Distant Relatives / Relative Distance

nce

ta is D e v ti la e /R s e v ti la e R t Distan

michael stevenson Hill House De Smidt Street Green Point 8005 PO Box 616 Green Point 8051 Cape Town tel +27 (0)21 4212575 fax +27 (0)21 4212578 info@michaelstevenson.com www.michaelstevenson.com

Cover: Odili Donald Odita, Attention, 2004 (detail)

Distant Relatives/ Relative Distance BaRthélémy toguo oDili DonalD oDita owusu-ankomah Julie mehRetu senam okuDzeto wangechi mutu

michael stevenson 7 June – 8 July 2006

Installation view of (left to right) Owusu-Ankomah, Movement III and Odili Donald Odita, The Space Between Things

contents

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Preface

14 24 30 36 40 48

Barthélémy Toguo Odili Donald Odita Owusu-Ankomah Julie Mehretu Senam Okudzeto Wangechi Mutu

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Bye-bye Babar – or, What is an Afropolitan?

by Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu

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Selected bibliographies

Installation view of Senam Okudzeto, All facts have been changed to protect the ignorant and Untitled (Hands and Feet) 6

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PReFace

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In the final message my father left for me and my sisters, he wrote, “Remember you are citizens of the world.” But as a leader of the independence movement in what was then the Gold Coast, he never saw a conflict between local partialities and a universal morality – between being part of the place you were and a part of a broader human community. Raised with this father and an English mother, who was both deeply connected to our family in England and fully rooted in Ghana, where she has now lived for half a century, I always had a sense of family and tribe that was multiple and overlapping: nothing could have seemed more commonplace. – Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a world of strangers1

Distant Relatives/Relative Distance brings together recent prints by Julie Mehretu, a video projection by Wangechi Mutu, paintings by Odili Donald Odita and Owusu-Ankomah, and installations by Senam Okudzeto and Barthélémy Toguo. These artists are ‘citizens of the world’, or ‘Afropolitans’, to use the term coined by Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu in an essay first published in The LIP and reprinted in this catalogue. As she writes, “Like so many African young people working and living in cities around the globe, they belong to no single geography, but feel at home in many.”

At present, many South African artists are enjoying an international prominence that was inconceivable a decade ago and have also become ‘citizens of the world’. Artists who live in South Africa – such as William Kentridge, David Goldblatt and Berni Searle – regularly show in the leading museums and biennales of the world, and artists who live in Europe – including Marlene Dumas, Robin Rhode, Candice Breitz, Kendell Geers and Moshekwa Langa – are similarly acclaimed. In the Venice Biennale of 2005, five South African artists were included in the official curated shows, making it the country with the fourth largest number of artists.

Although South African artists share many concerns with their African counterparts, there has been surprisingly little exchange between these ‘distant relatives’ at a high profile or sustained level on the continent,2 and specifically in South Africa.

In the 1990s, with the advent of democracy in South Africa and the ending of the cultural boycott, a new, celebratory freedom lessened the country’s isolation from the continent and the rest of the world. In the realm of visual arts, the first Johannesburg Biennale in 1995 invited participation through national exhibitions including representation from 18 other African countries. The second Johannesburg biennale, curated by Nigerian-born Okwui Enwezor in 1997, emphasised global connections through its theme of Trade Routes: History and Geography. The international roster included many prominent African artists (among them Distant Relatives’ Wangechi Mutu and Odili Donald Odita). This exhibition ended controversially, with the city

1 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a world of strangers (New York: WW Norton & Co, 1999), xviii.

2 In terms of the broader continent, the Dakar, Cairo and Bamako biennales are the prime opportunities for exchanges, although these events have often been undermined by disorganisation.

withdrawing its support, and there were no further biennales. In retrospect, it was a triumphant event in the history of contemporary South African art but the momentum it generated soon dissipated.

The exhibitions schedules of public galleries in post-biennale South Africa only sporadically included contemporary African art.3 The reasons for this absence could arguably be ascribed to South Africa’s preoccupation with ongoing debates about the politics of transformation and representation. The demographics of South African galleries and their collections continue to be debated, and the lack of significant state funding has hampered transformation in institutions. The documentary film, The Luggage is Still Labeled: Blackness in South African art (directed by Julie McGee and Vuyile Voyiya, 2003), highlighted the strong dissatisfaction with the pace of transformation in the South African art world, and its airing was accompanied by vigorous and vocal arguments. Some years earlier, the contentious issue of representation was brought to the fore by Enwezor during his tenure as the artistic director of the second Johannesburg biennale when he criticised some South African artists for their representation of the black body. A plethora of responses, encapsulated in Grey Areas,4 a collection of essays published in 1999, indicated that he had

3 This is not to state that there was no contemporary African art to be seen. Small projects, mostly initiated by a few dedicated individuals, maintained a certain level of engagement with artists from elsewhere on the continent. Immediately after the biennale, Angolan Fernando Alvim, Carlos Garaicoa of Cuba and Gavin Younge organised Memorias Intimas Marcas, an exhibition about the Angolan war that started at the Cape Town Castle in 1997 and traveled to Johannesburg and Pretoria in 1998. Kendell Geers collaborated with Cameroonian artist Bili Bidjocka on the installation Heart of Darkness, shown at the National Arts Festival in 1998, and later that year the foreign-curated eyeAfrica: African Photography 1840–1998 brought the work of more than 300 African photographers to Cape Town.

