FREE EXHIBITION GUIDE INTRODUCTION Africa State of Mind explores the work of an emergent generation of photographers from across the African continent. 16 artists from 11 different countries interrogate ideas of ‘Africanness’ through highly subjective renderings of life and identity, collectively revealing Africa as a psychological space or a ‘state of mind’, as much as a physical territory.

The exhibition orientates around three main themes. Inner Landscapes offers highly subjective visions of African identity, in the process interrogating prevailing ideas of Africa and Africanness. As a medium, photography has played a significant role in shaping external views of Africa. Ethnographic-style imagery of the colonial period presented Africans as the primitive people of a dark continent. Contemporary news reports often portray the continent as a place of chaos, corruption and disease. Such images gain their power by shrouding bias beneath a cloak of objectivity. By contrast the photography in this section revels in its subjectivity, embracing the particular, the personal and the idiosyncratic, in place of more stereotypical views of Africa.

Zones of Freedom brings together photographers whose works explore questions of gender, sexuality and identity. Many of the photographers in this section are working within societies where socially conservative views on sexuality and gender

Cover: dominate. For example, homosexuality Kiluanji Kia Henda is illegal in 34 out of Africa’s 54 nations In the Days of a Dark Safari and in Mauritania, Sudan, southern The Last Journey of the Dictator Mussunda N’zombo Before the Somalia and northern Nigeria, it is Great Extinction: Act II (2017) punishable by death. In countries where queer and trans identities are would-be migrants and corrupt rulers seen as the very antithesis of normality, – a vision given ugly validation by the work of photographers such as President Trump’s 2018 description of Athi-Patra Ruga, Ruth Ossai, Eric its nations as “shithole countries”.’ By Gyamfi and Sabelo Mlangeni takes on contrast, Africa State of Mind features a dual role. It is both an expression photography that seeks to address the of individual artistic practice and an complexity of what it means, and how assertion of visibility in circumstances it feels, to live in Africa today. where LGBT+ perspectives often go unrepresented. The exhibition also draws inspiration from the work of the Senegalese Hybrid Cities considers photography economist Felwine Sarr, who has centred on the African metropolis as called for fresh consideration of how a site of rapid social transformation. to understand Africa. Sarr speculates Of the largest cities in Africa, three - about a new Africa conjured into being Lagos, Cairo and Kinshasa - can be by artists, thinkers and cultural actors. classed as “megacities”, conurbations The work of these creative figures is with a population of over 10 million. intent on articulating the contemporary That number is set to double by lived experience in Africa as a thing of 2030. The share of the continent’s nuance and imaginative reach. In so population living in urban areas will doing they are articulating Africa as a pass 50 percent around the same place where there is, as Sarr puts it, a time. Amid such rapid urbanisation, profound “continuity between the real characterised by ceaseless flows of and the possible”. people, goods and capital, a state of permanent change reigns. The Ekow Eshun works in Hybrid Cities document the Exhibition Curator African city engaged at a period of unprecedented acceleration, revealing both the tensions and possibilities of that condition.

Africa State of Mind takes place at a time in which popular Western views of the continent still remain distorted. On one hand, an “Africa rising” narrative, celebrates the development of an emergent middle class and the growth of a tech sector driven by a young aspirational population, while glossing over the inequalities of income and opportunity that still hinder social progress in many countries. On the other hand, there’s the reductive stereotype of Africa as a land of Sabelo Mlangeni Country Girls Xolani Ngayi, eStanela (2009) ATHI-PATRA RUGA MUSA N NXUMALO (b. 1984, South Africa) (b. 1986, South Africa)

Working in performance, photography Musa N Nxumalo’s 16 Shots series and video, Athi-Patra Ruga’s artistic combines photographs from the approach combines myth, and violent, student-led protests of the alternate reality with a sly undercurrent #feesmustfall movement in 2016 with of humour. ecstatic dance scenes of urban nightlife and musical performances at clubs and Ruga’s world is populated with parties in Johannesburg. The series characters whose identities are in attempts to disrupt simplistic narratives a constant state of transformation. about South African youth as either The central figure in the Night of the angry activists or frivolous slackers, Long Knives is drawn originally from proposing instead an intertwining of his performance series The Future both viewpoints, with the party as a White Women of Azania. Engulfed in a site of protest and vice versa. cocoon of multi-coloured balloons, the character is in the midst of a racial and The title 16 Shots is also a reference sexual metamorphosis, their identity to a song of the same name by the suspended between black and white, Chicago-born rapper, Vic Mensa; a tune male and female. that addresses police brutality in the United States. In referencing the song, Here, the body has become the site to Nxumalo suggests a transnational link explore questions about South Africa’s between the struggles of young people troubled history and present-day in the USA and those of his South politics. Azania is a reference to pre- African peers in their confrontations apartheid activists’ dreams of building with the police. an African utopia free of white colonial presence. In Ruga’s images, that goal remains very much in the realm of fantasy.

