Autumn Missive
We are so proud to have exhibited three wonderful Senegalese artists during the roughly twelve months aKAZI has been in existence at Haugabrooks on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta. Cheikh Tidiane Keita, Kine Aw, and Sadio Diallo offered up a cross-section of the amazing art scene that is Dakar, Senegal. We hope they kindled curiosity and maybe even a desire to experience the places their work portrays. We are grateful to all three artists for entrusting their work to us, we are really appreciative of our friendship and collaboration with Jean Patrick Guichard of Gallery Miriam, who ‘loaned’ Cheikh and Kine to us, and Lauren Tate Baeza, the Fred and Rita Richman Curator of African Art at the High Museum for her amazing support and encouragement.
Visitors to our gallery have already had the chance to engage with the work of Moçambican sculptor, Gonçalo Mabunda, who continues expanding his artistry and most recently his huge sculptures were installed at the new US Embassy in Maputo, Moçambique. For now - please watch this space, as aKAZI is in talks to show his more recent works in Atlanta.
Just as these three exhibits made the cauldron of spiritualities, traditions, and expressions that is West Africa visible, we will attempt to do the same with the southeastern African seaboard country of Moçambique, home of many ancient kingdoms, centuries old trade routes with the Indian sub-continent and the far East, and the recipient of a truly Kafkaesque type of colonialism specialized in by the Portuguese. One of the last countries on the Continent to gain its independence in 1974, Moçambique was immediately plunged into a brutal twenty year civil war - actively fomented and financed by apartheid era South Africa next door. Of course South Africa did not want a thriving black ruled country next door and especially not one that gave safe harbor to ANC leaders as a front line state. These refugees from the terror in South Africa were often assassinated in Maputo.During those decades of war Moçambique followed an East German brand of Marxism. So clearly there are so many many layers of lived experiences that Moçambicans typically have to peel back in order to reconnect with the essential. Moçambican women have had to hold entire communities together in the face of Portuguese colonial capitalism which demanded the total erasure of African heritages and a total assimilation , a civil war that meant the absence of all males - even young boys - and then the ongoing pull of men to south African mining.
The women featured in our upcoming exhibition Mussiro & Other Masks by Moçambican visual artist, Manuela Madeira come out of this incredible mix of influences. Manuela’s figurative oil paintings portray women gazing out at the world provocatively and even suspiciously. Her subjects resist racial categorization, they are simply ‘every woman.’ Manuela seeks both in her practice as an anthropologist as well as in her work as an artist to refine the universal female essence from its manifold iterations across the globe. She resists the reductive label of ‘African woman.’ She often explains it makes no sense to talk about an archetypal African. African cultures number in the hundreds if not thousands, each with its own microcosm of legacies.
Mussiro is a type of white mask traditionally worn by women from the Macua group to signify virginity. Apart from Mussiro being a part of Manuela’s traditional upbringing, she is fascinated by the idea of the many masks women so expertly have to wear to navigate life, whether it is in Nampula, Maputo, in other African cities and in metropolises all over the world. Manuela lives between Brussels and Dublin currently and she is fascinated by the #me too movement of the moment and what it says about the sexual agency of women and in particular how class, power hierarchies and the general patriarchy play out for women as a universal phenomenon and the gaze of Manuela’s subjects speak directly to this.
Please hold the date for Saturday, November 20, 2021 when Manuela opens her exhibition in person at aKAZI. She will speak to her inspiration for the work and in particular she will speak about the resilience of Mozambican women who have for decades traversed war, absent men, a rapdily urbanizing country, and increasing precariousness economically and socially as Islamic radicalization grips the north of the country.
We also welcome Sandy Teepen's beautiful textile collages back to aKAZI as the perfect complement and frame around Manuela's work. For every city we have ever lived in, there has been a key and Sandy has been that key for us in Atlanta. She is that rare Atlanta citizen fluidly moving across and between communities in a city that is still struggling to present as One Atlanta. Her creations carry on a long tradition of female agency inherent in the African American tradition of textile art. Her love of fabrics from the African continent often manifests as centers or heartbeats of her art.
One of the unexpected joys of growing the aKAZI gallery has been the wide network of people working in the creative spheres of Atlanta that have entered our orbits as a result. We had the immense pleasure of hosting a literary discussion between Dr. Chika Unigwe and Samuel Kolawole, both working novelists and academics here in Georgia. They read from their works and hosted a discussion about the need to portray different narratives about the African continent with the paintbrush and also the pen. In the meantime the Tanzanian born novelist, Abdulrazak Gurnah won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, ten years after the Nigerian novelist Wole Soyinka did. The latter also published his first work of fiction in the last 50 years. Both Gurnah’s and Soyinka’s work resist the narrow tropes of ‘African literature’ and as Soyinka sarcastically said in the recent BBC World Book Club - writing African literature would be writing about drums, bows and arrows …. Instead their writing addresses universal human themes of rupture, displacement and resilience. Gurnah’s latest novel ‘After’ addresses the German colonization of Tanzania.
It is on our ‘to read’ list especially after our recent trip to the newly opened Humboldt Forum in Berlin. After what seems like decades of acrimony, multiple curator resignations, the Forum finally opened its doors in September 2021. The delays were largely due to the unwillingness or as the powers that be called it - inability to do the necessary provenance research of the literally thousands of treasures from the African, Asian and Latin American continents in the possession of the Humboldt. If you haven’t had the opportunity to savor Chimamanda Ngozi Adechie’s keynote address delivered at the opening, please do so for a further understanding of how tight a box, art from the African continent has to explode in order to unfold. Sadly Ethnographic Museum is still part of the forum’s title and many will find that challenging, as Chimamanda states: “why is art from Africa, Asia and Latin America ethnographic and art from the European continent not?”
While the Forum has copious notes accompanying the displays of art from the former German colonies on the African continent, the display leaves much to be desired. Sometimes as many as 50 items are crammed into small vertical glass displays and even the large and hugely significant sculptures are paired. There is an uncomfortable sub-text about displays like these which put treasures on display in that uncaring manner. It makes the viewer think ‘curios’ and it is problematic that there is no kind of beckoning into the exhibit.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adechie keynote address at the opening of the Humboldt forum in Berlin.
And finally - we are so excited to host Kenyan novelist and academic Wanjiku Wa N’gugi for a reading at aKAZI in early December. She will read from her new novel: Hippoland in conversation with novelist and academic Samule Kolawale. They will speak about female agency in contemporary African cities. Wanjiku is an esteemed and gifted writer in her own right while also part of an illustrious literary family, the daughter of iconic Kenyan writer Ngug’i wa Thiongo and sister of renowned writer Mukoma wa Ngug’i.
As always, we look forward to seeing you for our events and at any other time you feel like dropping in to see us. We love immersing visitors into the world of art from the African continent.
Greetings,
Anja & Jumbe
Hold these dates:
Saturday, November 20: Opening of Mussiro & Other Masks
Saturday, December 18: Wanjiku wa N’gugi reading from her new novel Hippoland and Holiday Market.