aKAZ!ATL Loves & Admires
The 2020 Coleman Memorial Lecture/UCLA entitled ‘Worrying the Mask: The Politics of Authenticity and Contemporaneity’ by Zina Saro Siwa could not have come at a better time for aKAZ!ATL.
We have been using some of this COVID time for cataloging, photographing, and situating our artwork from across the African Diaspora on this newly revamped website. As we handle, fondle and attempt to tell the stories of the many sculptures we have collected, to the photographer and our other collaborators, the question repeatedly comes up, so what category do we link them under on the website. Are they decorative interior design, are they sculpture, are they contemporary or are they antique? During these discussions, we frequently go down rabbit holes as we reminisce about Al Haji Issa, a Hausa trader of antiquities from across the Sahel, who used to regularly pull up at our home in Ouagadougou. This was the late 1980s and we were privileged to be living in Burkina Faso during the Presidency of the late Thomas Sankara.
Posters and murals shouting the words: down with imperialism, the fatherland or death, and crush neo-colonialism adorned the streets abuzz with people, mobilettes, sheep, and vendors selling everything and anything.
Al Haji would hoot at the gate and come in usually lugging something precious: sometimes a Senoufou gazelle, a Dogon door or chest or a Bamileke statue, recounting the adventures he had gone through to bring them to our door. Even before the serious haggling on price could start, he would offer that he would leave the treasures with us for the plaisir des yeux… the pleasure of our eyes and of course his hope was that we would not be able to part with them when he returned and issued the final invoice. Invariably it played out just like this.
Back to these sculptures and their value. Zina Saro Wiwa, in her lecture, discusses what constitutes art, who and what confers value, origin, context, and how artistry is assigned. She is especially powerful and erudite on the interface of contemporary, the antique, the cultural and traditional and the dreaded dimension of - if and where ethnography lands. Initially, her discourse confused us even more. But as we reflect on what she shares it is beginning to ground our thinking on how to exhibit and market that part of our inventory which is very contemporary and in-demand globally and yet is based on ancient cultural forms that remain very much alive today and inform day to life for Africans across the continent.
Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock artist residency in Dakar, Senegal
Sotheby’s Summer Discussion featuring Kehinde Wiley and the Duke of Devonshire gave dimension, joy and pleasure to a recent Sunday morning. It resonates with so much aKAZ! is trying to convey in Atlanta. The new gatekeepers to the art world are radically re-imagining how art is shown and accessed and nowhere more so than in the great cities of the African Diaspora. The questions raised by Kehinde Wiley about who gets to view great art and what do they get to see as well as what is the context of art that depicts violent, unjust and oppressive histories is paramount. aKAZ!ATL aims to play its small part in Atlanta which it considers an African Diaspora city but that sadly does not yet imagine itself as such. This is a narrative that aKAZ!ATL also dreams of showing in all its facets in Atlanta.
“I do think that fist-waving conversations around liberation ideologies are sort of dated - I'm not creating Barbara Kruger moments of self-actualization - what I'm trying to do is create more moments of chaos where we don't really know where we are: to destabilize; where all the rules are suspended temporarily.“ - Kehinde Wiley
Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock artist residency in Dakar, as one bullhorn of hopefully many starting up all over the Africa Continent, projecting artistry, thinking, music and literature, is a wonderful vision. aKZA!ATL aims to be a receptacle and amplifying this message in Atlanta. Framing all of this creativity in centuries of history and tradition, the current culturally fraught days and finally in the increasingly significant production of Afro futurists is going build the bridges allowing the many many up and coming African creatives to go through increasingly opening and beckoning gates of global marketplaces.
Finally, Kehinde Wiley’s preferred vehicle of portraiture compliments the same happening in literature, photography and music. There is a hunger for new narratives from radically differing perspectives. While Kehinde Wiley’s main goal is to portray black people in the same powerful light that white Europeans have always been, it also forces the white normative gaze into other picture frames. These forcefully lead eyes to start re-evaluating history, narrative and ‘stuff’ they have held sacrosanct because it is historical and documented. He is the supreme questioner of who gets to tell stories and for what purpose.