Athi-Patra Ruga Musa N Nxumalo Night of the Long Knives I (2013) Wake up, kick ass and repeat! (2017) RAPHAËL BARONTINI RUTH OSSAI (b. 1984, France) (b. 1991, Nigeria)

Raphaël Barontini’s Tapestry from “Fine boy no pimples” is a phrase an Asteroid, gathers references from commonly used in Nigeria to across past and present to explore compliment young men on their representations of African identity. appearance. In this series, Ruth Ossai uses the term as inspiration to push Barontini’s work combines antique and boundaries of gender and identity Western classical imagery (Velasquez’s while photographing a selection of Infante, 17th century portraiture, Roman Nigerian youth made up of her cousins, sculptures), cut and mixed with a extended family, friends and photographic portrait of a man from neighbours. the Tutsi people of Rwanda. With its painted cosmos-like background, the Produced in partnership with stylist piece also gestures to Afrofuturist Ibrahim Kamara, the series challenges ideas which suggest the most fitting expectations about what constitutes way to articulate black experience is "womenswear" and "menswear" and through science-fiction and fantasy. what it means to be a boy or a man This idea is reinforced by the dune of in Nigeria today. It seeks to prompt black sand at the base of the tapestry, conversations about gender in a alluding to lunar or unchartered country where traditional sex roles landscapes. remain largely fixed.

The sand is also grounded in a physical In creating the series, Ossai is also reality, furthering Barontini’s fusion conscious of working within another of fantasy and history in his work. African tradition of exuberant It relates to his personal experience portraiture, as exemplified by the likes of visiting family on the islands of of J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, Samuel Fosso La Reunion and Guadeloupe, places and Malick Sidibé. characterised by beaches composed of volcanic black sand.

Raphaël Barontini

Tapestry from an asteroid (2017) Ruth Ossai Ezugwu Ezugwu and Ifebuche Chidiebere Nigeria (2017) Enugu state, Nsukka, SABELO MLANGENI NEIL BELOUFA (b. 1980, South Africa) (b. 1985, France)

Sabelo Mlangeni's Country Girls offers In Neïl Beloufa’s Kempinski, citizens of an intimate portrait of gay life in rural Bamako, Mali, describe their visions of South Africa. the future.

Mlangeni took photographs over Addressing the camera directly, they a six year period from 2003 to speak in the present tense as if what 2009 in small towns in the eastern they imagine has already come into Mpumalanga province. In these being. The world they describe is locations gay lifestyles are often a fantastical place of talking cars, regarded contemptuously as un- telepathic sex, travel at light speed and African or un-Christian, and being gay mobile houses that roam continents. means running the risk of verbal abuse For a while, as the speakers sit in or physical violence. Yet even in such darkness, illuminated only by hand- unsympathetic settings, gay people held neon tubes, it seems that anything have created space for themselves to might be possible. work and love and build communities. Mlangeni’s photographs evidence In centring the film on the citizens an everyday world of intimacy and of Bamako, Beloufa’s film proposes affection, humour and connection. an inversion of international power They show gay people as vulnerable relationships. Rather than being but visible. A community that demands mere victim to the consequences of to be seen on its own terms. globalised change such as war, famine and environmental destruction, the people of the developing world here become authors of their future.

Sabelo Mlangeni Country Girls Neil Beloufa Nkululeko and friend from Durban (2003) Video still from Kempinski, (2017) ERIC GYAMFI (b. 1990, )

For Eric Gyamfi, the photographs in Just Like Us are part of an ever- evolving record of the lives of his queer friends in Ghana, whom he considers collaborators in the work.

Same-sex sexual activity is illegal in Ghana and to counter prejudice against the country’s LGBT+ community, Gyamfi aims to create images that normalise their presence within society.

Just Like Us seeks to represent queer people as both members of a distinct community and valuable contributors to the country’s social fabric and history. Although the project uses sexuality as a starting point, Gyamfi’s goal is to photograph queer people in the wholeness of their intersecting identities and interests. In the process, he seeks to expand the visual account of daily life for Ghana’s LGBT+ community which exists outside, yet also inside and alongside, heteronormative society.

