Ibrahim El Salahi

A visionary modernist

Source: http://www.newafricanmagazine.com/special-reports/other-reports/154-contemporary-african-art-fair/a-visionary-modernist

One of the Sudan’s greatest cultural ambassadors, the majestic Ibrahim El-Salahi, is also one of the continent’s greatest contemporary artists, as Beverly Andrews discovered at a recent one-man show.

1:54 reports

The Sudan has a rich history which dates back to antiquity where its fortunes were very much intertwined with that of ancient Egypt. The country was in ancient times the home of the great Nubian and Kush empires but much of the Sudan’s contemporary history has been mired in conflict. Two successive civil wars have plunged the region into armed chaos but with the peaceful succession of South Sudan there are now hopes that the country can once again be celebrated for its rich cultural life, and Ibrahim El-Salahi is at the forefront of this renaissance.

London’s prestigious Tate Modern is now playing host to a long overdue retrospective of this great artist’s work. This mammoth show chronicles his exhaustive career and in doing so also charts his turbulent personal life – a life that includes early acclaim as well as subsequent imprisonment. Salahi said in a recent interview: “When people ask me what I do and I say I paint, they ask, do you paint houses? I say no, but if I did I would have a lot more money. What I paint are ideas which come to me in my mind and seem to develop independently, ideas which I am always not aware of but that seem to exist somewhere in my subconscious.”

The concept of the subconscious is a powerful one and can be very much seen in El-Salahi’s work, work that is a wonderful fusion of traditional African, Islamic and European art forms. Both his paintings and his drawings on the surface initially appear to take the viewer on one single journey but after closer inspection, the images seem to take on a life of their own, a life filled with multiple meanings, the surface meaning and then the deeper subconscious one.

An example of this would be his painting dedicated to the late Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba was the first democratically elected prime minister of what was then the Republic of Congo, now DRCongo. He helped win the Congo its independence from Belgium, but subsequently found his socialist government deposed in a military coup, a coup that was backed by the West. Lumumba himself was captured and tortured by the military government and then finally murdered by western assassins.

Many African commentators trace the Congo’s current problems to Lumumba’s overthrow and this is very much echoed in the painting. It depicts skeletal mourners carrying the corpse of their dead leader on their heads. It is as if his death drains away their own life force in the same way
Lumumba’s assassination propelled the country into a period of instability that it has yet to emerge from.

Some of El-Salahi’s paintings are simply labelled “Untitled”. El-Salahi states: “In many ways they are like children, you give them names and then they grow up and the names no longer suit them. I gave up naming them because to do that in some ways dictates what paintings should mean to people who see. The most important thing I feel is the meaning people bring to them, not one I want to impose.”

So much of El-Salahi’s work does seem to fuse the present with the past. It is of Africa now, with all its contradictions with Africa of antiquity. One painting called, “The last sound”, is of a African mask which seems to literally depict not only the death mask itself and its physical essence but also to be reaching for a more mystical meaning, an attempt to trace the very moment at which the soul actually departs from the body.

It is both haunting and beautiful and contains an image that appears in many of El-Salahi’s other works, the crescent and the moon. “Another,” appears to be not so much a literal depiction of a tree but rather the female essence of all of creation. One of the most beautiful pieces in this wonderful retrospective is a collection of images simply called “Reborn sounds of childhood dreams II” in which there appear to be depictions of images from our dreams – the fragments that lurk in our subconscious and only emerge in the middle of the night.

Now at the age of 80, El-Salahi’s journey to his current status as one of Africa’s most renowned contemporary artists has been a long and torturous one. Born to an Islamic teacher in Sudan’s second city of Omdurman, his first commission was decorating writing slates at his father’s Qura’anic school. He went on to study art at Khartoum’s Goron Memorial College and subsequently won a scholarship to London’s Slade art school in 1954. He says of his experience in London that it was a place where he was able to discover Cezanne, Giotto and various other European artists.
On his return to the Sudan, however, he found resistance to his new artistic vision. He describes the experience in this way. “I organised an art exhibition in Khartoum of still lifes, portraits and nudes. People came to the show just for the soft drinks. After that no one came.”

So he started to look for something that would help the people there to connect to his work. In a recent interview he recalls: “I started to write small Arabic inscriptions in my paintings, almost like postage stamps and people started to come towards me. Then I began to break down the letters and a Pandora’s box opened. Animal forms, human forms and platforms began to emerge. That was when I really started working.”

