Of Beauty, Blackness & Power

We were inspired by the emergence of African artists at European art events to work with Philippe Dupont, a great lover of contemporary African art, in realising this exhibition of African-American and African photography: Of Beauty, Blackness & Power, which we finished installing just a few days before quarantine began.

This exhibition highlights seven contemporary artists’ perspectives on African-American and African identity.

While four of the artists use the medium of self-portrait, each vantage point is different, spanning multiple generations. As is often the case for exhibitions in the Arendt House hall, we selected up-and-coming photographers and artists whose work has appeared at important shows like the Whitney, Sharjah and Venice Biennials.

The 22 photographs chosen portray novel positions in photography, which are connected to diverse aesthetic questions surrounding issues of African and African-American identity.

The common thread running through the works is a singular, personal stance toward African and African-American history and culture. On one side, we have African-American artists from the post-black, post-racial era; on the other, African artists dealing with topical questions related to the realities of urban and post-apartheid life, as well as themes inspired by African tradition.

In front of the camera, she assumes a series of roles, playing with racist clichés, African culture and even different social masks. To borrow a term from Jung, her self-portraits become personas that she wears for the space of a picture.

Thus it is she who, from one photograph to the next, holds up a mirror to the viewer, offering herself into a duel of gazes and fixing hers upon us with beauty and force.

Starkly mindful of inequity, Muholi reports being inspired by the negative experiences she has had in Europe and the United States, both as a black person and with respect to gender: she is also an activist for the cause of lesbians in Africa, where the fight is far from won.

In the work of Ghanaian artist Prince Gyasi, community involvement and the exploration of the visual aesthetic of black people take on a more colourful and playful tone. With their lightness and humour, his photographic compositions send out a message of hope.

Black bodies against colourful backgrounds, firmly rooted in the contemporary culture of his home country, proclaim a kind of counter-current to white standards of beauty. 

Choreography and the power of ritual also lie at the heart of the video and photographic works of South African artist Mohau Modisakeng.

He made his professional breakthrough at the 2017 Venice Biennial with the video installation Passage. In his work, Modisakeng revisits South Africa's violent past, often taking his own body as a subject.

His powerful portrait series Baheberu (meaning “Hebrew”) makes reference to a people who, after their exodus, will one day form a new kingdom.

He creates images of supernatural beauty – as in Emira, another series – using the African body in metaphorical and symbolic performances that express the violence of South Africa’s history. Referencing spirituality, invoking the ancestors in highly choreographed scenes, he denounces all forms of racist segregation.

For the budding South African artist Lunga Ntila, femininity and sexuality are at the root of the “distorted” self-portraits through which she advocates for women in Africa.

In her words: “My feminism looks like freedom; it is opinionated and unapologetic.” As an artist, she works to dismantle stereotypes of black womanhood.

In her fragmented collages, she addresses the subject of blackness, the fragility of identity, and beauty as an aesthetically and culturally loaded concept. Her superb mini-collages made from self-portraits reference historic art movements such as cubism, but in working from the perspective of African culture, she does the exact opposite of the avant-garde artists of the early XX century. Picasso and the cubists were inspired by African masks, while Ntila uses her own black face as a point of departure, progressively deconstructing it until it itself becomes a sort of mask.

This concludes our review of the African artists in our exhibition. Now we move on to those from the US.

Internationally renowned American mixed-media artist Lyle Ashton Harris explores intersections between the personal and the political in society. In photomontages, mixed-media collage works and arresting self-portraits, he plays with notions of African-American ethnicity, gender and identity in contemporary urban culture. While living in Africa – spending several years in Ghana and Tanzania – and then in the Bronx in a community shaped by South African victims of political exile, Harris enjoyed total freedom of expression in his development.

In his self-portraits, he conveys the violence to which black people have been subjected. At once, handcuffs symbolise both slavery and rebellion.

With collections of imagery, he seeks to create complex iconographic references within a melting pot of US and African culture, in perpetual defiance of the establishment.

His piece Anansi is a reference to the spider of West African folklore that is widely known among the Akan people of Ghana.
Folk tales passed down through oral tradition describe the spider’s strength and cunning when confronted with superior forces. This collage using Ghanaian cloth and two-dye sublimation prints presents a clash of disparate images. Replete with symbolism and imagery from different cultures, his works leave the door open to viewer interpretation.

We included Caecilia Tripp, the only European artist in the group, to gain a plurality of gazes on African and African-American culture. Tripp now divides her time between New York and Toronto.

Renowned for her five-screen film installation Even the Stars Look Lonesome, shown at the Sharjah Biennial, her work focuses on various forms of freedom, utopia and civil disobedience in a globalised world. Poetic, political and ecological, her storytelling gives a central role to new languages, the investigation of sound and the examination of cultural and social codes.

Meaningful in their own right, the photographs featured in the exhibition are stills from Even the Stars Look Lonesome, which is grounded in the writings and research of the Senegalese historian and scientist Cheikh Anta Diop.