Eric Gyamfi Just Like Us, Untitled 7 (2016) Mimi CheronoNg’ok Untitled (2014) KILUANJI KIA HENDA NAMSA LEUBA (b.1979, Angola) (b. 1982, Switzerland)

Kiluanji Kia Henda’s series The Last Namsa Leuba’s work delves into Journey of the Dictator Mussunda the politics of the gaze and its N’Zombo Before the Great Extinction related notion of otherness. She (in 5 Acts) draws from a raft of literary revisits symbols of ancestral belief and historical references to consider from a contemporary, Westernized the European gaze on Africa and the perspective. myths and stories the continent tells about itself. In particular, it critiques The Weke, series was shot in the two persistent narratives about Republic of . The work imagines Africa: the colonial-era notion of narratives that are inspired by the Africa as a land of “noble savagery”’ local traditions of the vodun (voodoo) as perpetuated by Europeans such religion. Benin is the birthplace of as Joseph Conrad and his 1899 voodoo, a belief system which predates novel, Heart of Darkness, and the many religions by over 10,000 years, idea of Africa as a verdant paradise, and there are many groups in the as proclaimed by populist African country that keep its tradition alive. politicians. The central character in the work is based on the dandyish persona Traveling across Benin, Leuba met with of Mobutu Sese Seko, former president a number of different voodoo priests of the Democratic Republic of Congo and participated in voodoo ceremonies (1965-1997), who styled himself as a in order to gain a better understanding father to his people while robbing the of the religion’s practices. Sourcing country of its wealth. His death in the models from villages and towns final image can be read as a cautionary in the area, she created her own lesson in the seduction of myths. costumes and props. The result is not a documentary account of voodoo culture but a fictive portrayal that imagines new types of communities. While they are based on aspects of the local context, these images take on a new life of their own, rooted in fantasy.

Kiluanji Kia Henda

In the Days of a Dark Safari series (2018) The Last Journey of the Dictator Mussunda

N’zombo Before the Great Extinction: Act I (2017) Namsa Leuba Weke MIMI CHERONO NG’OK LEBOHANG KGANYE (b.1983, Kenya) (b. 1990, South Africa)

In the photo series Everyone Is Lonely Lebohang Kganye began to make the in Kigali, Mimi Cherono Ng’ok gathers works in Ke Lefa Laka: Her-story after together images taken in locations the death of her mother. With that loss across Africa, including Dakar, , came a desire by the photographer to Abidjan, Kampala, Kigali and Nairobi. explore the possibility of sustaining a The works contain no markers of connection with her mother. Searching geographical specificity and their light through her family’s house, Kganye suggests a liminal state in time that’s gathered together old clothes and neither dawn nor dusk. Recognisably photos and began inserting herself tropical elements recur such as palm into the pictorial narrative of those leaves and baobab trees. But there are family scenes. In these new images, also more enigmatic images. A couple Kganye wears her mother’s clothes on an empty beach. A man lying on a and mimicks her poses. These works bed, shirtless, his face obscured, and became what she describes as “herour” his presence hinting perhaps at love histories, a way of marrying two or loss. Ng’ok describes her images as memories, her mother’s and her own, an “emotional cartography”, a way of into one new form. mapping space through the senses so that the Africa we see in her images Kganye realised ultimately that she becomes a place of memory, desire, was scared she was beginning to loss and nostalgia. A place of absence forget what her mother looked like as much as presence. and sounded like, what her defining gestures were. The photomontages became a substitute for the for the fleeting nature of memory and a way to form a conversation that might be able to stretch across time.

Mimi CheronoNg’ok Kganye Lebohang Her-story Laka: Lefa Ke II (2013) e pinky 2-phisi yaka Ka Untitled (2014) Emmanuelle Andrianjafy Untitled (2015) From Nothing’s in Vain (MACK, 2017) GIRMA BERTA MICHAEL TSEGAYE (b. 1990, Ethiopia) (b. 1977, Ethiopia)

