{"title":"Ahmed Morsi","authors":"S. M. Hassan","doi":"10.1215/10757163-8719616","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-8719616","url":null,"abstract":"Born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1930, Ahmed Morsi is a multitalented artist who seamlessly moves between different genres and modes of creative expression. A brilliant painter, an eloquent poet, and a sharp art and literary critic whose career has spanned more than seven decades, his work has been enriched by the experience of living in three continents. While Morsi’s oeuvre is the embodiment of polyphony, a unifying force that defies any singular reading is the surrealist spirit that permeates his work across different mediums. The retrospective Ahmed Morsi: A Dialogic Imagination, held at the Sharjah Art Museum in 2017, captured the artist’s restless artistic spirit with a display of the intertextuality and multiplicity of voices through which Morsi expresses his creative talent and endless experimentation. This article references the Sharjah show and offers a survey of Morsi’s career, accompanied by a select number of images of his oeuvre from his early days in his native Alexandria to his sojourns in Baghdad and Cairo, and his current practice in New York City, where he has been living since 1974. It also offers a glimpse, in image and in text, of his diverse corpus of literary works, theater set designs, book covers, as well as rare photographs. In tandem with the Sharjah exhibition and the soon-to-be-published catalogue, the author offers a historical assessment and critical appraisal of Morsi’s accomplishments that will enable readers to appreciate the artist’s remarkable endeavors and experimentations over more than six decades of commitment to creativity in art and literature.","PeriodicalId":41573,"journal":{"name":"Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art","volume":"2020 1","pages":"22-43"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65991973","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Family Affair: Jacolby Satterwhite's Queer Utopics","authors":"Christine Knight","doi":"10.1215/10757163-8719641","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-8719641","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Jacolby Satterwhite is known for creating virtual worlds that feature multiple avatars of himself voguing within densely rendered neon landscapes. He populates those landscapes with threedimensional objects painstakingly traced in the animation program Maya from drawings that his mother made during his childhood in the hopes of striking it rich on the Home Shopping Network. This article focuses on an early work, The Country Ball (2012), an animated video that brings together archival footage from Satterwhite's family at a 1989 Mother's Day cookout alongside his mother's drawings of what he calls \"recreational American material culture.\" The author argues that Satterwhite's virtual performances link queerness and utopia: his animated avatars make manifest his desire to occupy a world as multiplicitous and far-reaching as his sense of self. However, the author believes that this queer utopics begins with Satterwhite's mother and her crafting of a creative process in the midst of terrible constraints on her physical and economic mobility. By reading the artist's virtual worlds through his mother's drawings, the author investigates a similar strategy of \"making do to make new,\" or reworking the mundane in the service of the marvelous.","PeriodicalId":41573,"journal":{"name":"Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art","volume":"19 1","pages":"56 - 66"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86603370","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Camera to Canvas: The Case of Patrice Lumumba and Congolese Popular Painting","authors":"G. Nugent","doi":"10.1215/10757163-8719668","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-8719668","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores the entanglement of Congolese popular painting with photography through the case of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, who was assassinated in 1961. Lumumba's final public appearance was immortalized in a series of photographs and newsreel footage that was disseminated around the world. The author contends that the events thereafter are frequently envisioned by Congolese popular painting, as it takes over from the operations of the camera in an era largely defined by the photographic. The article suggests that photography and Congolese popular painting are enmeshed in the creation of a visual archive around the figure of Lumumba. Furthermore, it examines the indebtedness of popular painting to photographic culture as well as other sources in the \"colonial contact zone.\"","PeriodicalId":41573,"journal":{"name":"Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art","volume":"18 1","pages":"82 - 93"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86381585","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Norman Lewis","authors":"Lucy H. Partman","doi":"10.1215/10757163-8719604","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-8719604","url":null,"abstract":"African American artist Norman Lewis (1909–79) was known to be a complex conversant in command of many verbal and visual idioms. His art reveals an interest in inter- and intrapersonal interactions. Lewis studied how people conversed, the way individuals operated in Groups, and the movement of crowds. His work compels viewers to look carefully at other people and themselves. How do we interact with others and what happens durinG those exchanGes? His interest in human interaction on the micro and macro scales has not yet received in-depth analysis. When for many abstract expressionists the individual and individual experience was paramount, Lewis was concerned with the community and the communal. He desired to communicate with the viewer and persistently souGht to confiGure the most fittinG visual lanGuaGe for the Job. His lanGuaGe and approach to visual communication took from the many vernaculars he