In Bye-bye, Barbar, Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu’s text in the catalogue to Distant Relatives/Relative Distance, she describes the “moments to midnight on Thursday night at Medicine Bar in London. Zac, boy-genius DJ, is spinning a Fela Kuti remix. The little downstairs dance floor swells with smiling, sweating men and women fusing hip-hop dance moves with a funky sort of djembe … The whole scene speaks of the Cultural Hybrid: kente cloth worn over low-waisted jeans; African Lady over Ludacris bass lines; London meets Lagos meets Durban meets Dakar. Even the DJ is an ethnic fusion: Nigerian and Romanian; fair, fearless leader; bobbing his head as the crowd reacts to a sample of Sweet Mother.”
It is this blend of people and places — this crossing and blurring of boundaries between geographies and cultures, private and shared spaces — that holds the interest of Distant Relatives curators Michael Stevenson and Joorst Bosland. Their idea for the exhibition started about a year and a half ago in response to the increasingly high profile of contemporary South African artists, and the reality that home audiences often do not get to see the work of their European and American counterparts. Particularly those living in the African diaspora.
The six artists on show — in addition to being darlings of the international art circuit — all use their links to Africa to fuel global debates challenging old-school phenotypic identity, belonging and that indefinable expression of home. But it is the “Muthaland” link that interests the curators and creates a thread through very different levels of expression.
Julie Mehretu — daughter of an Ethiopian father and American mother of European descent — was born in Addis Ababa, raised in the United States, studied in Dakar and is currently based in New York. Her complex Heavy Weather etchings, monumental at nearly one square metre, are composed of delicate lines which, in combination, describe the heaving, swirling, destructive path of Hurricane Katrina. Truly visually beautiful, her work seems to speak quietly — but with harsh vocabulary — of displacement, destruction and panic-driven relocation. A graduate of the acclaimed Walker Art Centre, an institution that houses some of the world’s leading artists, Mehretu, in 2005, was also one of the recipients of the MacArthur Foundation fellowships (commonly referred to as the “genius grant”).
Senam Okudzeto — born in Chicago to an African-American mother and Ghanaian father — spent most of her childhood in Ghana and Nigeria and now lives between London, Basel and Accra. One of three artists currently in Johannesburg for the exhibition, Okudzeto sometimes links her paintings of bodies and body parts by painting on to the wall space between them. Classic in execution and presentation, the works reflect the artist’s continual travels between Africa and the West. Okudzeto notes that, “having been a gypsy for the longest time, all I ever move around is a suitcase and a roll of paintings … and being itinerant, and making work wherever I go, the medium and material are as portable as I am. There’s something great about being able to just stop, pull up a restaurant bill, or your plane ticket or a piece of paper and start to work.”
Laden with contemporary concerns about gender politics, the work is sumptuously sensuous and seductive. Okudzeto recalls the tale of a past and terrible lover her friends called the “pig”. While in love with him she started a series of drawings (part of the Disarmament Series of small paintings of gesturing hands) “that just oozed sexuality”. A friend walked into the studio one day and asked: “Oh my god, did you do this when you first fell in love with the pig?” “And she was totally right,” clarifies Okudzeto, “It was … just my hands … but they were throbbing.”
Two other artists here to grace the walls of the Standard Bank Gallery are Barthélémy Toguo and Odili Odita. Toguo studied arts in Côte d’Ivoire, France and Germany. The materials and origins of his installation function almost as a checklist of the curators’ concern with the cosmopolitan: a wooden stamp sculpted on his visit; watercolours from Paris; banana boxes and mosquito netting from South Africa.
Odita moved from Nigeria to the US in 1966, the year of his birth. Also a critical writer for Flash Art and NKA, he is currently an associate professor at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. Odita first exhibited in Johannesburg during its 1997 biennale.
His work on Distant Relatives leans towards classic modernism. But, says Odita, in the art and belief systems of Western modernism, reality starts and ends at the edge of the artwork, of the city or country, of the mind or political state. Here, mixed by hand, his colour shards intersect at acute angles, drawing the eye both to the centre of the work and over its edge. As he says in the catalogue, his inspiration comes from “my intellectual rumination and fascination for television, wallpaper, the computer and all they hold in relation to the idea of painting.” Television he calls a brainwashing device. Wallpaper he calls the “conceptual end-game for high-modernist painting and the computer, he says, is a digital-spacial phenomenon.
Owusu Ankomah was born and studied in Ghana and now lives and works in Germany. His paintings on exhibition are from the Movement series, using symbols from the 400-year old Adinkra sign system (described by Safu Mafundikwa in Afrikan Alphabets: The Story of Writing in Afrika as representing “proverbs, historical events, and attitudes as well as objects, animals, and plants”.)
Traditionally printed on textiles by the Akan people of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, Ankomah here reproduces the symbols in thick black paint on white canvas. Emerging, just visibly, from the field that has grown to include signs from sources as diverse as urban graffiti and science, are figures in movement. The curators of Distant Relatives write that his inspiration for these figures are also disparate, “ranging from the muscular bodies drawn by Michelangelo through to capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian martial art which, disguised as a dance, once served the slaves of Bahia as an instrument of resistance”.
Wangechi Mutu — the only artist working in an electronic medium — was born and raised in Kenya and schooled in Wales and at Yale University in New York. Her video Cutting was filmed in Presidio, a desert town on the border of Mexico and the US. Shown at sunset in increasing silhouette, the artist slashes at a piece of wood, each down stroke accompanied by jarring, metallic sound. Without biographical or geographical information, the artist could be anyone, anywhere.
Seen as a collection, the individual bodies of work on Distant Relatives are sharp, discrete statements, a fact that disturbs Cape Town critic Linda Stupart. She writes, on artthrob.co.za (in response to the Cape Town leg of the exhibition shown at Michael Stevenson Gallery earlier this year), that “The problem … is that these artists’ works seem to have been lumped together in a manner that is often thematically and curatorially incoherent … not really living up to its potential as a concept-driven, curated show.” But, ironically, she seems to miss that the works’ eclecticism is its greatest strength. A show of this form is, by nature, varied.
True cohesiveness is nearly impossible with such wide debates, such different experiences, such constant permutation of the very subject matter the curators interrogate. Stevenson and Bosland present the whole as a series of themed short stories, leaving it to the viewer to decipher what it means to be a global African. It is this concept that Tuakli-Wosornu sums up in her delightful and derivative “Afropolitan”, a conceptual term that challenges Stupart’s desperate need to classify and categorise. Perhaps it’s a Cape Town thing.
Distant Relatives/Relative Distance is on at the Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg, until December 2. Tel: (011) 631 1889