Collectif GawLab in Denmark When things fall apart: Critical voices on the radars February 11th — October 23rd, 2016 Trapholt Museum
Æblehaven 23 6000 Kolding, Denmark
Courtesy Bildrecht Wien and Kunsthaus Bregenz
In his ground breaking 1958 novel Things Fall Apart, Nigerian author Chinua Achebe staged the decline of a man obstinately struggling against the mutation of his society. Ironically, this 19th century story line seems to ridicule the world of today. For the current abolition of frontiers made virtually possible thanks to the internet — much like the (re)-discovery of lands in past centuries — has, instead of opening up an infinite realm of inspiring encounters, created a vast intersection of fratricidal conflicts. This disturbing context based on power control, ostracism and fear can lead us to conclude that the Other is not our brother or sister, has never been and never will be. It is an enemy to neutralize or destroy so as to maintain our own system of values alive and intact. And it matters little if this murder necessitates our own loss.
When things fall apart: Critical voices on the radars is a metaphor of Achebe's novel. But rather than staging the dichotomy of a hostile geopolitical, economic, socio-cultural and religious relationship based on "us" versus "them", the exhibition analyzes our common chronic pathologies. Built as a series of wake up calls, it tells us that the little we have retained of History could be the reason why societies, throughout the entire world, create their own Nemesis by living in an almost constant state of intolerance, withdrawal into oneself and fear. Using humor, poetry, radical protest or interactive role-play, twelve voices direct a critical gaze at a world that is drifting to emphasize the vital necessity to learn to live together, for the survival of communities is at stake, for the survival of humanity is at stake. Because human beings, architects of their past and their present, behave as tragic gravediggers of their own destiny.
When things fall apart: Critical voices on the radars is a platform for artists who are taking a radical stand for a salutary change of mind-set and attitude. It probes how their positions and voices are acting as a warning that mirrors societies in turbulent times. If some of them are demanding Equal Justice and Social Change by addressing gender, race, sexuality, politics, democracy and human development issues; others are embracing a globally resonant humanitarian cause with an Empathy that will uplift humanity, redefine otherness, rehabilitate solidarity, and lead us to believe that the best is yet to come.
Curator: N'Goné Fall
Participating artists
Nidaa Badwan, Rehema Chachage, Tiffany Chung, Arahmaiani Feisal, Regina José Galindo, Milumbe Haimbe, Wambui Kamiru, Dinh Q. Lê, Babirye Leilah, Zen Marie, Thái Tuấn Nguyễn, Pascale Marthine Tayou.
Publication
When things fall apart: Critical voices on the radars (90 pages) features essays by N'Goné Fall, the exhibition curator and co-founder of the Dakar based collective GawLab; and Stefano Harney, Professor of Strategic Management Education at the Singapore Management University and co-founder of the School for Study, an ensemble teaching project. It is part of Artist in Society, a major publication gathering four exhibitions produced by Trapholt Museum under the umbrella of the Images 2016 art festival. Size: 24,5 x 30,5 cm, 200 pages. Languages: Danish and English.
Images Festival
The exhibition is part of Images 2016, an art festival taking place in various cities in Denmark and coordinated by the Danish Center for Culture and Development, CKU.
For more information about the festival, please visit www.cku.dk/en/images-2016/
« Humains-Animaux, le grand jeu des correspondances » de Yao Metsoko
Yao Metsoko | International Artist
Vernissage de l’exposition
en présence de l’artiste
le jeudi 17 Mars 2016
de 18h à 20h
Yao Matsoko, Artiste
Yao Metsoko est né au
Togo en 1965 où il vit jusqu’à l’âge de 19 ans.Installé en France,
c’est en fait un artiste international qui joue avec les passerelles
entre les civilisations. À l’heure où chacun se préoccupe de nos
rapports à la nature, il exprime bien ce « réveil africain » qui affirme
sur la scène artistique planétaire des valeurs primordiales.
En sculptures, peintures ou dessins, ses compositions fortes et variées
nous parlent ainsi de notre présent et de notre futur. Nul étonnement à
ce que leur puissant écho symbolique traverse les océans.
