CURATORS’ SERIES #8 ALL OF US HAVE A SENSE OF RHYTHM 05.06.2015 – 01.08.2015 INTRODUCTION It is a great pleasure to welcome eighth guest curator Christine Eyene and her ambitious and original exhibition All Of Us Have A Sense Of Rhythm to DRAF. This is, to my knowledge, the first exploration of the lineage of African rhythmic sources in modernist and contemporary practices, thanks to Eyene’s scholarship and personal dedication in its research. The exhibition encompasses sculpture, dance, poetry, video, performance, sound and music. It traces the cadences of modern masters (John Cage, Langston Hughes), popular subcultures (Northern Soul, drum’n’bass) and a contemporary generation of London African diaspora artists (Larry Achiampong, Evan Ifekoya). We look forward to welcoming visitors to this exciting show and concurrent programme of talks and live performances. DRAF is a factory for new prototypes to present and engage with art, and since 2009 exhibitions by international independent curators have introduced new forms to the space and our London audience. We have been particularly proud to present with them works of art from different continents, generations, practices and ideologies, many of which had never been previously displayed in the UK. The depth of their research, their individual curatorial sensibilities and the broad networks of artists and collaborators they have involved have made an invaluable contribution to our programme. Our guests have brought much to the household, and we have both enjoyed and learned from these collaborations. Our thanks to previous Curators’ Series participants, all of whom remain part of the family. We continue to be grateful to Arts Council England who have supported the Series since the beginning, and whose endorsement means a great deal. Thanks also to the many cultural funds who have supported elements of these exhibitions, including on this occasion The African Arts Trust. A range of diverse and fascinating works constitute in this show, and we thank all the artists for their trust and commitment in bringing them to DRAF. The team at DRAF have, once again, produced this exhibition with dedication, and my personal thanks to Sandra Pusterhofer and Benedict Goodwin. Finally, and most of all, we would like to thank Christine Eyene for her extraordinary knowledge and vision in curating this exhibition. Vincent Honoré, Director & Chief Curator, DRAF THE BEAT THAT’S HAUNTED US EVER SINCE One day, Lorna – a friend of my elder sister’s, a South African teacher, journalist and anti-apartheid activist exiled in London – took us to visit an old man. It was somewhere near Saint-Michel, Saint-Germain, in Paris. His flat looked like an abandoned place, with cardboard covering broken windows and pieces of paper scattered everywhere. We were told he was a painter. I never understood why Lorna took us to that place and I was quick to forget about the old man until he reappeared in our lives some time later. By then he had become Oncle Gerard, a mark of respect shown to elders in the Cameroonian and, generally speaking, African community. We would visit him at his retirement home in Nogent-sur-Marne; other times, my sister would bring him home for friends and family gatherings. Although I cannot recall any meaningful conversation with him, I clearly remember him enjoying watching our dances. All sorts of dances, to a variety of genres of black music, the most spectacular of which was the dance we performed to a music identified with Cameroon’s Beti people: Bikutsi. Bikutsi, meaning “beat the earth” or “smash the ground” in the Ewondo language, is a fast pace 6/8 or 9/8 rhythm traditionally played with balafons (African xylophones). The dance involves keeping up the rhythm in an energetic back-and-forth movement of chest and hips – a movement subsequently popularised in urban dance such as hip hop. When one person dances, or two together, exhortations from the surrounding crowd include one to shake, or more precisely to break, the hips (ateg ankuk). We might not have had a good command of Ewondo, but as children from the Cameroonian community within the African diaspora, knowing how to dance Bikutsi was a way to claim our cultural identity. It was almost a rite of passage that legitimised a cultural belonging validated by the elders. The Bikutsi genre is said to have appeared in the 1940s and was mainly the preserve of women, who used it as a medium to express themselves from a female perspective. It gained a new lease of life in the early 1980s with the electric keyboard and guitar adding to, or replacing, the balafons. Brought up by our mother, who under the stage name Sellsa contributed to the revival of the genre, our encounter with Oncle Gerard happened in the same decade that we were intensely exposed to this music. I don’t think I