El-Salahi then travelled to Nigeria and met Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka and started to become aware of the cultural renaissance that was underway throughout Africa. He says of this time: “It was exciting, but also frustrating, because there was little response from the rest of the world or even Africa itself. Everything went quiet.”

El-Salahi subsequently fell out of favour with the Sudanese government and was imprisoned in appalling conditions: “There were 10 of us in a cell, sharing a bucket that was overflowing. The penalty for being caught with writing instruments was solitary confinement but I kept working, drawing on scraps I buried in the ground.” He simply states of this traumatic time that “I learned a great deal.”       

El-Salahi now lives in Oxford in a kind of self-imposed exile but his work still transports those who see it back to his homeland, even with the colours he uses – the ochres, browns, black and green are all very much the colours of the Sudanese soil.

The abiding impression one gets from seeing El-Salahi’s paintings is that of his ability to paint both spirit and form, to paint not only what he sees but mystically the very essence of what gives it life; be it a tree or the portrait of a person, he treats both with the same reverence and respect.
For so much of the last century contemporary African art has struggled to be accepted on the international stage but that struggle appears now to be coming to an end; with an increasing number of contemporary African artists now taking their rightful place. No one deserves this more than El-Salahi, who fought, at times, a solitary battle to have African art taken seriously. Seeing his breathtaking work on display at London’s Tate Modern you feel that his name most certainly can and should be mentioned in the same breath as many of the other European artistic giants of both the 20th and 21st centuries. He is truly a remarkable artist.

AFRICAN ART FAIR IN LONDON PART OF FREEZE.

New African 1:54 Special – Newfound Visibility

Source: http://1-54.com/newfound-visibility/

Posted on 29.09.2013

• Abidjan
 
• Congo
 
• Côte d’Ivoire
 
• Cotonou
 
• Dae es Salaam
 
• Dakar
 
• Kinshasa
 
• Lagos
 
• Maputo
• Morocco
 
• South Africa

The art dealer André Magnin has played a pivotal role in the dissemination of African contemporary art outside Africa. In 1989, he co-curated the global art exhibition Magiciens de la terre in Paris, after which he became director of the well-known Pigozzi Collection for 20 years. In 2009 he founded Magnin-A, his eponymous agency which represents a diverse array of artists including Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, Romuald Hazoumè, Chéri Samba, Kura Shomali and Billie Zangewa. He explains to Olivier Coutau how the African art market has evolved from a situation of relative non-existence in the 1990s to a situation of newfound visibility.

Photo: Mart Engel

Olivier Coutau: You first gravitated towards Africa while investigating the continent for the exhibition, Magiciens de la terre, which opened at the Pompidou Centre in 1989. How did the art world respond to the exhibition at the time?

André Magnin: Magiciens de la terre was innovative in the sense that, for the first time, artists from all over the world were shown on an equal footing. While asking many questions to art history, institutions, galleries and collectors, the exhibition exposed several African artists. But, at the time and in the following years, the market for African contemporary art was non-existent.

In the early 1990s, access to mobile phones or the internet was scarce. You had to go up to Lagos, Kinshasa, Dar es Salaam, Maputo or Abidjan to discover the artists and their work. A situation that discouraged dealers and other art professionals.

Following Magiciens de la terre, the Jean Pigozzi Collection gave to a group of about forty African artists an international visibility. This was not a commercial en- deavor, but a non-conventional adventure aiming at challenging the cannons and broadening the field of art history through a number of collective and solo shows. It is only at the end of the 1990s that a market for African art started to be thinkable. Artists from the Pigozzi Collection began to sell, consequently their success created a momentum that encouraged a younger generation of African artists. I believe the collection played a vital role in this respect.

The above painting by Kura Shomali [Je tire le premier, 2011] is an example of an African artist who is going beyond visual traditions and appealing to a global audience

OC: In 1999, Sotheby’s auctioned works from the Pigozzi Collection. This was the first major auction sale dedicated to contemporary art from Africa. How was the event organised and what was the outcome?

AM: Sotheby’s was the first auction house to ask us for pieces from the Collection. It was an opportunity to contribute to the creation of a market and to raise the attention of collectors to an area they did not know. Twenty-eight artists were selected, including Romuald Hazoumè, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré and Chéri Samba among others.

