Technology Meet Africa! Wasswa Donald Curates | Opening Statement by Joe Pollitt

Technology Meet Africa! Wasswa Donald Curates



WELCOME TO OUR ONLINE MINI EXPO A VISUAL UPRISING FROM KAMPALA, UGANDA.


The passion for this show stems from an overwhelming desire to create positive media for Artists from Africa via Social Media Networks. Working in collaboration with a young, dynamic Ugandan artist from Kampala, Wasswa Donald, together we have chartered out a different course in which to sail. Helped by our various friends around the world, we have tried to break the mould of those favoured few and open up the spectrum to a far greater audience; both from those participating and those observing. Presently, the artistic practitioners within the Continent have little, if any say in their own contemporary cultural development; with the slight exception of Nigeria, North and South Africa. Galleries, Private Collectors, Museums and Art Institutions throughout the western world are defining Africa without asking the Africans. Europe and America are developing highbrow exhibitions that have no reflection on Africa Now – A Continent of Artists working without sufficient patronage or adequate fiscal support. Wasswa and I are ambitiously creating platforms for the rejected, unaccepted African artistic elite. Together, we are all creating new ways of seeing and brand new waves of being an Artist in Africa. In this era of New Media things are about to change for the better and open up various avenues for those that dare to be an Artist!

Art is a powerful force; an energy that can inspire a generation. The spirit of art takes shape organically, creating common threads - a Riot in the making with direction but no director or dictator; setting fire to the hearts and minds of all those participating. It is the collective, voicing feelings long since silenced. Sending clear messages out to those discontented masses to soothe their aching lives. No group on earth would know this better than those living in black Africa. For those that live on the periphery, the marginalised and rejected majority: For those that work so thanklessly, pushing aside mediocrity and striving forward to fight for the right to have their say. Those courageous enough to continue despite years of neglect. All in the same vein of being seen, in some affirmative way, as progressive.

The purpose of this exercise and its ultimate goal, is to create an authentic virtual mini artistic revolution by creating an active yet invisible Museum. A Museum without windows or doors; without ceilings or floors. Randomly posting: Online Mini-Shows; Mini-Group Exhibitions; Mini Expos and Solo Shows from all the overlooked and underseen artists of Africa. All the artists that are interested in participating are encouraged to self-publish a book on the Blurb website to be housed in the African Library
www.africanlibrary.blogspot.com. This will allow Institutions around the Globe a rare glimpse and a mesmerizing insight into Africa on a far more personal level; inevitably enlightening an alternative perspective on what Contemporary Africa Art truly is: a panoramic view, as seen from the artists living and working from within. Wasswa Donald and I, would like to thank all those who have supported us in both Kampala and the UK and to Wasswa Donald - thank you so very much for agreeing to be a little crazy with me – It takes great courage to expose yourself as we have done...so we ask you all to join us in our expose and enjoy the weeks ahead. Wish us luck and get involved in our Mini Artistic Revolution.


Ugandan Video Uprising | As Seen On Youtube.


Thank you all for watching! X


*N.B. Special thanks go out to Ceris Dien, Shiela Black, Kate von Achen, Paul Hardcastle, Kathy Goodell, Prince Babs Epega, Najet Belkhodja, Mona Douf, Joel Nankin, Miss Kitty, Octavio Zaya, Tracey Rose, Simon Wajcenberg, Bud Rose, Melonie Kastman and Emma Youngs for your constant love and support. Cheers Big Ears. X







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Technology Meet Africa! - Wasswa Donald Curates

Check to see the show: www.youtube.com/africanwell


Thur.18th August 2011 


Online Mini Expo on African Artists Inc.ONline Mini Expo into the Art of Uganda.

This is the first of many: An ONline Expo into that artists of Uganda from the perspective of a young artist living and working in Kampala. 
Wasswa Donald.

The Mini Exhibition will be shown through The African Well on Youtube. The show outlines the expectations of the young artists of Uganda and gives an insight into the Contemporary History of Art of the country. The date is 18th August and will run for a month. A book will accompany the Mini show or Expo, either through Amazon or Blurb.

Hopefully this will develop an effective way to show up-and-coming artists from within the Continent and educate all of us to History of Art of a Continent by those within it. The intent is to expose of the artistic heroes of Africa by the Africans.

Frank Bowling OBE, RA

Book Description: This is the first comprehensive monograph on the art of Frank Bowling OBE RA. Born in British Guyana in 1936, Bowling arrived in England in his late teens, going on to study at the Royal College of Art alongside David Hockney RA and Derek Boshier. By the early 1960s he had established himself as an original force in the vibrant London art scene, with a style that brilliantly combined figurative, symbolic and abstract elements. Dividing his time between New York and London since the late 1960s, he has developed a unique and virtuosic abstract style in which certain formal aspects of American painterly abstraction are assimilated to a treatment of light and space that consciously recollects the great English landscape painters, Gainsborough, Turner and Constable. In a compelling text Mel Gooding establishes Bowling as one of the finest British artists of his generation.


About the Author:
Mel Gooding is a professor at the Wimbledon School of Art in England, and an art writer, critic, and curator.

Tate Channel: BP Artists Talk
http://channel.tate.org.uk/media/24906110001




Product Details:

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Royal Academy of Arts, London (13 Jun 2011)
• Language English
• ISBN-10: 1905711964
• ISBN-13: 978-1905711963
• Product Dimensions: 29.6 x 24.8 x 2 cm

Peter Minshall | MasMan

Peter Minshall | Mas Man

Book Description
Peter Minshall was born in Guyana and raised in Trinidad, where the traditional carnival, pre-Lent festivals of street dancing and masquerade, or mas', captured his imagination. He left to study theater in England, only to become, in the early 1970s, one of the first designers to create mas' for London's now-legendary Notting Hill Carnival. A run of well-received theater design work in England and the United States brought him back around to the value and potency of Carnival's creative expression, and, gradually, he made it his principal medium. Minshall is now the head of the Callaloo company, which creates mas' productions in Trinidad, from human-sized costumes to 10-foot-tall creatures. Elements of that Trinidadian work have also made appearances at carnivals in Miami, San Francisco, Paris, Tokyo and Kingston, Jamaica, and his designs for the opening ceremonies of more than one Olympics have been seen by millions. Minshall has been a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation and has won an Emmy for costume design; Masman-Minshall: Trinidad Carnival Artist brings readers inside his costumes and masks.




Product Details:Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: Hatje Cantz Publishers (May 1, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 3775717854
ISBN-13: 978-3775717854

WeaverBirds from Uganda

INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS' RESIDENCY UGANDA

WEAVER BIRD INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS RESIDENCY (WEBIARE) One of Uganda’s current most exciting arts initiatives, Weaver Bird International Artists Residency (WEBIARE) was started as an inspiration from artist Collin Sekajugo’s mission of bridging the gap that exists between the arts and our communities here in East Africa. Under the influence of brains like artists, Sanaa Gateja, Rose .N. Kirumira, Ronex Ahimbisibwe, Sheila Nakitende, Enoch Mukiibi, Donald Wasswa, Hassan Mukiibi and few more with a major objective of promoting the development of the Arts from community level in Uganda, WEBIARE came together under a brick house that was constructed in Ndegeya - Masaka purposely to host the first international artists residency which would be run as a community based program. The Weaver Bird Artists Residency is synonymous with the ongoing efforts to establish the first Artists Village in Uganda which is strategically situated in a small community called Ndegeya; Luganda for “Weaver Bird”. Ndegeya is located only 5 miles from Masaka Town Center or 2.5 Miles off Masaka - Mbarara bypass highway. As a community based initiative, the Weaver Bird Residency is aiming at developing a new image of Ugandan art as related to the society and social transformation while fostering development in our communities.

Mo Ibrahim Foundation - Deadline 31st July.

Ibrahim Leadership Fellowships

The Mo Ibrahim Foundation, in partnership with three of the world’s most influential
multilateral organisations has launched the Ibrahim Leadership Fellowships programme.
Working with the African Development Bank (AfDB), the United Nations Economic
Commission for Africa (UNECA), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) the
Fellowships Programme will help to prepare the next generation of outstanding African
leaders by providing them with unique mentoring opportunities.

Having identified a lack of opportunities for aspiring leaders across Africa to gain critical
 experience at the highest levels of multilateral organisations, the Mo Ibrahim Foundation
has worked with these partners to create the Fellowships. The AfDB, UNECA, and WTO
will each host an Ibrahim Fellow in their executive offices. The expectation is that Ibrahim
Fellows will go on to play a major role in the governance and development of the African
continent.

Ibrahim Leadership Fellows will be selected by the institutions in conjunction with the
Mo Ibrahim Foundation and will take part in a 12 month fellowship with one of the
participating organisations. They will be young professionals, mid-career and new
executives under the age of forty, or forty-five for women with children. The Fellows
will be nationals of an African country with 7-10 years of relevant work experience
 and a Master’s Degree. They will support the work of the institution to further
promote the economic development of the continent.

The deadline for applications will be 31 July 2011.

To apply for a fellowship with the African Development Bank

To apply for a fellowship with the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa

To apply for a fellowship with the World Trade Organization
(via the African Development Bank)

From The Sunday Times

Source: Sunday Times

February 10, 2008

Uncensored: France's erotic art

For centuries, the French coyly seized
licentious art and locked it away in a library
they called Hell. Now this secret archive of
erotica has been opened up to the public.
So has the anticipation been worth the wait?
Lesley White heads off to Paris to sneak a
preview

_________________________________



The French have finally come clean. For years their collection of dirty books has been filed away in the state’s sprawling archives. Now these once illegal works are on show at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; visitors who make the journey are rewarded with prints and engravings of tumescent aristocrats, knickerless royals, not to mention the excretions of Salvador Dali (of which more later). As might befit the national library, the collection also has literary merit – included are works by Baudelaire, de Sade, Apollinaire and Diderot.

Since 1840 over 2,000 works have been marked with the special code “Enfer” (Hell), the hiding place for the library’s under-the-mattress stash of pornography – sorry, erotic art. Until 1968 these books and prints were hived off to protect public morals, but after the uprisings of ’68, in which the slogan was “it is forbidden to forbid”, the library was no longer imbued with the moral authority to bury the works of which it disapproved. Yet it was so proud of its unique archive – which over the years has accrued a reputation for crude and shocking pleasures, a fetish joint for the stay-at-home literary classes – that it couldn’t bear to let it disperse.

Erotic literature no longer needs to be hidden: one of the last entries into Enfer via the traditional route of public prosecution was the novel Le Château de Cène in 1969, but the contents of Enfer have never been revealed before. Why now, I ask the curator Marie-Françoise Quignard. She shrugs. “Why not? Later could be too late.” At first I think she means that in a highly sexualised society, eroticism will lose its pulling power; or that in a world where nobody reads for pleasure, books won’t fetch a crowd. But no, Quignard’s fear is that such an exhibition will fall prey to the moral strictures of the religious right, the new puritanism that sees only damnation in pornography but is, perversely, its most effective catalyst. “Sex is banal today,” she reflects, “but at the same time there are little groups of people, these virtuous leagues, high on moral principles.”

Since the show opened in December there hasn’t been a squeak of disapproval from censorious ministers, or the church, or the right-wing press. The new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has defined his guiding principles as “authority, morality and respect”, but the money-making, deregulated France he dreams of is not a place to waste time fretting about saucy books and prints. The days of the old paternal president successfully preaching one moral code and practising another ended with the demise of Papa Mitterrand – family man and father of a “secret” love child – after whom this library is named. Who is fit to be custodian of public morals any more? A modern literary pornographer, Catherine Millet, author of The Sexual Life of Catherine M, talks on tape at the exhibition about the “warm, encouraging” public response to the publication of her infamous (and bestselling) adventures.

Besides, outside the grandiose, modern edifice, France is in the grip of a real sexual frisson as its new president parades his supermodel, Carla Bruni, like a totem of middle-aged virility, his citizens unable to decide if they should condemn or admire him. Inside, with the dimmed bordello lighting and the hush of a sedate reading room, there is also evidence of Gallic double standards. France may be in the mood to display its dirtiest secrets, but how shocked are we? The language of the works is explicit, but the act of writing is in itself a daring subversion; this is a world of pseudonyms, false publishers’ addresses, subterfuge and anonymity. All of the exhibits from Enfer were suppressed, judged by the library to run “counter to good morals”, often gifted by the public prosecutor, having been used in obscenity trials. In the conservative Catholic France of Napoleon III, Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, the most poetic case for depravity, had six poems suppressed, though they were published nine months later. Between 1947 and 1970 the publishing house of Jean-Jacques Pauvert was the subject of serial obscenity trials. In 1947 he published Sade’s Juliette, was prosecuted and won.

Enfer was created in 1840, during the reticent reign of Louis Philippe, paradoxically the beginnings of photography and lithography, which would turn pornography from niche leisure pursuit into an industry. Once locked away, Enfer’s contents were restricted, released on written application to those finding favour with the library’s committee, as if the dirty habits described might be catching.

On a wet Wednesday morning I’m given a tour by Quignard, a small, cheerful woman whose cheeks do not colour as we pass obscene offerings stored away for dusty years in the parallel Enfer departments of books and prints and photography. One of the earlier exhibits is the 16th-century Ragionamenti of the lewd satirist Pietro Aretino: Nanna, a former prostitute, and her friend Antonia compare the lives of a whore, a married woman and a nun, concluding that the oldest profession would offer the best chance of happiness for Nana’s daughter. “In the 17th century,” laughs Quignard, “you can do whatever you want as long as no one knows.” And as long as you are a member of the leisured classes, of course. The libertine novels of the next century were protected in private libraries alongside travel and religious titles, discreetly locked away from servants in little cabinets that usually included a version of the 1748 underground bestseller Thérèse Philosophe, by Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d’Argens. If the 18th-century enlightenment was the golden age of French eroticism, Thérèse is its conflicted, provocative heroine, aspiring virgin and rampant sex fiend. Still uninitiated at 25, she is not naive, has lived with a prostitute, and witnessed a priest sinning wildly with a penitent. Her protector the count tires of her refusals, finally lending her his salacious library of fiction and images for one year on the condition that for 15 days she must resist self-gratification. After a short time contemplating Jupiter impaling Juno with a giant phallus, randy satyrs and super-endowed athletes from a guiltless pre-Christian Arcadia where pornography flourished unfettered by law or conscience, Thérèse calls for her triumphant lover. The oldest exhibit is the 13th-century

Le Roman de la Rose, a medieval French poem surviving in illuminated manuscripts whose message is clear: even monastic life will not protect a woman from the overwhelming urges of the flesh. The illustrations here include a nun picking a ripe phallus from a tree which groans with an abundant crop. Next to it is an edition of The Black Forest, by “Merryland”, a journey through the inside of a woman’s sex, translated – it claims – from English, though this is mere hide-and-seek: if such works were tracked down they were destroyed, their authors punished. Careful disguise had proved the key to survival for a teasing genre. Licentious 17th-century sonnets are illustrated with charming daily scenes, a woman being fitted with new shoes, though in the verses underneath she is enjoying a different indulgence. The chaste packaging was partly tease, partly precaution. Among the titillating engravings sits stark reality: a letter from an agent of the crown detailing his capture of a printer of a work whose author escaped the Bastille only due to influential contacts. The work in question, Memoirs of Dom Bugger, is the story of a sexual adventurer’s travails –catching the pox, being castrated, living in nunneries (seemingly the era’s equivalent of the Playboy mansion) – becoming so addled that the only thing to revive his libido is copulation with a pious Catholic. Later there would be a list of priests discovered in flagrante with Parisian tarts in the ancien régime, taken from papers kept at the Bastille, the names and addresses of the women and details of what they did included.

Some of the authors of early soft-core thrills were respectable citizens with public lives: the statesman Mirabeau, a moderate of the revolution (though he was condemned to death for seduction and abduction) published his obscene Ma Conversion (1780) under the initials MDRCDMF, the tale of a male prostitute who specialises in servicing the old, fat and ugly. Mirabeau’s contemporary Andrea de Nerciat, a secret agent of the French government, secretly penned Le Diable au Corps, “oeuvre posthume du très recommendable Dr Cazzone”. Nerciat is keen on animals, but not as keen as his bawdy heroine Felicia, with her boudoir penchant for dogs and donkeys. It’s not so much the bestiality that shocks as her horrific comparison of black men and animals: the blacks are good as lovers but can rebel, the animals are more predictable, easier to manage for a women with needs.

The fictional 18th-century courtesan had fun. For all its ribaldry, this is popcorn porn, full of lifted skirts and expressions of eye-bulging ecstasy, and innocence. It’s like the contents of the confiscated-items cupboard at a boys’ school; naughty but nothing you’d get the authorities involved with. That changes as you turn a corner into the darkly criminal world of the Marquis de Sade, the black star of a dubious bunch, who spent 32 years in prison for his outrages against propriety. On the wall nearby are painted the names, addresses and prices of Parisian prostitutes of the time, taken from the small but essential almanacs (maybe the first Rough Guides) published in the capital. One “petite sauvette” wanted 15 louis for her attentions; another describes herself as “folâtre” (wild, baby) and does it for nothing; another wants a hat. Their likenesses, powdered and pink-cheeked, tumbling over laps and bedsteads with sturdy legs akimbo, are reproduced on jokey calling cards, the original dirty postcards.

And such pornography maps the undulations and secret pathways of French history itself; through its changing forms one glimpses the hesitant and then brutal birth of a republic. At the time of the Frondes (1648-52) the uprisings against royal power that would simmer into revolution, pornography assumed a political, pamphleteering role. Marie Antoinette was portrayed as a treacherous, incestuous whore, obsessed with sapphic orgies, low-born men, and her trusty dildo; apparently because of Louis XVI’s minute member. Priests and aristos are shown as sexual grotesques, seducing animals, vegetables, anything to sate their insane lusts; the venerable Abbé Maury, cardinal and archbishop of Paris, was insulted as voracious homosexual. The best weapon against deference was sexual attack; a satirical viciousness that was as effective as a tabloid sleaze scandal at ending political careers. While the tumbrels were prepared, the withering satire continued, the annals of Enfer piled with confiscations from ecclesiastical libraries, and those of émigrés and the condemned. The artist Dominique Vivant Denon, who accompanied Napoleon Bonaparte to Egypt and became the founding director of the Louvre, engraved in 1793 “Le Roi Phallus, Malade et Défait”, which mocked Louis for his vapid masculinity. The king’s phallus, sick and undone, receives a visit from doctors who are incapable of offering help.

The sweetest things here are the 19th-century divertissements; the phenakistiscope, an 1835 animation device showing a close-up coitus, a roundel of penises disappearing into furry fruits; the childish little drawings French Windows, which open to reveal such saucy surprises as Napoleon with a dishevelled mademoiselle on his knee. The pretty “English scene” engravings were meant to be held to the light to reveal what was really going on behind the pastoral haystack; a theme of voyeurism that runs through the exhibition, all countries, all tastes, all centuries.