Sur le passage de quelques artistes…En
liaison avec les Rencontres-Promenades « Histoires de passages… » au
pays d’Argentat sur Dordogne, une collection de mobilier a été
créée chez ECART, invitant des artistes très divers. Dans la continuité,
une carte blanche leur est offerte à l’espace ECART de Paris avec
d’autres créateurs (peintres, photographes, dessinatrices/teurs,
sculptrices/teurs…). Après un terrible accident de vélo à vingt ans en
1945, Andrée Putman vide sa chambre pour y mettre un lit en fer, une
chaise et une affiche de Miro sur des murs blancs. Où sont les Miro de
notre époque ? Sous ce beau nom d’ECART qu’elle inventa en 1978, dans ce
haut lieu du design, il s’agira en tout cas d’avoir les yeux curieux.
Sont ainsi présentés, de façon très ouverte, des visions sensibles d’ici
et d’ailleurs. Cela se fait par un dialogue entre la sobriété élégante
du mobilier et la force d’images se succédant comme un long récit aux
murs avec des artistes toujours passionné(e)s. De nouvelles Histoires de
passages...
Laurent Gervereau
Un Cocktail est organisé pour
le vernissage de l’exposition
par le Showroom Ecart Paris
18 rue Jacob
75006 Paris
tél.01.43.54.43.94
showroom@ecart.paris
horaires: du mardi au samedi 11h à 19h
Pour accéder au showroom les deux stations de métro les plus proches sont: Saint Germain des près et Odéon
As a working artist living in Paris for over 25 years it would be great to see Mickael Bethe-selassie have a retrospective at the Musee D'Orsay curated by Senegalese Curator N’Goné Fall - N'Gone Fall
N’Goné Fall
N’Goné Fall is an independent curator, art critic, and
consultant in cultural engineering. She graduated from the École
Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris, France, and was editorial director of
the Paris-based contemporary African art magazine Revue Noire from 1994
to 2001. Fall has edited books on contemporary visual arts and
photography in Africa including An Anthology of African Art: The Twentieth Century (D.A.P./Editions Revue Noire, 2002), Photographers from Kinshasa (Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., 2002) and Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography: a Century of African photographers (Distributed
Art Publishers, Inc., 1998). She has curated exhibitions in Africa,
Europe, and the US. Fall was one of the curators of the African
photography Biennale in Bamako, Mali, in 2001, and a guest curator at
the 2002 Dakar Biennale in Senegal. Fall is an associate professor at
the Senghor University in Alexandria, Egypt. As a consultant in cultural
engineering she is the author of strategic plans, orientation programs,
and evaluation reports for Senegalese and international cultural
institutions. She is also a founding member of the Dakar-based
collective Gaw-Lab, a platform for research and production in the field
of new media and visual arts.
I am a big fan of Valerie Kabov who is supporting the best of Zimbabwe Contemporary Art and some may say she is too white to have such a job I would disagree..She is the perfect person for the job. She loves her country and wants only the best to rise to the top regardless of tribe or colour and for that I have the utmost respect for her.
I share Stefan Simchowitz's
calling a spade a spade view. The concept of conflict of interest does
not exist in the art world. More importantly, if you study art history,
it never really has existed, just that we have grown used to maintaining
a charade/façade of decorum. Personally however I think there is no
point getting too worked up about it because the things that matter in
art, we don't get to find out for a couple of decades (if not a century)
- history has a really wonderful way of figuring it all out...
This
is a topic I have a lot to say about. I like the positioning of
Lawrence Luhring aghast with the idea of supporting museum shows as if
it is some surprise. I wont even start
to state how thrilled galleries are to support shows at museums where
they get the inventory exhibited outside of the hands of competitors in
other regions. Museum shows are great for everyone and this threshold
of morality called into question is once again the art business' way of
protesting in the same way as one reads a protest of love and sex in a
cheap romance novel. In the 19th century this pretense did not exist,
as Musuems just sold the shows directly to make money. Now the
gallerist has to attend the VIP opening at the Museum to make the sales.
Not only is this article BS but galleries who are well funded flock to
fund institutional engagements: as they should. This notion of
separation between so called Church and State in the culture industry is
very murky. Curators are complicit in conforming through these lines
of BS and making empty statements, which include two forms of deception:
the first being whining about conflicts of interest ad nauseam, and the
second and more expensive route of showing art that no one understands
nor will ever really give a rats ass about unless you happened to have
read Jacques Derrida and acquired a curatorial studies degree and
assumed the bend over your knees and pucker up position of 100K USD of
student debt. Culture must be funded and pragmatism is always the
winner over fiction and fantasy. So stop pretending, all of you.
The article:
Art Galleries Face Pressure to Fund Museum Shows
Parts of the Whitney’s recent
Frank Stella retrospective were aided by funds from two galleries that
jointly represent Mr. Stella.Credit
2015 Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
Galleries have always provided scholarly support for museums exhibiting their artists’ work.
Now they’re expected to provide money, too.
In
today’s exploding art market, amid diminishing corporate donations and
mounting exhibition costs, nonprofit museums have been leaning more
heavily on commercial galleries for larger amounts of money — anywhere
from $5,000 to $200,000 each time — to help pay for shows featuring work
by artists the galleries represent.
The
increasingly common arrangement has stoked concerns about conflicts of
interest and the dilution of a museum’s mission to present art for art’s
sake. Such cozy situations raise the specter of a pay-to-play model and
could give galleries undue influence over what the public sees.
“It’s
really gotten out of hand,” said Lawrence Luhring of the Luhring
Augustine gallery. “It’s the brazenness of it — just the expectation of
‘How are you going to contribute?’ ”
Others
say the galleries, which generally earn between 20 percent and 50
percent commission on each sale, shouldn’t complain, because the
prestige of museum shows raises the value of an artist’s work, boosting
gallery profits. “Museums are giving these galleries the best platform
in the art world for free, where they can sell work to their clients on
the walls of the greatest museums,” said Jeffrey Deitch, the longtime
dealer and former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles. “If the galleries can contribute, why not?”
The average selling price of a
Mark Grotjahn work at auction rose from $322,000 in 2010 to $1.2
million in 2015 partly because of shows featuring his work, like MoMA’s
“Forever Now.”Credit
Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
Maxwell
Anderson, who has served as the director of institutions like the
Whitney Museum of American Art and the Dallas Museum of Art, said:
“Gallery-supported exhibitions commingle inventory that may be for sale
with museum inventory. The self-interest of the gallery can compromise
the independence and integrity of the curatorial voice.”
Examples
of gallery support abound. For the Whitney’s recent popular Frank
Stella retrospective, the installation of two outdoor sculptures was
made possible in part by funds from the Marianne Boesky and Dominique
Lévy galleries, which jointly represent Mr. Stella.
In
listing contributors to its current exhibition on the New-York-based
German photographer Vera Lutter, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, names
the Gagosian Gallery, which represents Ms. Lutter.
And
when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art mounted a Pierre Huyghe show
two years ago — billed as the first major retrospective of that French
artist’s work — sponsors included the Marian Goodman Gallery, which
represents Mr. Huyghe.
“Ten
years ago, museums rarely, if ever, asked galleries to support their
artists’ museum exhibitions,” said Lucy Mitchell-Innes of Mitchell-Innes
& Nash, who said her gallery is called on to support museum shows
once or twice a month for $5,000 to $50,000. “Galleries are now
regularly asked to support their artists’ museum exhibitions,” she said.
The
gallery payments, which museums generally tailor to a dealer’s
financial capacity, are directed toward expenses like opening-night
dinners, catalogs, shipping, even the costs associated with an artist’s
creating new work for a show.
“The
only thing I have not been asked for is postage,” said Angela Westwater
of the Sperone Westwater Gallery, who said she regularly has to pony up
money to museums, with $10,000 being the low end. “Certainly this can
be onerous and complicated for many reasons, including potential
conflicts of interest.”
Museums
have long turned to outside support for their exhibitions, namely
corporations and collectors. But as the cost of mounting shows has grown
— a result of increasingly pricey line items like insurance — museums
have also sought galleries’ financial help. And some worry that museums
now favor shows by artists represented by galleries with the deepest
pockets.