Estimates ranged from €800 to €9,000. Fifty-six lots out of fifty-seven were sold and, on the whole, the results were higher than the estimates. Some positive results, but prices remained reasonable and could not compare with Western art auctions. It was neither a success nor a failure. For Sotheby’s, the test was not conclusive. The African contemporary art market was still hesitant and the main Western private collectors were absent.

OC: Since 2008 and 2009, auction sales of contemporary art from Africa have been more frequent. Specialised African galleries have emerged, some of which participate in international art fairs. You yourself have started a commercial activity with your agency Magnin-A. How do you explain this current market trend?

AM: Yes, indeed, during the last few years, auctions dedicated to contemporary Afri- can art have proliferated. But, with some exceptions, outstanding works are rare and results for the lesser-known artists are weak.

Paintings like this by the Congolese artist Chéri Samba [Lettre de la CPI, 2013] are now selling for in excess of €100,000

In 2009, noticing with Jean Pigozzi the limited presence in international art fairs of artists living and working in Africa, I decided to devote all my time to the promotion of African artists in the international art mar- ket. Other galleries or agencies dedicated to African contemporary art were created in Europe; they have brought a new energy to the market in the UK, in Germany, in Belgium and in Paris.

In addition, many in Africa have started to become aware that investing in art matters. I am thinking of the many biennales, private foundations, auction houses, art centres and galleries that contribute to the emergence of a market and stimulate artistic creation. However, it appears that the only African galleries present in major art fairs are from South Africa, where institutions and collectors support creation.

OC: From your experience, who buys contemporary African art today?

AM: With the growing interest of biennales, fairs, and other Western institutions in contemporary art from Africa, the visibility of artists from the continent has never reached such a level. As a consequence of this proliferation, buyers are very diverse. Most of them are Westerners; they can be private persons who, without being collec- tors, couldn’t resist the drawings of artists like Bouabré. African artists have also been integrated into public and private collections internationally, such as the Tate Modern and the Smithsonian Museum, not to mention the Charles Saatchi collection, the Sindika Dokolo collection and other major collections.

Prominent African collectors are still too rare, but things are moving and some of them, like Alami Lazraq in Morocco or Gordon Schachat in South Africa, are thinking of creating private museums on the continent.

OC: Certain African artists have reached the one million euro mark at auction. On the other hand, most artists living and working on the continent are still very far away from it. How do you explain this disparity?

AM: Yes, some African artists have reached important prices, but they are still far from the market records of the Western, Chinese or Indian ‘stars’. There are also numerous well-established Western artists who never reach this level. African artists from the di- aspora benefit from the important network of their own countries, where there are of- ten serious markets. With the exception of Nigeria and South Africa, the art market in Africa Sub-Saharan is still in its infancy. But, some African artists, without reach- ing these records, still do very well in the international market. For example, works by the Congolese artist Chéri Samba, can sell for €50,000 to €100,000, or a big series by the Ivorian artist Frédéric Bruly Bouabré can also reach a very high price.

OC: You have been visiting Africa for over 20 years. How has it changed as a continent and what kind of impact will this have on the future?

AM: With an economic growth of 5% a year, Africa is now a driving force. A new African middle class is emerging and eager to live and consume. In 2050, with 30% more inhabitants than China, Africa will be the biggest market in the world! I believe that the well-off African middle class will make a difference in the development of an African art market. When this sector of society begins to buy national artists, it will undoubtedly help to support the continent’s vast artistic production, reflecting that of China and India. I foresee a real market emerging from Africa’s rise, impacting on African artists’ international ratings.

I think African institutions can help the public to better know and understand con- temporary art. For example, the Foundation Zinsou in Cotonou has been a pioneer in carrying out a tremendous work to advocate cultural democratisation, while the Raw Material Company, in Dakar, aims also at reinforcing artistic creation and dissemina- tion. Major international initiatives such as London’s 1:54 contemporary African art fair, will show all the richness, diversity and dynamism of artistic production from the continent. In my view, the trend is deeply rooted. We can be optimistic in spite of all the difficulties.

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André Magnin’s agency Magnin. A will be participating in 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair, please see our exhibitors page for more information

(This feature was originally published in New African magazine’s special on contemporary African art in association with 1:54, available to buy from October, 2013)

FRIEZE MAGAZINE

White Mischief

DEBATE

Source: http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/white_mischief/

Issue 7 November-December 1992

'Out of Africa'

The story begins one day in 1989 when an idiosyncratic and disillusioned European art collector visits an exhibition. The artists have unpronounceable names, they speak in languages unknown to the collector’s ears and they live in distant locations which he cannot find on his big plastic globe. It is like no exhibition he has ever seen before and he falls in love with it. Unable to buy what he sees, which already belongs to a big corporation, the collector engages the services of a young curator. He sets him the task of researching and acquiring new art from the most exotic places in the world. Gradually the collector’s dream comes true and before long the young man has returned with hundreds of works by artists from Africa. Delighted with the marvels he has brought home, the collector proudly displays his treasures to his friends. An exhibition is born…1

Out of Africa, the exhibition of eleven contemporary African artists which has been touring Spain, Holland and Mexico with a slightly different cast and title (Africa Now), has arrived at the Saatchi Collection in London. The exhibition, which marks a new move in Saatchi’s programme in showing a guest collection, is directly related to Magiciens de la Terre, the hotly-debated global art show which took place in Paris in 1989 and in many ways opened the doors of contemporary art to non-Western expressions of Modernism. André Magnin, who was responsible for ‘discovering’ the majority of African artists included in the notorious Magiciens exhibition, has spent the last three years trekking through the African bush in search of art which he feels embodies the present expression of the immemorial past. Africa, that much abused ‘reservoir of the esoteric’,2 couldn’t provide a better playground for the fantasies of a jaded collector and an adventure-hungry curator.

Unlike Magiciens de la Terre, the choice of artists in Out of Africa does not extend to Europe, America or Asia, although André Magnin and Jean Pigozzi, the collector to whom the works belong, intend eventually to cover other ‘Third World’ territories. The show has no discernable curatorial concept other than Africa now, which places it in a very vulnerable position. It is primarily the private collection of a rich enthusiast, and as such it has a highly personal flavour - possibly its only saving grace. When questioned about his selection criteria at the first showing in Las Palmas last year, Magnin showed slides of sunsets and landscapes he had photographed on his travels through Mozambique, Madagascar, Zaire and Nigeria. He spoke of personal encounters, of feeling empathy with the African artist’s working environment, finally revealing his decision to avoid ‘official’ artists - in other words artists who have received formal art training and are patronised locally to the point where their work reflects national identities.

Several artists I spoke to recently in West and East Africa are unhappy about the way their work is currently exhibited on the international circuit. Their criticisms are rarely directed towards details in the art itself, an unfortunate reflection of the huge isolation they experience working at different ends of the continent. What they question is the nostalgia inherent in the efforts of French curators and museum administrators, in particular, to search out the ‘primitive’, ‘tribal’, untutored African artist. The most problematic distinction to date rests on a predilection for self-taught artists who, as Jean Pigozzi writes in the catalogue that accompanies Out of Africa, ‘have the internal fire of creation’ and therefore do not need to ‘go to art school or visit the Louvre or the Whitney’.3 Primitivism now extends beyond the specific period associated with cubism and l’Art Negre and re-emerges in the 90s as a search for the neo-exotic: the authentic African artist still working in the isolation of the African bush and without influence from Europe. As Eddie Chambers put it bluntly in a recent seminar in London, the Black artist, ranging from the Haitian-American Jean-Michel Basquiat to the Namibian John Muafangejo, has to be illiterate, surrounded with an aura of ‘juju’, and ideally deceased, to fit the appropriate Western stereotype. Efiaimbelo, the carver from Madagascar, whose funeral posts were displayed in a mock burial ground in the Africa Now exhibition corresponds in large part to this projection. Other artists in Pigozzi’s Contemporary African Art Collection such as Cyprien Tokoudagba and John Fundi, whose work is directly related to voodoo and beliefs in the spirit world, provide ample source material for the white man’s perennial thirst.