ever saw Oncle Gerard dance. He had been knocked over by a car some time earlier. So he usually sat down and looked with fascinated eyes. He said things in English that I did not always understand. I remember once asking my sister for a translation: she said that watching us dance reminded him of home… Later came some women […] all dancing to the rhythm of drummers1 Gerard Sekoto (1913-1993) left his native South Africa in 1947, a year before the implementation of what Jacques Derrida called “racism’s last word”.2 Although he had enjoyed some form of acknowledgement in a racially divided society, it was only toward the end of the apartheid regime, and the end of his life, that his art gained national and international recognition. He is now regarded as a one of the pioneers of African modern painting. In the Paris-based black diaspora of the late 1940s, it comes as no surprise that Sekoto – who also played the piano in Saint-Germain jazz clubs – interacted with Négritude and Présence Africaine. Négritude was a literary and ideological movement developed in 1930s Paris by poets and political figures Aimé Césaire, Léon Damas and Léopold Sédar Senghor. One of its disseminating outlets was Présence Africaine, a journal and publishing house both founded by Alioune Diop in 1947 and 1949 respectively. The movement and associated publications were instrumental in propogating a Francophone anti-colonial discourse, and highly influential in the decolonisation process of the 1950s–60s. Although Sekoto never explicitly positioned himself as an advocate of Négritude, he was certainly responsive to its philosophy. He contributed writing to the journal and participated in the Society of African Culture’s first and second Conferences of Negro Writers and Artists in Paris (1956) and Rome (1959). He also took part in the first International Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar (1966), the only time he ever returned to Africa. Sekoto’s extended stay in Senegal echoed his own recommendation for Africans and members of the diaspora to return “now and then to Africa to draw their inspiration from spiritual sources which have not been influenced by Western culture”.3 He stayed in the West African country for a year and upon his return to Paris, his painterly touch had noticeably changed. He had developed a style of “facet-like” planes, to quote South African curator Lesley Spiro4; rhythmic strokes of paint conveying the impression of colourful rays, or light beams, cutting through the picture plane. In aesthetic terms, Sekoto’s post-Senegal compositions resonated with Senghor’s idea of rhythm as being at the centre of Africa’s system of thought and experience, influencing the continent’s and diaspora’s cultural productions. 1 Gerard Sekoto’s account of his time in Senegal in Barbara Lindop, Gerard Sekoto. Randburg: Dictum, 1988, p. 39. 2 Jacques Derrida, ‘Racism’s Last Word’, in Art Against Apartheid, 1983, pp. 11-35. 3 Gerard Sekoto, ‘Responsibility and Solidarity in African Culture’ in Chabani Manganyi, Gerard Sekoto. ‘I am an African’. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2004, p. 223.. 4 Lesley Spiro, Gerard Sekoto: Unsevered Ties. Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery, 1989, p. 58. Rhythmic attitude: may we remember the word5 In the year Léopold S. Senghor (1906-2001) published his seminal essay ‘Ce que l’homme noir apporte’ (‘What the black man brings’), the Western world embarked on the dark chapter of the Second World War. For Senghor, Africa’s contribution to the forging of a new world is not to be valued by the number of African troops joining the ranks of Europe’s, but rather through singular works by black writers and artists. However this essay, he writes, is not about that: it is about “all the virtual presences that the study of the Negro allows one to foresee”.6 Senghor focuses on African culture, the fertile elements of the “negro style” and, more precisely in the visual arts, sculpture which he sees as Africa’s most typical art form. He highlights the importance of the human figure in African sculpture and notes that, within anthropomorphic statues, the masks are predominant. On classical African aesthetics, Senghor writes: This ordinating force that makes the Negro style is the rhythm. It is the most sensitive thing and the least material. It is the vital element par excellence. It is the primary condition and the sign of art, like breathing in life; a breath that speeds up or slows down, becomes irregular or spasmodic according to the being’s tension, the degree and quality of emotion. Such is the rhythm primitively, in its pureness, as it stands in the masterpieces of Negro art, particularly sculpture. It is made up of a theme — sculptural form — opposed to a correlated theme, like inhaling and exhaling, and again.