Mask

Coloured Family Tree Gelede

1995

In 1995, Sokari Douglas Camp was invited to

do an exhibition at the British Museum in

response to works in their collection. She

had never seen Gelede masks up close, and they inspired her to

play with (appropriate?) the form in her own

work.

In the film Nigerian Art Kindred Spirits you can see some Gelede dancers (at about 18 minutes), followed by an interview with Sokari.

Naked Gelede 1995

He She 1996

Yoruba Gelede performers

September 11, 2001

Close to My Heart is connected to a series of work that is about photography and life in the Niger Delta. There is a photograph of flames from an oil well sandwiched in glass container which has oil in it. This is held by a woman dressed in traditional costume as if showing off something important. Kalabari people generally display photographs in public when someone close has died. (The dead person is shown in good health in an enlarged photograph). Generally the person holding the photograph is related to the deceased. There is an added emotion for the observer when they see the connection in the resemblance of the displayed image and the person carrying it.

It is the emotional content of holding such a photograph which is also my home (I am Kalabari) which inspired this work. My peoples’ health is being damaged and our environment is being polluted by the extraction of oil in this manner. As a piece of work, I like the combination of old and new. Acetate, oil, glass added to a traditional African woman. This combination is very real for me as an African living in these changing times. Nothing stays still.

Close to My Heart 1998

Oil Nigeria Prayer 1998

Open and Close 2003

Sokari: "Fela’s music was very sexy and when I think of his concerts I think of the women in his band, dancing and gyrating to the beat, scantily dressed in woven fabric and painted with fluorescent colours and beads. They were symbols of African beauties. Fela married all of these women to give them respect and sense of pride, marrying them all at the same time to eliminate the sentiment of whom was senior to another. When he did this it was spectacular because there were so many of them; twenty-three in total. People found it amusing but I thought it was wonderful and inventive. Looking at the idea of using Fela’s women to convey his spirit is apt because they gave life to his concerts. I am using cowries in the sculpture to make their costumes. Cowries in Nigeria are used as currency and for magical purposes. My sculpture will therefore be a fetish of some kind. A tall gyrating structure decorated with cowries and motorised. Fela was a symbol of West African style he had so much power but all of his strength could not save him from AIDS. This is a contemporary plight. I would like to convey his dynamism and power, his vulnerability in death and the irony of life. ‘If you say African woman na woman, she go say- she go say aah I be lady oh’.”

Exhibited in: Black President : The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti

Sharia Fubara 2000

19th century Kalabari Ijo

fubara funerary screen

Figure screens (below) were made by the Kalabari to honor, memorialize, and communicate with deceased leaders of their trading or canoe houses. One would have formed part of an altar in a side room of a meetinghouse. Originating in the 19th century, when European commerce flourished in the Niger Delta, these screens may have been inspired by early portrait photographs. Sokari appropriates the format of the fubara to challenge the imposition of sharia law in Northern Nigeria that advocated cutting off the hands of those deemed as offenders. This sculpture also denounces the harsh treatment of women under sharia law.

Guns and Oil 2003

Guns Nigeria Suicide 2003

Teasing Suicide, 2004 steel wood

Sokari: “This sculpture was created for an exhibition … in response to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Creating or acknowledging a new law is like creating new people. Our behavior and aspirations should change because of these new laws. A new law supporting children all over the world is a good start to a better future At the moment I am very inspired by ancient art from Italy Botticelli, Michael Angelo and so on, looking at iconic images from the Sistine chapel I was attracted to the painting of God creating Adam, I love the hand gesture of this composition as so many people recognize it. Interpreting this in steel, I have decided to concentrate on god and his cloak of cherubs and people. Was Michael Angelo trying to express how complex God is? Anyway my rendition is god with children in his cloak. His hand is out stretched. Once installed, I hope viewers will adopt Adam’s iconic pose of almost touching God.

God's Children/God's Gift 2016

Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel