Albertino Silva | Cape Verde | "Shoes-A-Pair"

Here is an artist from Cape Verde who is creating fun artwork using old shoes.

Artist: Albertino Silva
Country: Cape Verde
b.1967 - Present

For more information see Art Africa http://www.artafrica.info/html/artistas/artistaficha_i.php?ida=42

Sandile Zulu | South African

Source: South African Contemporary Art
Website: http://web.uct.ac.za/org/cama/CAMA/countries/southafr/Makers/sandzulu/HTML/index.htm

For Laurent Devèze, 'the fight is everywhere in Sandile Zulu. To spend all his life to burn things in a continuous tortuous way, to destroy with meticulousness all the support of your work, is something very strong.' Devèze is director of the French Institute in Johannesburg, a supporter of the Amakhono Art Centre where Zulu has his studio, and his observation points to a crucial shift in the reception and making of art in South Africa. On its way out is the fascination with documentary realism, the literal conception of art as a window onto the world. In Sandile Zulu's burned works and collaged constructions, the township or the fight may not be visible and yet it is 'everywhere'. The struggle has shifted away from surface representations to the support itself. The medium - found objects and fire on paper and board - has become the message.

'To me the framework of addressing issues is metaphorical rather than direct or obvious,' says Zulu, 'so you see in my work details which have reference to histories of religion, to revolutionary politics, art making, psychological relationships. There are many forces within myself as an individual and as an artist in South Africa,' he says; 'external forces around me and international forces. I am aware that the question of self-identity is very much determined by one's cultural heritage.'

Commenting on the old art-market pressures on South African artists to reflect their society, Zulu says, 'This robs the artist of his intention and conception of art,' adding that his own work is wholly inner-directed.
Shibui is a Japanese term which refers to the greater beauty an object acquires

through age and marks of use. It is a concept which comes to mind when considering the work of Zulu. Two pieces of the old hide-top of a drum - so old that the middle has worn through and only the stiffened edges remain with their slashes where the top was pegged onto the sides - have been thonged together and hung on the wall under a netting of thin card. The piece is untitled, non-specific, but powerfully evocative, eliciting images of a barely veiled, exposed human rib-cage.
'I do my work to enjoy what I'm doing,' says Zulu, 'and to make beautiful work even if it doesn't talk about beauty.' Zulu's aim, then, is not to soften the struggle, but to give it his own interpretation. Fire is his paint.

The first time I saw Sandile Zulu work in Amakhono,' writes Devèze, 'he made me think of a researcher. Laying them on his desk, he was meticulously manipulating matches, touching them with heavy brown paper and setting fire to them like magic. Following with extreme caution the biting of the flame on the cardboard, Sandile makes incredible discoveries: what turns the burning into a track, and what makes the consumed become an incandescence.'

'Fire is a difficult medium to control,' says Zulu. 'Once paper gets on fire it is very fascinating to me. I can control fire to create ordered designs.' It is an exacting discipline. The precise moment when the burning board or canvas has been burnt sufficiently must be judged, and the flame instantly quelled with the judicious use of water. On large pieces, this procedure must he followed hundreds of times. It is this interplay of immediacy and distance that holds him. 'I use flame as an alternative approach to normal methods,' says Zulu. 'I want to feel the relationship between the material and me.' Of a work entitled Landscape with Spheres: Study in Spaces and Structures, Zulu explores the question of land. 'Boundaries could be read as that which existed before,' says Zulu, 'but they are made of a burnt mark which suggests destruction of barriers' or 'the bandaging of a body after being hurt.' For Zulu, fire has a dual import - burning can cleanse as well as destroy. However, irrespective of the reading one gives to Zulu's fire-works, the artist's abiding concern is the 'imaging of order' - 'the idea of ordered surfaces using geometric forms that are always taken further' - but still 'appeal to all senses ... touch, feeling and sound.' Zulu's choice of materials is focused yet variable - hard board, canvas, leather, plaster, perspex, drum hide. Given Zulu's refusal to be obvious in his expression of unrest and struggle, his paradoxical embrace of the immediate and the distant, the textural and the scientific, Nietzsche's aphorism is a salient one: 'When dealing with the abstract, all the more the need to be sensuous.'

For more information on this artist see Afronova | www.afronova.com

Billie Zangewa | Malawi/England

Artist | Billie Zangewa, produces silk tapestries

BILLIE ZANGEWA | Malawi/England
by Michael Smith

Billie Zangewa makes figurative works in which she records experiences and explores ideas she finds of interest. Her works are made from fabric, sewn painstakingly onto a base in a way that allows her to build a picture and suggest the illusionism of painting or photography, but which lets the textures of the various fabrics disrupt easy consumption. Zangewa's choice of materials resonates with her abiding interest in fashion. Many of her images also take fashion and glamour as their subjects, yet she avoids placing an all-too-predictable feminist slant on the phenomenon of fashion, choosing instead to use it as a formal base from which her gentle satire and social observations flow.

Zangewa works from home, often working on her bedroom floor or on the carpet in front of the television, preferring not to have a formal studio. She says she values the freedom this working gives her of being able to work as late into the night as she needs without concerns of safety or having to drive home afterwards.
The process that underpins the production of these works is layered, and involves a fair amount of planning and forethought. Mostly working from photographic sources she generates herself, Zangewa creates compositional plans in pencil and then makes colour studies, often in watercolour. Certain works that require accuracy of portraiture will have more detailed colour plans, in which the originals are broken up into flat facets of separate colour to allow for effective translation into fabric.

Zangewa often makes use of pieces of raw silk with which to build her works. Citing a moment she experienced as she drove down Johannesburg's Commissioner Street soon after moving there from Grahamstown, Zangewa relates how she was awed by the reflective quality of a number of the high rise buildings along that street. Later, upon visiting a fabric shop, she noticed how the raw silk swatches behaved in a similar manner to the glass, their reflections changing tone and hue as they shifted. She soon began experimenting with this fabric, allowing it to assert a new, painterly identity in the context of her street scenes, group scenes and portraits. She clearly revels in the quality of the silk, credibly claiming to be more strongly influenced by Issey Miyaki than artists like Tracey Emin or Ghada Amer, who use fabric in a comparable manner.
Text, or as Sean O'Toole more accurately terms it 'the written word', functions as a key element of Zangewa's works, lending them to interpretation as diary entries.

Artist's Statement:

'What I take most pleasure in, as an artist, is making beautiful things. Not the superficial kind that first comes to mind, but a truth so profound that it resonates beauty. Damien Hirst's Mother and Child, Mario Benjamin's disturbing self-portraits - each of these works is so eloquently executed that amongst everything else it is also exquisitely beautiful. So no matter what message I am trying to convey in my work, I also strive for beauty.'

Amal Kenawy | Egypt

Article from the Daily Star in the Lebanon.

Purple ink, a beating heart, a wedding dress on fire
Egyptian artist Amal Kenawy's visual language confounds expectations and creates its own codes of experience and meaning
By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Daily Star staff
Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Interview

BEIRUT:

For the past five years, Egyptian artist Amal Kenawy has been producing work at a prodigious pace. Since 2002, she has created more than five major pieces involving video, performance, drawing, photography and animation. Taken together, Kenawy's works carve out a self-contained system of images and ideas that echo off - and elaborate on - one another like variations on a set of inextricable themes. The fragmentary repetition of electricity pylons, trees, beds, tables, chairs, rats, infants, pools of purple ink, a beating heart and a white wedding dress cohere into sustained ruminations on life, death, marriage, alienation, freedom, entrapment, joy, sadness, violence, power and pain.

In addition to creating what some artists manage to achieve in a lifetime, Kenawy has been exhibiting extensively as well. Her work has featured in several biennials - Cairo, Alexandria, Dakar and Singapore - and high-profile group shows - "Nafas" in Berlin, "Some Stories" in Vienna," "Flight 405" in Beirut and the blockbuster "Africa Remix," which debuted in Dusseldorf before touring four cities. Two weeks ago, Kenawy presented two video animations at the Creek Contemporary Art Fair in Dubai. She is showing a new piece entitled "Do the Angels Sh*t, Mama?" (inspired by a dream her son her described to her), in the group exhibition "Convergence," on view at the Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art in Cairo through March 21. The arts foundation Darat al-Funun in Amman is exhibiting a veritable retrospective of her work - including the videos "Frozen Memory," "The Artificial Purple Forest" and "You Will be Killed," along with a performance of "The Room" - until May 3. Later this month, Kenawy is participating in the Moscow Biennial. Early next month, she is unveiling a new performance with projections for the Sharjah Biennial. Such high levels of artistic activity and exposure seem logical enough. Kenawy is an Arab woman from a Muslim country and these designations are nothing if not fashionable. But Kenawy's work - as attractive as it is repulsive, as intriguing as it is deeply, utterly disturbing - so thoroughly trashes notions of "representing" the Middle East, the Arab world or women in Islam that any curator seeking an easy cliche would probably wither in confusion before her art. The sheer weirdness of Kenawy's visual language - which strives to materialize the mental spaces of dreams, desires and doubts - frustrates expectations of what her work should be like, given her biographic and geographic profile. Instead, Kenawy insists on a fluid, dynamic artistic practice in which nothing is fixed yet everything is there to be read, connected and understood, even if only on gut instinct, emotion or intuition. Still, what is perhaps most striking about Kenawy's prolific streak is that had you asked her more than five, 10 or 15 years ago, she may not have said she wanted to be an artist at all. Even now, she is shy to say: "I am an artist," and prefers to fall back on the more technical aspects of her work - "I am a filmmaker," she says. "I make animations" or "I do performances."

Kenawy was born in Cairo in 1974 and attended government schools, which she remembers as being rudimentary and lackluster. "The problem with education in Egypt is that it's not about what you learn," she recalls. "There is no way to discover yourself ... I mean, we would draw for every occasion. We would draw the Pyramids. We would draw for the Eid. We would draw for Ramadan. But it didn't really matter. Whether you were good or bad, art wasn't added to your marks." Her first real embrace of creativity came not through incidental art classes but by designing her own clothes.
"I designed my first uniform for school," she says, smiling. "My uncle had a clothes factory for mass production, and he did it for me. I was 6. It was very beautiful," Kenawy laughs. "Really, it was different from the others. So I wanted to be a fashion designer."

When Kenawy finished high school, there was no place in Cairo to study fashion design except a cinema institute that included historical dress in a section devoted to animation and decor.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb

"That's why I went there and I was so disappointed," she says. "I decided I should study directing but it was too late. I stayed [at the cinema institute] for two years and then I went to study in a faculty of fine art."

In the meantime, she had grown close to her brother Abdel-Ghany, nine years her senior and an artist through and through. "Abdel-Ghany is the kind of person who has art in his blood," says Kenawy. "Even when he was very young, you could see it in his handwriting." Later, it was obvious in his sculptures, which incorporated a wild array of materials. Kenawy followed her brother around everywhere, and especially to museums and galleries, which, in the 1980s, were just beginning to exhibit modern and contemporary art in Cairo. Absorbing new forms of artistic expression on the move became her education, such that when she turned 18, "I realized studying art in Egypt was a waste of time. I decided to do my own research. From my first year in the faculty, I decided I'm going to start my work and I'm going to show."

At the time, the art scene in Egypt was for the most part state-controlled. Kenawy and her brother began collaborating on ambitious, sprawling sculptures. They rented out garages or worked in the street. They collected money from friends and family to complete all the finishing themselves. They won prizes and critical acclaim. But they had no hope of selling their work, and so they remained outside the system.
By 2000, Kenawy was ready to reconsider whether or not art was worth the effort. She was also, by that point, married and had just given birth to a son. She stopped working for two years.

"Me and Abdel-Ghany had something very special," she reasons. "But to keep working like this for seven years without any financial support or sponsorship was too long. I thought to myself: Shall I continue? What am I going to do if not art? What do I want from art? Why am I doing art?

"This time was very important for me. Maybe I wasn't very happy but I had the time and space to look at what I had done and what I wanted to do."

To think things through, Kenawy started keeping a diary. She never imagined it would become source material for her work, but it did. When Kenawy returned to work two years later, she did so with a vengeance.

"Frozen Memory," from 2002, marks Kenawy's last collaboration with her brother. Enigmatic and precious, it consists of a four-minute video and photographs that explore the transformations of birth, marriage and death through the symbols that stick in one's memory. Since then, Kenawy has been working on her own. "The Room" and "The Journey" followed close on the heels of "Frozen Memory." The labor-intensive video animations "The Artificial Purple Forest" and "You Will Be Killed" appeared in 2005 and 2006, respectively.

It is tempting to read these works as an ongoing narrative that adheres to events in Kenawy's personal life. But she insists that while there are autobiographical elements at play, her pieces strive to code a more universal language.
"The Room," for example, is ostensibly about the restrictions of marriage but it also grapples with classic themes - the self versus society, the skin as a boundary between interior and exterior, the dialectic of beauty and ugliness. "You Will Be Killed," set in a military hospital built by the British in Egypt 30 years ago, takes obvious cues from war imagery but it also pares down the essence of violence to a power dynamic that pervades all human relations.

"Sometimes I wonder: What am I doing?" says Kenawy. "If it is wrong that my art comes from a personal perspective, then why do people in so many different places respond to it? I mean, I'm not a prophet, but when you deal with human experiences, this is what we call a universal language - outside of the cultural, the religious and the political - because in the end what we have are feelings about our lives and about ourselves. It's a reflection of what we are living but in the end pain is pain and joy is joy. Art is only the medium."

For more information see Amal Kenawy | http://www.amalkenawy.com

Zineb Sedira | Algeria

Here is a slide show of one of the greatest video artists in the world today. Zineb Sedira, originally from Algeria she presently lives and works in London.

'This mutiple consciousness affords you a particular space when you are negotiating your place in relation to others. It's a space which is often referred to as 'in-between'. I don't like to see it as a negative place rather I see it as an active site of exploration that speaks of different histories and locates identity to a place which is endlessly remade through our negotiation of boundaries - this obviously presents challenges to those who are and who are not familiar with this sense of perspective.'

How to negotiate different worlds is the overriding question in Zineb Sedira’s work, worlds that collide and conflict. It is precisely her Algerian heritage and her experience of living in London and France that gives Zineb’s work insight into these different worlds. The work shifts from the political to the emotional; from a sense of history to the present; from East to West and through them both. Her use of Islamic pattern and the veil can be clearly identified as an element drawn from her Algerian parentage yet the work is constantly reminding us that she is working as an artist living in the West. Zineb talks of ‘the veiling of the mind’ as a significant metaphor in her work and while she also uses the veil literally, it becomes a device to embrace all women. For example, ‘Self Portrait or the Virgin Mary’ (1999) where she is photographed from behind wearing the haik (the Algerian veil), refers through the title to the French Catholic tradition - the cult of the Virgin Mary and the self-sacrifice of women. A conflict is set up between the visual image and the title, which challenges any Western viewer to question their understanding of the female condition as well as their perceptions of Arab women. In fact the reference to parallel debates are clear in much of her imagery. Her use of body parts such as mouths, hands and eyes are directly connected to the Islamic prohibition of representing the body while at the same time reframing the Western feminist theories of objectification. The hands, eyes and mouths, employed in several of Zineb’s works, refer to the absent body, but that body is known through the detail – the shift of the gaze; the motion of the hand, reveals the condition of the people who inhabit those hands and eyes – and the power that confers to the ostensibly absent whole reinforces the presence of those people.

Invocation of ritual and heritage give rise to a meshing of present and past as the self seeks to understand itself as independent of, yet still within the background of, one’s birth. The video works are quietly potent and emotionally charged, with ambivalence keenly felt. In the piece ‘Don’t Do To Her What You Did To Me’ (1996-8) the poetry of the imagery is bound to the simplicity of the form. Ink is dropped into a glass, followed by a written talisman with an image of a woman. This mixture is then stirred vigorously several times and drunk. Even without any knowledge of the ritual involved, the video conveys its message clearly – the ink spreading like blood through the water; the paper disintegrating as it is stirred; the image of the face breaking up, staring at the viewer in pieces. Imbibing the ritual becomes a defiant action but within the logic of the video necessary and compulsive. It is such a sense of necessity and compulsion combined with the visibility and invisibility of the Arab body and the experiences of women which makes Zineb Sedira's work so engaging.



© Rachel Garfield 2001 Rachel Garfield

Erruas Safaa | Morocco

Here is a slide show of the work from one of the best international artists in the world, Erruas Safaa from Morocco.

Born in 1976 in Tétouan, Morocco, Safaa Erruas is part of the generation of artists trained in art schools in the late 1990s and who are standing away from the legacies of their education to position themselves in relation to international art by using materials they find in the souks’ stalls. If Erruas evokes dressmaking as a job and family tradition, she recuperates it in her own way to claim her existence as an artist. Cotton, plastered gauze, pins, cloths and razors are her favorite entities. She turns these clinical materials into poetic elements.

Fatma Charfi | Tunisia/Switzerland

Fatma Charfi the Artist.

Here are a series of images, which are a tongue-in-cheek look at the idea and difficulties posed by Swiss neutrality - the heartland of the United Nations based in Geneva.

How can I best describe this artist? Those that have met her have been merely amazed. Amazed at her energy, her enthusiasm, her love for the life around her and I am no different. To understand Fatma is to understand her work and once understood one can't help but be impressed. The pace. The constant flow of ideas. The respect she gives herself and her work. The endless possibilities within art and a clear representation of what a true contemporary artist should be. She is regarded by her peers as a maverick in a world of mavericks. Understand her work and you cannot help but be inspired. When I met her a few years ago now, in Switzerland she was working on a Rap Song. Her ideas are everywhere. Spending the day with her was exhausting and a wonderful experience.

In 1991, the time of the first Iraq War she created figerines that are actually present in her head-dress. She refers to these figures as the "Abroucs". She has taken this subject and developed this idea over 18 years. What is becoming remarkable is her loyalty and committment to her subject. Her work should be seen as a life's work each different Abrouc strand is another thread to the rich tapestry that is Fatma Art. In a world that is seemingly speeding up Fatma is just taking her time. I have enormous respect for this artist and her work as she has truely earnt it.

Fatma Charfi is a Tunisian artist born in Sfax Tunisia in 1955. She now lives in Bern Switzerland. After graduating from the Fine Arts College, Les Beaux Arts in Tunisia, she attended an internship in cartoon animation in Poland 1977 and second one at the “Ecole Supérieure d`Art Visuel de Genève” 1986 – 1991. Fatma Charfi holds a PhD she gained in 1980-1985 from the Sorbonne’s “Institut d`Esthétique et des Sciences de l`Art" Paris, France.

Through complex installation, sculpture and performance works, Charfi explores the problem of Diaspora. Her work investigates the complexity of displacement, of being a North African woman living in Swiss society. She uses photographs, sculpture and installations to express herself. War has largely influenced her work. During the Gulf War, which she watched on Swiss television, she began to make black Gulf War figurines that she spread over powdered marble. The figurines have spindly appendages that extend outward from a central body and represent all of the people killed in the war. The insect-like forms suggest that the war reduced humanbeings to nothing more than insignificant insects. She describes the figurines as shadows of all people, as they have no faces and no sexes. Au-dessis, one of Charfi`s pieces that incorporates the figurines, shows them inside clear plastic storage compartments. The compartments represent Swiss society and societies in general, pigeon-holing and boxing people in and never allowing them to be themselves.

She has exhibited widely across Europe and North Africa, including the International Contemporary Art Biennale, Alexandria, Egypt 1999, the Dak'Art Biennale, Dakar, Senegal 2000/2002/2004, the Sculpture Triennale, Berne, Switzerland 2002, and the Centre d`Art contemporain Santander, Spain 2002.

Fatma is the first woman to have been awarded the first prize at the Dak'Art Festival in Senegal and what is more impressive is that she has been awarded this prize twice in 2000/2002 and was runner-up in 2004.

Awards:
2000/2002/2004: Leopold Sédar Senghor Prize, Dakar International Biennial of Contemporary Art Senegal
1999: Jury Prize, Contemporary Art Biennale Alexandria, Egypt

© Joe Pollitt, 2009