Nearly
a third of the major solo exhibitions at museums in the United States
between 2007 and 2013 featured artists represented by just five
galleries, according to a recent survey by the The Art Newspaper:
Gagosian, Pace, Marian Goodman, David Zwirner and Hauser & Wirth.
These
findings “raise questions about the growing influence of a small number
of galleries in a rapidly consolidating art market,” The Art Newspaper
said, “especially when they often offer logistical and financial support
for exhibitions.”
Over
all, dealers say they have come to accept this practice as simply
another cost of doing business — like setting up shop in the mushrooming
number of international art fairs (going rate: $100,000) — and part of
their obligation to their artists.
“As
funding sources become tougher for exhibitions, museums have an
expectation that galleries will assist in identifying potential funders
as well as making outright or in-kind contributions,” the dealer James
Cohan said. “It’s in our artists’ best interest to support these
projects.”
He
added: “Gallery involvement in museum exhibitions is part of the
ecosystem of the art world. The competition to get one’s artist seen in a
noncommercial context like a museum or international survey is quite
intense but ultimately hugely gratifying. It’s part of our job to step
up to support our artists.”
But small and midsize galleries now have to stretch themselves thin to stay in the game.
“It
is certainly burdensome for galleries such as myself, who work with
younger artists in the career-building stage,” said the dealer Susan
Inglett, who was asked by a museum she would not name for $8,000 to
cover shipping on works traveling to a four-person show in the Midwest.
But
“I am the first to acknowledge that museum shows certainly help build
careers,”
she added, “which speaks to a conflict of interest and lack of
transparency on the part of museums that depend upon such support.”
In
a period when galleries and auctions strive to land the highest prices,
a museum show can help significantly. Prices rise for works by artists
with a museum exhibition approaching. The average selling price of a
Mark Grotjahn painting at auction, for example, rose from $322,000 in
2010 to $1.2 million in 2015, according to ArtNet, partly because of
exhibitions featuring his work, like “The Forever Now: Contemporary
Painting in an Atemporal World,” which opened at the Museum of Modern
Art in 2014.
Some
galleries request something tangible in return. “With a major four- to
five-figure contribution, we will ask a museum for certain sponsor
benefits such as tickets to their gala, credit in the catalog or seats
at the lenders’ dinner,” Ms. Mitchell-Innes said. “Museums understand
that whether funding is coming from a bank, a luxury brand or a gallery,
there needs to be some benefit to that sponsor.”
At
the Guggenheim Museum, galleries are typically part of what the museum
calls a Leadership Committee that includes collectors, foundations and
businesses whose “support goes directly toward the costs of presenting
an exhibition,” Sarah Eaton, a museum spokeswoman, said.
Jeremy
Strick, director of the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, said his
institution was “most grateful for that support.” He acknowledged that
depending too much on outside funding can compromise a museum’s
“curatorial independence.” But, he said, “The quality of a museum’s
program is the ultimate standard by which to judge whether those
programs are serving their public purpose.”
The
Museum of Modern Art does not seek support from galleries, “other than
periodic contributions to our annual events like galas,” said Glenn D.
Lowry, the director, adding that a gallery will occasionally host a
dinner for an artist the museum is showing, “but not at the museum, and
as a gallery event outside the museum.”
But
some dealers say museum galas can also be a burden, given that they
often include a charity auction to which galleries and their artists are
expected to donate artwork.
For
the Bronx Museum of the Arts’ coming gala, for example, the Sean Kelly
Gallery — along with the artists — contributed two pieces for the
auction: a color print by Frank Thiel, which has an estimated retail
value of $16,000, and a mixed-media work on paper by Mariko Mori, worth
$12,000. The Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery and the artist contributed a José
Parlá painting worth $30,000.
“General
operating support is the hardest to raise for an institution like the
Bronx Museum,” said Holly Block, the museum’s executive director. “We
are dependent on this in a huge way.”
Galleries
are also asked to pay fabrication costs for works that have debuts in
museum exhibitions and international shows like the Venice Biennale.