used.","PeriodicalId":41573,"journal":{"name":"Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art","volume":"2020 1","pages":"6-21"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49431565","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Studio Call","authors":"Chika okeke-agulu","doi":"10.1215/10757163-8719692","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-8719692","url":null,"abstract":"In February 2020, the author spent a day with Penny Siopis in her studio at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, to discuss the artist’s new ink and wood-glue paintings, which she adopted in 2008 as her primary painting medium. This new direction is quite significant for an artist who, in the 1980s at the height of the antiapartheid movement, made ardently realistic figurative oil and mixed-media paintings that signified the psychic detritus of apartheid’s pathologies. The weighty sparseness of Siopis’s Cake paintings (1981–81) and the airless excess of the History paintings (late 1980s) might have been the artist’s way of both dealing with and reflecting on the psychology of apartheid as the institution lurched to its inevitable end in 1990. In the early 2000s, before settling on ink and wood glue, Siopis spent a few years producing oil and ink paintings that contributed to the making of postapartheid trauma art—investigations into the psychic, moral, and ethical abjections of apartheid in the wake of testimonies from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Her ink and glue works represent the conjunction of material, process, and subject matter: Siopis relies on and is challenged by the unpredictable mixing and flow of ink, glue, and water—material acts, as she calls them—that evolve as the sum and interplay of autonomous agencies of medium and artist. Siopis’s most recent work in this medium and her film She Breathes Water (2019) allegorize global warming and the devastating impact of human exploitation of nature—elegies to present and coming catastrophes.","PeriodicalId":41573,"journal":{"name":"Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49462646","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beyond Political Tensions: 2019 Ségou'Art | Festival on the Niger","authors":"Hélène Tissières","doi":"10.1215/10757163-8719680","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-8719680","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In 2019, the second edition of Segou'Art, a contemporary art event taking place in Mali, was combined with the country's popular Festival on the Niger, launched in 2005 by cultural entrepreneur Mamou Daffé. The combined festival, held February 1–9, included concerts, workshops, conferences, exhibitions, and performances, uniting people and art forms and working beyond barriers. For two full weekends the event hosted numerous concerts by renowned stars such as Vieux Farka Touré, Sékouba Bambino, Abdoulaye Diabaté, Amadou and Mariam, Fousco and Djènèba, Master Soumy, Tab B., Calibre 27, King KJ, and Kader Tarhanine. The art program was composed of an In at the Foundation and nineteen Offs held throughout the city, showcasing, among others, the work of Abdoulaye Konaté, Barthélémy Toguo, Cheick Diallo, Philippe Dodard, Siriki Ky, and Amehiguéré Dolo, as well as sixteen young artists who were selected from the continent and given the opportunity to attend workshops by leading artists. Galleries and collectives were present as well. This article discusses this amazing event that, through musical and artistic works, promotes peace and stability in a country that has been facing intense political difficulties, fully illustrating this year's theme of Ségou Yelen (Light). The project demonstrates that culture is the best way to bring about hope, unite people beyond their differences, dissuade youth from migrating, elevate the public's spirit, and promote the Malian concept of Maaya—a lifestyle, an attitude, and a way of being based on humanism, civility, and respect of others.","PeriodicalId":41573,"journal":{"name":"Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art","volume":"17 1","pages":"113 - 94"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74285285","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Nudity and Pleasure","authors":"Naminata Diabate","doi":"10.1215/10757163-8308270","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-8308270","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Cultural products and discourses about erotic pleasure have recently proliferated, leading to what the author calls “the pleasure turn.” In studies of African culture, “the pleasure turn” can be read as decentering the dominant paradigm that has mostly associated black nakedness with negative emotions: sorrow, pain, and humiliation. Illustrative of the turn is the 2009 exhibition Beauty and Pleasure in South African Contemporary Art, which considered pain and suffering as overrated and sought to provide a more accurate picture of life on the continent as a mix of pleasure and pain. This article closely reads the South African multimedia artist Dineo Bopape’s 2008 Silent Performance, alongside Berni Searle’s 2001 politically charged Snow White, to point out their generative potential for the intersection of the visual media, erotic pleasure, and nudity. Traditional views of pleasure have avoided the nexus of erotic pleasure and the visual because of their historical association with nineteenth-century scientific racism. The author argues Bopape’s and Searle’s images exceed a single and stable interpretation. By inserting their (semi-)naked bodies as central images, they invite yet resist unwanted readings of erotic pleasure in their works. Incorporating her analysis of these works into her conceptualization of images of black female nudity in art, the author proposes that a robust attention be given the visual image in the rising conversation on pleasure in African studies.","PeriodicalId":41573,"journal":{"name":"Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art","volume":"9 1","pages":"152 - 166"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88660753","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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