NYAB Event - “Find Us on the Map” Exhibition

“Find Us on the Map” Exhibition

Rush Arts Gallery

This event has ended.

Find Us on the Map is an exploration of recurring themes in contemporary visual culture in Africa. Through people, places, and plural identities, the artists capture and create narratives that are factual, fictional, and occasionally hypersurreal, and leave the audience room to investigate them. The works of the featured artists encourage, and even demand, the audience to Find Us on the Map!, in accordance with the title of the exhibition. Whilst there is now a widespread awareness that Africa is not a country, are we better informed about this vast geographical entity? We may be able to name a few countries within Africa but can we find them on a map?

As the art historian, artists and curator Chika Okeke-Agulu said just last year: Folks can’t seem to come to terms with the fact that African artists have now taken and secured their seat at the dinner table, invited or not! With works of art from Africa receiving long deserved acclaim from museums, curators, and collectors, finding these places on the map becomes a prerequisite for us to be allowed to sit at the table with them. As we begin to develop our understanding of art created on the continent beyond the antiquated, overarching, and superficial title of “African art”, we seek additional information that gives us clues about society, economy, religion, and love in African countries. The exhibition includes a map that graphs “the most Googled for object” in each country and whilst Nigeria’s most Googled term is “weddings”, we see very different results in North, East, and South Africa. This is just a small piece of information that informs the practice of artists in these countries.

These artists and their stories inform and illuminate our understanding. Works by Jenevieve Aken, Joana Choumali, Colin Delfosse, Logo Olumuyiwa and Nobukho Nqaba, exemplify the intimate and synchronized dance of the factual and fictional in contemporary African photography. As we create a story and plotline for Aken’s haunting albeit glamorous character, a creation myth for Choumali’s Awoulaba mannequins, an arena for Delfosse’s wrestlers to rumble in, an audience for Olumiyiwa’s Lagos aesthetes, and a consumer base for Nqaba’s newest all-purpose textile, the exhibition allows room for playfulness but also deeper contemplation of the role of photography and the access provided through the lens and in turn through the photographs.
The show additionally features work from Ima Mfon, and Andile Buka. Mfon’s Nigerian Identity series tackles the ever-false stereotype of a homogenized blackness while Buka takes a more comical approach to identity in Satirist Sports.

These works collectively repudiate preconceived notions of an Africa with a single story. Simply knowing that a work was created in Africa is no longer enough, and the curated selection is evidence as to why that is.

Taking a more historical approach, photography was initially used in Africa to engage audiences with a place that at the time was a complete fantasy. African art, objects, dress, people and lifestyles were photographed as a means to inform us of the otherness of Africa. These fantasies of Africa, based on very real objects, artworks, and peoples in the past, were the foundational introduction to a continent of 54 independent countries and more than 3,000 ethnic groups. Today, the concept of fantasy is reclaimed and repurposed to narrate stories and engage viewers in innovative ways. Can you find us on the map?

Media

• Photography

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