Ultimately,
however, galleries say they feel they have no choice but to play ball,
because the potential benefits are mutual. “We all might grumble here or
there or sweat and curse a bit,” Ms. Boesky said. “But we do our best
to achieve what needs to be achieved.”
Correction: March 9, 2016
An article on Monday about nonprofit museums’ relying on art
galleries for money to help pay for shows featuring work by artists the
galleries represent misidentified the museum where the art dealer
Jeffrey Deitch, who commented on the arrangement, was the director. It
is the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, not the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art.
This is the official project video for my new series of drawings "Ten Little Nigger Girls." It's worth watching for anyone who would like to better understand the inspiration behind my project, in particular, a 1907 children's book/ nursery rhyme in which black children are eliminated (some killed off). It also offers some clarity about why I chose to develop this series in the first place, especially given the current climate in the United States, which in many ways, is lacking in safe spaces (literal and conceptual) for black children.
The exhibition "Ten Little Nigger Girls" is currently on view in the Arno Maris Gallery at Westfield State University, but only for a little while longer - it closes February 27. Here is a link to the official press release, along with gallery hours (scroll to bottom):http://www.westfield.ma.edu/…/westfield-state-professors-ex…
Greek Mythology created by The London Mural Company
With contemporary pieces of art, installation, and sculpture at the top of most home decor must-have lists this season, we agree with The London Mural Company when they say that murals are the new wallpaper! Specialising in providing clients with original and bespoke artwork, TLMC believes that professional artwork should be accessible for everyone.
Intro
Working alongside agencies, illustrators, fine artists, designers, traditional sign painters, sculptors and graffiti artists, their network is forever expanding. Founded by Stewart Chromik, the agency has gone from strength to strength. Evolving in style and expanding what the company has to offer. The team pride themselves for being versatile and confident when it comes to tackling individual briefs.
The Growing Demand
Here is what Stewart had to say.
“The idea was to create a company that could provide creative solutions for interior and exterior spaces, and doing it well. The company originally started out providing murals and has steadily grown from there.”
Stewart believes that, with the growing demand for original artwork, “it’s more important now than ever to be flexible and versatile when it comes providing a creative service.” He knows there are some really great companies and competition out there, and works hard to provide new and exciting ideas to work with a wide range of artists and agencies across the board.
We asked Stewart if he found it hard adapting to different projects and he said, “it’s a fine balance, on the one hand you don’t want to spread yourself too thinly by trying to cover as many disciplines as possible, and on the other hand you don’t want to become predictable and repetitive.” You can see below a few different styles of TLMC’s work!
Recent work – The Mesmerist Brighton
Stewart’s main aim is to work alongside like minded artists who excel in their field and who enjoy what they do. He likes to collaborate and work with people who are passionate about their craft and says “it’s invaluable to be challenged on an idea or a process.”
He’s spent the last five years working as a freelance artist, which means he predominantly specialises in illustration but with such a competitive marketing he knew had to broaden his skill set. “I’ve been fortunate enough to work alongside some amazing agencies and creatives enabling me to gain insight and experience across a varied range of practices”, he tells us.
“I’ve always enjoyed working on big creative pieces, from start to finish the whole process is a really satisfying experience. I enjoy the creative problem solving. From the initial discussions and planning, to getting your hands dirty and executing the work.”
Action shot taken from Stewarts Instagram account @thelondonmuralcompany
So setting up The London Mural Company seemed like the next logical step for Stewart. He found that in both corporate and residential, there’s such a demand for original work and there are so many talented creatives out there looking to provide it, it’s just a case of joining the two elements together.
If you’re reading this and thinking about what mural you could add to your home or business, then it’s time to talk about current trends and what is most popular this season.
Trends
Over the last few years, ‘street art’ has really developed and come into it’s own. ” There is an ever growing curiosity and acceptance towards it”, Stewart explains. “When executed well, it’s an art form that works in complete unity within its environment and surroundings, both complimenting one another perfectly.”
Radicals Bar Islington
When speaking with TLMC we found out that it’s so much more than just scrappy stencils, stickers and tags. It’s large scale abstract murals, sculptures and installations bound with humour or social and political commentary. The crossover and diversity envelops so many practices and styles that it will constantly evolve organically.
