Chance Encounters: From Sabo to SoBO

International Wed 06-05-2009

Chance Encounters: From Sabo to SoBO
By Aarti wa Njoroge

A few weeks before it was decided that India would go to the polls in April and May and, as a result, the India Premier League cricket tournament would have to be moved, advertisements for South Africa had started appearing in Mumbai. The relocation of the tournament must have been a huge unexpected bonus for the country’s tourist board.

In another Africa-India story, the Sakshi Gallery (maybe not a misspelling of Saatchi, but reputed to be hip anyway), in the back streets of South Bombay near the Taj Mahal Hotel, has collaborated with The Centre for Contemporary Art, located in Lagos’s Sabo.

The result is Chance Encounters: Seven Contemporary Artists from Africa. Seven, like the iconic Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa organised by London's Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1995. This time, though, it is not about seven countries, but seven artists from north, west and southern Africa: a Moroccan, Ghanaian, three Nigerians, a Gabonese and Zimbabwean.

Ashioke by Nnenna Okore

Nnenna Okore
Ashioke - 2009 - Clay & Burlap - 72x89x15 cm

Just as the Whitechapel exhibition (which went on to Sweden and the United States) sought to give contemporary art from Africa a western audience, so Sakshi - so as to introduce international art to the Indian audience - is bringing it east. According to its website, "'Chance Encounters' plays on the idea of discovering, meeting, interacting and exchanging within a loosely prescribed curatorial framework."

This may explain that when I looked for links, I could not at first find any except for geography, and that, too, 'loose', with thousands of kilometres apart. The media are varied, as are the themes, and if the artists interact, it is through the layout of the exhibition, which commingles their works.

El Anatsui, who was also present in Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, has specially created three trademark wall hangings which, from a distance, look like cloth. His use of flattened bottle caps from local alcoholic drinks remind me of three totem-like sculptures I saw recently in Nairobi by Irene Wanjiru, except that while Anatsui’s caps are held together by copper wire, and the overall form wavy (one is a Black River, another Ink Spill; the third is simply entitled India), Wanjiru’s bottle tops are nailed flat into rough wood to create a Maasai, guitar and machete.

Maybe having Wanjiru's pieces would have brought some cohesion yet diversity, particularly as there is no east African artist in 'Chance Encounters'.

Still, the crumpled cloth wall hanging look extends to Nnenna Okore's clay and burlap Ashioke and white telephone directory pages (more recycling) scrunched and woven in Ute. Okere has graduated from University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where Anatsui is professor of sculpture.

Coexistance by Nnenna Okore

Nnenna Okore
Coexistance - 2008 - Newspapers - Varied dimensions

Okere has coiled and again scrunched newspapers to make Co-Existence, two large circles and uneven balls assymetrically distributed on the wall and floor, like a sprawling extended family. (There is more newspaper, rope and burlap in the flat discs of Okirika, which resembled the cow dung fuel still used in Gujarat.) Thick coils, the curves of the ears and the hoops of the earrings form a sinuos image in Suku Serino, one of fellow Nigerian J.D. Okhai Ojeikere's photographs of 1970s hairstyles.

Unlike the relatively crude, colourful (but fun) painted hairdresser signs one sees in west Africa, Ojeikere's black and white images are precise. I will think of the intricacies of Abebe, composed similarly to Suku Serino, next time an Indian looks at my simple braids with awe. His punkish Mmon Mmon Edet Ubok (1974) is three years ahead of its time. The hats were no less impressive, though I found the angle of the woman's head in Headgear strange.

I could not see her face, nor was she completely turned away. While these oversized portraits allow one to zoom in on the detail, I would also like to have seen some context, images of the women in whatever environment they would have worn these elaborate 'heads'.

The finest - technically speaking - works in 'Chance Encounters' are by Safaa Erruas. Her 2004 La Robe, not included here, would have fit well next to Okore's Ute or Okirika. Her Romantic Bouquet, made of eighty pieces of porcelain and embroidery thread, sits on the floor.

Sleeping Beauty by Berry Bickle

Berry Bickle
Sleeping Beauty, Burning Dress 2009 C. Print 120x84 cm

Her mixed media canvases are more ambiguous. Through metallic wire and needles, she has created a work entitled Flora, but this is like a vulva. Anillos, also using metal on paper, could be the reading of a heart monitor. Further still, The Two Knives are pointed at each other, as if in conflict. However serene the white might appear, the image is not so benign.

At the other end of the subtlety spectrum are the violent reds and subject of Uche Iroha's 2004 photographs of open-air abbatoirs with their omnipresent smoke, even in the rain. The colour images are awash with blood, on boots, in tanks, on the ground. My friend wondered whether one of the carcasses in the Slab-fire, Flesh and Blood series was part of a whale. The black and white landscapes are about goats, roasting and roasters, but no less menacing.

Men stare into the camera, one smiling while carrying, on his shoulder, a severed animal head, which reminded me of a trip to Empress Market in Karachi, where I unexpectedly came across a pile of black cows' heads. The animal, even in death, could also be smiling, its mouth close to the butcher's.

Goats has been cropped so that you do not see the lower teeth or bottom half of the body of the goat (the same one, but before...?) closest to the camera. Even when the creatures are alive, Iroha is reminding you of their fate. For a change, though, here is slaughter not because of some war, but to provide food for people.

No less disturbing is Myriam Mihindou's negative black and white 'performance' series of Haiti, Dechoucaj. Eyes that look as if they are being gouged out, contorting fingers, wrists and bodies (I prefer the aesthetic of Christophe Mahoukpé), a man hanging over the branch of a tree, his torso bare. Resonant of Elizabeth Atnafu's A Shrine for Angelica's Dreams from 15 years earlier, Berry Bickle has a series of three Sleeping Beauty, Burning photographs. More violence, with Bickle presumably representing her own pariah state.

The writing superimposed on the clothes made me recall Aryan Hirsi Ali and Theo Van Gogh's film Submission, this time the words directly on a woman's body.

The following day, I saw Caroline Gibello's photographs of elephants, birds and landscapes that are dusty (with much of the scenery bleached away so that you focus on the people, goats (alive!) and trees) rather than smoky, at an exclusive furniture store not far from the Breach Candy Club frequented by well-to-do South Bombaiites.

I had been attracted to it by two large advertisements in different parts of town. (India, like Africa, has a prolific billboard culture.) The water is serene, there are boats evoking departures and even a smiling child. Life is not portrayed as easy: women and a girl, carrying a load on her head, are walking on the interminable road.

But Meet Me on the Other Side, the title of one of her works, is an apt description if I were to pit this exhibition against 'Chance Encounters'. Here is southern Africa again presenting itself as exotic. Maybe I should not mind such stereotypes - some of the time.

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