The Zairian painters Moke, Chéri Samba and his brother Cheïkh Ledy were well established in their home country before the arrival of Magnin. Their genre of painting, with its combination of richly detailed scenarios and biting social commentary, is part of the visual history of urbanisation in post-independence Zaire. While it lends itself well to encapsulation by a Western art market eager for new authenticity, this work is less favoured amongst fellow African artists, many of whom view this style of painting as an extension of popular graphics and sign-writing. Moke paints large-scale cartoons of his surroundings in Kinshasa with its night crowd, drunk on Skol and Primus beer, giving in to corruption or mythologising the experiences of the Gulf War. The Self Portrait, 1990, so the story goes, was inspired by Magnin at a point when Moke’s imagination was momentarily stymied. But that rumour does not weaken the power of the tryptich to point a cynical finger at the imaginary African artist who, in the third painting, has apparently disappeared into Van Gogh’s chair and lost his true African identity (the fateful premise of the Pigozzi collection). These paintings stand out because unlike the contrived translation onto canvas of Cyprien Tokoudagba and Esther Mahlangu’s mural art, or the grotesque tourist figures of Ivoirian Emile Yebo Guebehi, the Zairois group, sometimes described as ‘artistes provocateurs’,4 operate deftly between assimilation and subversion.

The international situation surrounding contemporary African art is changing so rapidly that the issues relating to its presentation outside of Africa often blur a vision of the aesthetic and conceptual concerns of the artists themselves. The temptation is far greater to write about the conditions generated by an exhibition of African art, than it is to explore the art. The vocabulary of 20th century African art is largely unfamiliar terrain to a Western audience, and so to speak of ‘African art’ is still in many respects to refer to the West’s understanding of ‘traditional art’ from Africa. Increasingly the term is being recognised as a discursive construct not unlike ‘Orientalism’, implying an imaginary realm with very real political consequences, a field of knowledge deeply entwined with the histories of colonialism, anthropology, museums of ethnography and the lucrative trade in ‘tribal’ art. In the past, interpretations of ‘traditional’ African art have generally fallen into two modes: ethnographic contextualisation, whereby objects act as testimonies of culture and artists are seen to be operating more within a social community than as individual creators, and a purely aesthetic approach, oblivious to ‘deep description’, that contents itself with the formal and evocative dimensions of the foreign object. This impossibly reductionist set of alternatives continues to bedevil the presentation of historical art from Africa. Ethnographic museums in Europe and America have been debating the crisis for several years, yet still seem unwilling to involve African artists and historians directly in the negotiation of their own artistic past.

The sudden interest of European and American museums and private collectors in purchasing contemporary art from Africa, which in a period of recession is considerably cheaper than its Euro-American counterpart, has aggravated this situation. Dealers and curators are placed in the immediate position of having to find a more compatible means of framing the works and ultimately commodifying the new aesthetic which doesn’t always fit neatly into its ‘tribal’ antecedent. It is clear from the current curatorial dilemma which has characterised recent exhibitions, such as Susan Vogel’s Africa Explores, 1991,5 that too little faith is invested in the ability of the art to stand its own ground without intervention from the West. The artists’ own reflections on their work are given anecdotal significance and written art criticism from Africa is generally treated as non-existent. The intellectual dimension to African art, claims the Ghanaian art historian Kojo Fosu, is rarely or never understood.6

Faced with a vast continent of over forty countries extending from Egypt to South Africa, Sierra Leone to Mozambique, and an unfathomable diversity of visual artistic expression, the urge to reduce 20th century African art into manageable categories (‘urban art’, ‘international art’, ‘popular art’, ‘self-taught’) overpowers any effort to accommodate a sense of the artists’ own decision-making process. Any exhibition has to take into account the desires of the artists whose works are being shown, and this applies to African as much as it does to European artists, but somehow this obvious channel is only intermittently pursued. Without direct feedback, a blanket-term such as ‘African artist’ remains uncontested. Is the disenfranchisement of the African artist still part of the narrow procedures of anthropological research, or are we encountering here an inadvertently Post-Modernist ploy? To rejoice in the hypothetical death of the author is one thing, but this disassociative strategy, when transposed onto the subjects of centuries of colonial oppression loses all the sovereignty of its philosophical position.

The latest travesty of Magnin and Pigozzi, which favours the untampered inspiration of the self-taught artist against the academically-trained painter or sculptor, effectively cancels out a significant proportion of African artists, many of whom have travelled abroad and whose concerns incorporate current critical and art-conceptual questions. Art departments have existed in universities right across Africa since the early 40s and although several are still run along an anachronistic Beaux Arts model, many artists are keen to benefit from this additional perspective, if only to rebel against its strictures. Oil on canvas is the dominant medium in West Africa and yet a number of younger artists have succeeded in forging an independent position through a conscious and sometimes political reappraisal of local materials and pigments. Atta Kwami, an artist based at Kumasi’s University of Science and Technology in Ghana, compresses hand-made paper dyed with pigments into grid-like permutations. Apparently convention-bound, these ‘Tana paintings’ seem to float between rational knowledge and instinctive action. This floating is likened by Kwami to the act of breathing.