With all this in mind, and hearing more about the concepts behind the design, it is clear that people are realising they don’t and shouldn’t have to settle for filling spaces with a generic print of a sunset or a skyline. There are so many alternatives and mediums that they can have something specifically designed that tells a story, reflects personality and uses the space to it’s full potential.
You can see from TLMC website and social media pages, it is popular with businesses too. It is a great platform to create something that can explain what the company does and how it does it, but it’s also good for the working environment. Employees and clients can get an immediate sense of company values.
Business Art – 2014
Within a culture where we’re exposed more than ever to endless information and imagery, our need for immediate visual satisfaction is growing. Apps like Pinterest and Instagram are on the rise, and the demand for new and original content is growing alongside with it.
Are you feeling inspired? Take a look at The London Mural Company’s Instagram account, we’ve just followed them too, and we’re already thinking about what we could do with the entrance of Ideal HQ!
The Love Boat, 2016, palm spines, copper wire, threaded rods, 26 x 72 x 10 inches
Adejoke Tugbiyele
Grassroots
February 25th – April 9th, 2016 Reception: Thursday, February 25th, 2016
Skoto Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent works by the Nigerian-American artist Adejoke Tugbiyele. This is her first solo show at the gallery. The artist will be present at the reception on Thursday, February 25th, 6-8pm.
Adejoke Tugbiyele’s work is informed by a sophisticated discourse on traditional philosophical concepts, a deep understanding of the aesthetic and cultural character of the African continent as well as an invigorating inclination and facility with various materials and methods. By inventively handling her material within a formalist sculptural framework, combined with a highly developed experimental approach to making art, she creates work that is unorthodox, persistently innovative, and ignores boundaries between different cultural heritages and socially constructed constraints.
Tugbiyele’s sculptural process combines the weaving of fibrous materials such as palm spines around light metal structures, producing abstract figurative forms with universal elements of androgyny, armor, flight, seduction, myth and mystery. Her practice is influenced by multiple genres including ready-made/assemblage, architecture and performance/film. While her work does not openly narrate the events in her life, they are certainly rooted in her cultural, political and emotional experiences as she continuously explore strategies that fuse her aesthetic concerns with playful ironies and poetic metaphors. Despite the fact that she does not avoid the significance of content in her work, they still manage to tell stories of hope and courage, of compassion and resilience that speak to the triumph of the human spirit.
Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1977 to Nigerian immigrants, and raised for seven years in Lagos Nigeria, award-winning artist/activist Adejoke Tugbiyele boldly, yet delicately weaves complex ideas about race, gender, sexuality, spirituality and migration. Tugbiyele's work has been exhibited at reputable institutions around the world including the Brooklyn Museum, The Newark Museum, The Museum of Arts and Design, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, The Reginald F. Lewis Museum, The Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos Nigeria, The Goethe-Institut (in Lagos, Nigeria and Washington D.C), The Centre for Contemporary Art, Torun, Poland, and The United Nations. Tugbiyele's work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, The Newark Museum and in significant private collections in the United States and Hong Kong.
Adejoke Tugbiyele is the recipient of several awards including being named Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2015, a Fulbright U.S. Student Fellowship in 2013, the 2014 Serenbe Artist-in-Residence, the 2013 Amalie Rothschild Award, and the 2012 William M. Phillips Award for best figurative sculpture. In 2014, images of her sculptural works graced the first-ever United States publication of poetry by the African Poetry Book Fund. Her work has been mentioned and featured in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, Artsy, Financial Mail, This Day Live, The Feminist Wire, The Star Ledger, Intense Art Magazine, Africanah, Okay Africa, Art South Africa, Mail & Guardian, and ArtThrob. In 2014, she appeared on CNN International as the first openly gay woman of Nigerian heritage to come out in the media. Tugbiyele received a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from The New Jersey Institute of Technology and a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Maryland Institute College of Art.