One corner is dedicated to spanking, “le vice anglais” (though all the books gathered here eem to be French), but we are sorely under-represented as a nation; maybe we should be thankful for the neglect. Some aspects of Eros are distinctly unsavoury. The stain left by Salvador Dali on his engraving for the front of Georges Hugnet’s poem, Onan – dedicated to masturbation – is best not contemplated too hard. Dali, creator of The Great Masturbator, was obsessed with the subject; his surrealist compatriots were more wary about the use of pornography. They preferred to use sex in a more veiled way as they set about discrediting reality; but the Spaniard was relentless, and by 1934 he had been excommunicated by the movement. As Realism takes a fumbling hold in the fin de siècle, enthusiasts were treated to Jean-Jacques Lequeu’s (Johnny the Cock) engravings of a women’s genitalia, delicately executed, but anatomically wayward. With photography, however, came accuracy, the meeting of the fantasy and the flesh that would dominate and enslave the imagination the way no drawing ever could. The pornographic photographs of Auguste Belloc, graphic, unprimped, daring, ended up in Enfer after being seized in a police raid, many hidden inside hollowed-out books. Belloc was an enormous influence on his contemporary Gustave Courbet’s shockingly realistic female nude, L’Origine du Monde of 1866, both blatant and mysterious. Contrast Belloc’s provocative female sitter, sex revealed, eyes covered or averted, with the jolly workaday photographs of a brothel on the Rue Saint-Lazare in 1900, commissioned as part of a police report, which records a respectable-looking Mademoiselle Nini charging five francs for the girl and five francs for the house.

By this time, the names associated with Enfer are the big hitters of modernist French Lit; it was the age of the iconoclastic artist and the publisher with a taste for a fight with the state. August Poulet-Malassis published Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. The first printed catalogue of the contents of Enfer was edited by the symbolist poet Guillaume Apollinaire in 1913, the same year he published his controversial anthology Alcools. He also championed libertine texts, wrote but never publicly acknowledged authorship of a 1907 erotic novel, Les Onze Mille Verges (Eleven Thousand Penises), which was banned until 1970, and edited an anthology of Sade. Another pioneering publisher, Jean-Jacques Pauvert, published the complete works of Sade, after winning a public prosecution case, which makes our own Lady Chatterley trial look like a fight to publish Bambi. Pauvert also published Georges Bataille, a conservator at the Bibliothèque National and author – though he never admitted it – of L’Histoire de l’Oeil, the story of two teenaged lovers and their accelerating perversions, in which exhibitionism and soft-boiled eggs play a supporting role.

In 1969, Enfer closed. The system changed: if salacious works were judged of historical interest, they were placed in a special reserve, though not a hidden one. The rest had no special sanctuary. This distinction soon revealed the snobbery surrounding pornography as art: the 1969 novel Le Château de Cène, by Urbain d’Orlhac, was considered vulgar porn, until it emerged that its author was the esteemed Bernard Noël, and its status upgraded. In 1983, Enfer staged a comeback, reopened because, as Quignard says, “it had meant something” and transformed from a hellhole to a treasure chest, bursting with beautiful words of erotica such as Francesco Clemente’s lithographs for Harry Matthews’s Singular Pleasures (1988), one of the few examples of more recent addictions to the stock. According to the organisers, works continue to arrive, gifted by private collectors, but new titles are rarely extended the compliment of a place in Hell.

Can a library exhibition about sex be sexy? Though under-16s are barred, the exhibits are harmless enough. They are in the most part antique books about spent passions, old drawings, dusty relics of someone else’s fetish. Until, that is, you turn a corner and see the grainy monochrome film – jerky as a Chaplin comedy walk – L’Atelier Faiminette, which was shown in the waiting rooms of Paris brothels in the early 1920s. A cross between slapstick and hard-core, the look on the only male client’s face as he services a small harem is one of fierce concentration rather than the po-faced mask of ecstasy demanded of the modern porn hero. In its quaintness the home movie is endearing, and yet it is also drawing the sort of interest one might expect at a porn show.

Most of the visitors today are women, but I watch one man, smart, middle-aged, circling the glass-topped cabinets, returning again and again to that vaudeville scene of real, moving flesh, clearly unable to stop looking, and reminding us that the point of all this refined, sometimes exquisite, high art was voyeuristic pleasure.

As the rumours swirl about “Sarko’s” marriage and his girlfriend’s reported pregnancy, you can see that, for snatching the attention of the immoral majority, the celeb-mags and gossip rags have it over the porno-lit any day.