‘Vouhou Vouhou’ is another spirit or movement which emerged in 1986 in Cote d’Ivoire as an expression of pictorial research in which ‘materials of retrieval’ could be made to redefine a new specificity within the multifarious identity of the Ivoirian artist. Saturated by a diet of Rambo, Dynasty and the Surrealist and Freudian inclinations of their professors, N’Guessan Kra, Youssouf Bath, Theodore Koudougnon and Yacouba Touré wrote manifestos and began to paint on jute and stretched animal skins with earth, sand, local chalk and natural pigments. This wasn’t collage as their French art school teachers had taught them, but a case of sticking together the fragmented inheritance of 20th century African art. Although Magnin’s speculative eye has wandered into ‘Vouhou’ country, these artists represent the ‘official’ domain he is keen to avoid. Their material works contain too many reflections of the ‘intellectual morgue’ of the West, and for Magnin, art in Africa ‘has nothing to do with a progressive history, composed of problems that are successively posed and answered’.7 The annulment of an African ‘avant-garde’ is yet another example of the Pigozzi/Magnin procedure. Whether or not an ‘avant-garde’ exists in the European sense of the word is a crucial point which needs to be debated within the complexity of the African context. For, as Efua Sutherland, the respected Ghanaian writer and initiator of literacy programmes put it to me recently: art in Africa was designed to aggregate social wealth. To be anti-society in the sense of the ‘avant-garde’ is for Africa to repeat the West’s history…

Issa Samb, artist, critic and founder of the Laboratoire Agit Art which has existed in Dakar since the late 70s, is wary of the numerous officialdoms which smother present practice. Unlike most of the West African states, Senegal has nurtured its home brood and artists have benefited from the social and cultural philosophies of poet and statesman Leopold Senghor. Even so Samb, like his colleague Etale Sukuro in Nairobi, whose paintings are treated as seditious material by the Kenyan authorities, stands happily outside this warm nest. He has no desire to couch his work in a new heritage industry, nor is he seduced by the razzmatazz of international art world glamour. His concerns lie with the immediate problems of dispossession and displacement in Africa and the lack of status accorded to the Tuareg and other nomadic peoples. If the world is moving fast toward a near pathological obsession with ethnic and racial differentiations, then all the more reason, he feels, to shift the power invested in boundaries. Perhaps that is why Samb chooses to paint on perishable materials, tarpaulins sewn together with daubs of shellac, paint and tar and hung from wooden poles like the makeshift banners which help to shelter the homeless. A blackboard with a chalk text defying the destruction of the Xelcom forests in Senegal commemorates Labour Day, a wire sculpture is rendered indiscernable against a mound of dead leaves, and as Issa Samb treads over the surface of his paintings in his studio in the rue Jules Ferry, one can’t help wondering how much longer it will be before artists from Africa are given a direct line. It may be possible to relegate to historical circumstances the misconceptions produced by the primitivist painters and collectors of l’Art Negre at the beginning of the century, but it is seriously debatable whether today European and American academic and commercial interests should once again be allowed to ventriloquise the other’s desires and thereby frame the access to art produced in Africa today.

Out of Africa, with its unfortunate title evoking scenes of Meryl Streep running into the arms of Robert Redford, may be part of the largest collection of its kind in the world, and does include some great pieces, but ultimately represents the imaginary Africa of its collector, an exotic safari into a world he has never personally experienced and probably never will.

1. Scenario to Out of Africa based on Jean Pigozzi’s own words in the introduction to Africa Now, catalogue pp.13-14

2. Wole Soyinka, ‘Between Self and System’ in Art, Dialogue & Outrage - Essays on Literature and Culture, New Horn Press, Ibadan 1988, p.64

3. Jean Pigozzi in Africa Now p.14

4. Graeme Ewens in World Beat, September 1991, p.30

5. Centre for African Art and The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York

6. see Kojo Fosu, Intellectual dimensions of Ghanaian visual art of the last decade, Paper presented at the National Festival of Arts and Culture, 25-27th August 1992, Kumasi College of Art, UST, Ghana

7. André Magnin in Africa Now, pp.17-21

Clémentine Deliss

frieze is now accepting letters to the editors for possible publication at editors@frieze.com.