Artist Manifesto
One day I woke up and it dawned on me that simply choosing to be me WAS the protest. By boldly saying these words: "My name is Adejoke, I am black/African and I love women, could I possibly inspire a young woman out there facing her own personal demons? A girl who had her genitals cut at birth, before she could even speak...a fourteen year old girl forced to marry some forty year old against her will. or a young student who has been raped by thug militants. What about the woman who feels voiceless because she is neither allowed to study nor vote. The woman who fears speaking her truth and being cast out - rejected by her family, community and church/mosque. Or the older woman trapped in an abusive marriage and too scared to leave because maybe in her hood/village she has very few means for providing for herself and children. I woke up and realized that by simply choosing to live, but to live authentically... by choosing to love unconditionally, do the best work I can and recognize those who came before me, perhaps a woman out there might find the courage to break free and do the same, in her own way and at her own time. Just as countless women, gay and straight, have surely inspired me. The journey is never as easy or straightforward as it seems, but I chose to take the journey regardless and not just for me alone.
Since birth I have been on a journey towards a global Black ex
perience - born and raised in Brooklyn's Crown Heights, further seasoned in Lagos for seven formative years, later educated in Newark and Baltimore, a former resident/frequent-flyer to Harlem and most recently, a two-month long stay in Johannesburg. I still remember the smell of London's Little Lagos and I look forward to my first trip to New Orleans, Dakar, Guangzhou and other cities Black people call home. Part of my mission in making art is to help people understand and relate to the suffering of Blacks/Africans who face discrimination and injustice on a daily basis. Ethnic discrimination, lack of understanding and xenophobia among Blacks/Africans also puts a dent in the fight against poverty and white privilege.
Last but not least, I work in order to give voice to injustices against LGBTQ people in Africa, where thirty-seven countries still outlaw same sex love. Beyond the impact of hate-politics and extremist religion's homophobia on the gay community, I also relate to the shared experience of the strain on familial bonds, as well as the initial work of facing one's own demons which, if not done can lead to severe depression and suicide. Love should not kill.
At the end of the day, what I'm really talking about is not simply about race, gender and sexuality. It is about judgment. The first three are surface issues, but judgment is the core problem. Apart from the general work we all do, much of the work in life is simply unpacking. Unpacking the judgments and expectations of others. If you're Black, the expectation to look White. The expectation to "behave" like a woman and constantly act or sound submissive to men AND other women, even when you know exactly what you're talking about. The expectation to be straight when every part of your physical and mental health/well-being tells you you're gay. So much to unpack! Unpacking a deep self-loathing in that search for the freedom to simply be you and love yourself unconditionally. It's so bad that there are people who come into your life who never, ever carried a single judgment of you and you didn't recognize them because of the baggage you were carrying about yourself. And oftentimes those are the very people who's view of you is way more accurate than what you see when you look in the mirror. I hope and pray that my art, and indeed my life, reflects the best and not the worst that others see in me.
My art practice seeks truth, balance and fairness. I subscribe to the age-old notion of ethics/aesthetics what we now call art and activism or the return to agitprop. With sharply rising inequality in these modern times our collective ethics is in serious question. I keep all of this in mind when I work. Transformation of my materials is a metaphor for the transformation of myself and, hopefully, others.
N’Goné Fall is an independent curator, art critic, and
consultant in cultural engineering. She graduated from the École
Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris, France, and was editorial director of
the Paris-based contemporary African art magazine Revue Noire from 1994
to 2001. Fall has edited books on contemporary visual arts and
photography in Africa including An Anthology of African Art: The Twentieth Century (D.A.P./Editions Revue Noire, 2002), Photographers from Kinshasa (Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., 2002) and Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography: a Century of African photographers (Distributed
Art Publishers, Inc., 1998). She has curated exhibitions in Africa,
Europe, and the US. Fall was one of the curators of the African
photography Biennale in Bamako, Mali, in 2001, and a guest curator at
the 2002 Dakar Biennale in Senegal. Fall is an associate professor at
the Senghor University in Alexandria, Egypt. As a consultant in cultural
engineering she is the author of strategic plans, orientation programs,
and evaluation reports for Senegalese and international cultural
institutions. She is also a founding member of the Dakar-based
collective Gaw-Lab, a platform for research and production in the field
of new media and visual arts.