In Girma Berta's Moving Shadows Michael Tsegaye’s Future Memories series, solitary figures are juxtaposed examines the nature of urban change against vibrant backgrounds, creating in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where the images which exemplify the contrasting photographer is based. colours and personalities on the streets of his home town of Addis Ababa, Over the past decade an upsurge in Ethiopia. Berta describes the intention new construction projects has altered behind his work as a desire to capture - and to some extent damaged - the "the beautiful, the ugly and all that is in social fabric of the city. People who between" in his city. once lived in village-like environments, and in neighbourhoods that were a hive A self-taught photographer whose of activity, have now been relocated to work fuses street photography with anonymous apartment buildings. Many fine art, Berta’s use of digital media older people have lost their homes and to produce his artworks is itself a livelihoods. commentary on how online and mobile technologies are offering new routes to Future Memories is Tsegaye’s attempt empowerment and expression for the to capture what will - or already has - young in Africa. faded into the past. The series provides a visual tour through the Addis Ababa he knew and grew up in, excavating the histories and narratives encased within its physical form.

Girma Berta Michael Tsegaye Moving Shadows II: XII (2017) FM IV (2009) EMMANUELLE SAMMY BALOJI ANDRIANJAFY (b. 1978, Democratic Republic of Congo) (b. 1983, Madagascar) Sammy Baloji’s photographs document The origin of the Nothing’s in Vain the urban spaces of contemporary series lie in Emmanuelle Andrianjafy’s Congo. His pictures show a built relocation from Madagascar to Dakar, environment in which colonial-era Senegal in 2011. A stranger to the structures have largely fallen into city, Andrianjafy originally struggled disrepair and where infrastructure is to orient herself in a place of noise subject to constant breakdown. Here, and crowds and seemingly constant the Congolese city is replete with construction projects. As a way disconnected fragments, reminders to familiarise herself with her new and echoes of a former modernity that environment, she took to walking continues to exist only in a shattered the streets with a camera, eventually form. If there is a vision for such cities, amassing a kaleidoscopic body of it mainly lies in fantasies of glimmering images that reflected an outsider’s Dubai-like new developments, which fascination with the people and promise a future far out of reach of places and accidental beauty of a most residents. Yet Congo’s urban city in constant flux. From snapshots residents are constantly inventing new of passers-by to the image of a social spaces to overcome their difficult monumental socialist realist-style circumstances. Baloji’s photographs statue of a man, woman and child capture an urban world where the rising from a parched and rock-strewn possibilities of collective action and landscape, this is Dakar revealed in its dreams of a shared future continue to splendour and contradiction. be explored.

Sammy Baloji Emmanuelle Andrianjafy Urban Now: City Life in Congo (2013-15) Untitled (2015) Street view, municipalities of Masina and From Nothing’s in Vain (MACK, 2017) Kimbanseke (2013) MICHAEL MACGARRY Africa State of Mind (b. 1978, South Africa) is a touring exhibition by New Art Exchange Michael MacGarry's practice as a visual (NAE) Nottingham, curated artist and filmmaker is focused on by Ekow Eshun. researching narratives and histories of socio-economics and politics in Ekow Eshun is an Africa, principally in spaces where independent writer and contemporary life is in a state of curator. He is Chairman invention and flux. of the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group, Excuse Me While I Disappear was overseeing ’s made in Kilamba Kiaxi, a new city most significant public art built outside Luanda, Angola which programme, and Creative is to be home to more than 250,000 Director of Calvert 22 people. It was built by a Chinese Foundation, a leading arts construction company for $3.5 billion space dedicated to the and is the single largest investment contemporary culture of project by China in Africa. The film’s Eastern Europe. narrative follows a young municipal worker who lives by night in the old NAE is a contemporary city centre of Luanda and works by arts space in Nottingham day as a groundskeeper far away in that celebrates the region’s Kilamba Kiaxi. Conceptually, the film cultural richness. The is concerned with themes including largest gallery in the UK African science-fiction and the visual dedicated to culturally mechanics of mid-century European diverse contemporary visual ethnographic cinema. arts, NAE’s mission is to stimulate new perspectives on the value of diversity in art and society.

Michael MacGarry Video still from Excuse me, while I disappear (2014) Mimi CheronoNg’ok Untitled (2014)

EXHIBITION TOUR DATES

New Art Exchange, Nottingham: Africa State of Mind is a project 29 September - 16 December 2018 strand of NAE’s three year programme, www.nae.org.uk Africa/UK – Transforming Art Ecologies, which has been supported by Arts Impressions Gallery, Bradford: Council, England’s, Ambitions for 29 March - 15 June 2019 Excellence funds www.impressions-gallery.com

See NAE's website for further tour dates.

New Art Exchange 39-41 Gregory Boulevard Nottingham NG7 6BE 0115 924 8630 [email protected]

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