NYAB Event - “The Lay of the Land. New Photography from Africa” Exhibition

“The Lay of the Land. New Photography from Africa” Exhibition

The Walther Collection Project Space

This event has ended.

The Walther Collection presents the inauguration of a new multi-year exhibition series on contemporary photography and video art from Africa, to be presented in thematic exhibitions in New York from 2015 to 2017. Expanding the collection’s longstanding focus on African photography, this program features a diverse range of emerging artists who are exploring new visions of social identity in Africa and the African Diaspora.

The first exhibition, The Lay of the Land, brings together three young artists who are examining the effects of the built environment on African landscapes from Dakar to Johannesburg. Born one generation after the liberation movements that swept Africa in the 1960s, Edson Chagas (Angola), François-Xavier Gbré (Côte d’Ivoire), and Mame-Diarra Niang (Senegal/France) investigate the promises and failures of the postcolonial city.

Uniting their works is a vivid attention to color and form. The artists systematically portray monumental civic buildings or banal apartment complexes, imposing avenues or lonely corners, profiling spaces discovered on travels within the African continent and abroad. Their images of physical structures and public spaces — whether functional or incomplete — are encoded with the values, dreams, contradictions, and politics of urban life. In The Lay of the Land, rather than providing purely documentary statements, Chagas, Gbré, and Niang pose open-ended questions about the changing visual narratives of the landscape.

Edson Chagas (b. 1977, Luanda, Angola; lives and works in Luanda) studied photography at the University of Newport in Wales, London College of Communication, Escola Técnica de Imagem e Comunicação in Portugal, and Centro Comunitário de Arcena in Portugal. His work has been shown in group exhibitions including Journal, Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2014); No Fly Zone. Unlimited Mileage, Museu Coleção Berdardo, Lisbon (2013); and the traveling exhibition The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Hell, Purgatory revisited by Contemporary African Artists (2014-2015). His series “Found Not Taken” was shown at the Angolan Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, winning the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. In November 2015, Chagas will be featured in Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015 at the Museum of Modern Art.

François-Xavier Gbré (b. 1978, Lille, France; lives and works in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire) studied photography at the École Supérieure des Métiers Artistiques in Montpellier and later worked in fashion and design photography in Milan. Gbré’s work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions including
The Past is a Foreign Country, Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College (2015); Abroad, Art Twenty One, Lagos, Nigeria (2014); Surfaces and Fragments, Galerie Cécile Fakhoury, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire (2013, 2014); DAK’ART: The 11th Dakar Biennale, Dakar, Senegal (2014); FLOW, Kyoto City University of Arts Gallery, Japan (2014); New Africa, Kulte Editions, Casablanca, Morocco (2014); We Face Forward: Art from West Africa Today, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, U.K. (2012); and Rencontres de Bamako-The African Biennale of Photography (2009, 2011).

Mame Diarra Niang (b. 1982 Lyon, France; lives and works in Paris and Dakar), a self-taught artist and photographer, was raised between Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, and France. Niang’s work has been featured in solo shows at the Stevenson Gallery, Johannesburg (2014) and Institut Français, Dakar (2013), and group shows including Cosmos Arles Books, Rencontres d’Arles, Arles, France (2015); Nine Artists, Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town (2015); Dakar Biennale Off (2014); and Le Piéton de Dakar, Institut Français, Dakar (2013).

Media

• Photography
• Video installation

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