Interrogating Western Paradigms: Rethinking Authencity in African Art

Angola Sun 03-07-2011

Interrogating Western Paradigms: Rethinking Authencity in African Art
By Simao Souindoula

"Millennium base and new way of expressing in the modern Bantu art".

One of the major purposes of this project was to display all the analogy which exists in modern plastic creativity among people of central, eastern and southern Africa; after the historical, linguistic and anthropological harmony clearly highlighted since the end of the nineteenth century in this cultural part of Africa.

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^{Seated Nude | Late 13-14 century CE Copper at the Fundación Marcelino Botín, Museum for African Art | Ife Art in Ancient Nigeria}

We could in this way notice, after having organized six of these contest and plastic art exhibition that most of the painters, engravers, sculptors, ceramists, copper beaters and many of their equivalents mainly drew their inspiration from old Bantu and even from old proto-bantu traditions.

These artists very likely devoted themselves in carrying on authentic values of their civilization through their way of working out, setting or shaping using endogenous techniques and deriving Greco-Latin methods or deepening modern methods.

Thus we could observe within this regional exhibition hundreds of works such those coming from kongo local painting techniques called takula or ntoto mbwaki, the utilization- as rest- of the mpekwa, the mongo raffia, the ngomba, the Swahili banana leaves; the ibu, the teke tree barks; the making of frame with the andala, the palm from Sao tome; the incorporation of the ndjabi tattoo called yimango or the kimbundu cowry shell called muzudi.

We also valued the revival of the setting of ancient umbundu ceramics called kacimbeya; the making of rundi calabash called urubakuzo or urwaato [rundi] and Xhosa woven object called luka.

Such devotion to the native expressing methods forms part of a strong movement of opening and also of a conceptual and technical adaptation to the modern aesthetics.

About the Author:

Simao-Souindoula-Modern-Expression-of-Bantu-Art

Simao Souindula is a historian, an art critic and a Fellow of Scientist Committee of World Festival of Negro Arts, Luanda (Angola).

Posted By: Maggie Otieno

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