During its brief existence from December 1999 to September 2001 the Johannesburg gallery Camouflage, run by Clive Kellner and affiliated to Fernando Alvim’s institution of the same name in Brussels, hosted a number of high-profile artists. Bidjocka, Pascale Marthine Tayou of Cameroon and N’dilo Mutima of Angola were included on the opening show, and in 2001 Camouflage brought Yinka Shonibare to South Africa for a solo exhibition.

The Fordsburg Artists Studios in Johannesburg and Greatmore Studios in Cape Town (both part of the international Triangle Network) have offered residencies to visiting artists from Africa and further afield since as early as 1996. Isaac Carlo of Angola took part in the Pulse project, an exhibition and conference organised by Greg Streak with support from the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in 2000. In 2003, South African Thomas Mulcaire brought Reading Room, a project he developed with Beninese designer Joseph Kpobly for the São Paulo biennale, to the SA National Gallery. March 2004 saw the Eritrean artists Alazar Asgedom and Laine Blata Kiflezion exhibit at Johannesburg Art Gallery. In 2005 Algerian artist Zoulikha Bouabdellah visited the SA National Gallery with a French residency grant, while Anawana Haloba, a Zambian artist living in Oslo, Norway, took part in the KZNSA Gallery’s Young Artists Project.

It is also rare that artists from elsewhere in Africa have shown in South Africa’s commercial galleries. At Michael Stevenson, we curated a pan-African photography show titled Staged Realities in 2004, and in 2005 In the making: materials and process featured Ghanaian El Anatsui as a guest artist; most recently the gallery showed photographs by Rotimi Fani-Kayodé. In other exceptions, Antonio Ole and Reinata Sadimba Passema of Angola have occasionally been part of projects at the Goodman Gallery. Congolese artist Roger Botembe has exhibited at Gallery MOMO, as has Zimbabwean sculptor Shepherd Ndudzo. Zimbabwean Kudzanai Chiurai and Malawi-born Billie Zangewa, both living in Johannesburg, have increasingly high profiles.

4 Atkinson, Brenda, and Candice Breitz (eds), Grey Areas: Representation, identity and politics in contemporary South African art (Johannesburg: Chalkham Hill Press, 1999)

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touched on a delicate and unresolved situation which continues to be contested. These issues and their broader ramifications have been the focus of South African artists, critics and curators, with the side effect of a continued inwardness and parochialism.

Seemingly times are changing. Almost 10 years after the second Johannesburg Biennale, there is, at an institutional level, once again a consciousness of the relevance of contemporary African art to South Africa.

The first manifestation of CAPE, founded and funded by South Africans, and billing itself as “the first largescale exhibition of African contemporary art held in South Africa”, is scheduled to open in September 2006.

Africa Remix, curated by Simon Njami, which has been seen in Düsseldorf, London, Paris and Tokyo, and moves to Stockholm later this year, concludes at Johannesburg Art Gallery early in 2007, marking the first occasion a major international exhibition of contemporary African art has travelled to the continent.

Artists from across the world gravitate towards Paris, London, New York, Berlin and other urban centres for the educational opportunities and proximity to other artists, museums, galleries and collectors that they offer. However, this is more pronounced in the case of Africa because of the extreme paucity of support structures for contemporary art practice, particularly in a white cube context, on the continent north of South Africa. Consequently, it is often imperative to establish a link with another world in Europe or the United States in order to sustain relationships and realise creative ambitions.

There are many examples. Julie Mehretu, born in Addis Ababa to an Ethiopian father and American mother of European descent, was raised in the USA, studied in Dakar and is based in New York. The prints on this exhibition were produced by her at Crown Point Studios in San Francisco, and are her response to the catastrophic devastation wrought in New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. Senam Okudzeto was born in Chicago to an African American mother and a Ghanaian father, spent most of her childhood in Ghana and Nigeria, and now lives between London, Basel and Accra. The watercolours on this show are drawn from bodies of work that have been exhibited, among other places, at Harvard University in the USA, where Okudzeto was recently a Radcliffe research fellow, but have been specifically reconfigured, on site, for the gallery in Cape Town.

Wangechi Mutu was born and raised in Kenya, spent two years at a school in Wales and furthered her studies at the Cooper Union in New York and at Yale University. Her video work on this exhibition was filmed in

5 Internationally, the category of ‘contemporary African art’ has rapidly gained prominence, led by the efforts of curators such as Okwui Enwezor, Salah Hassan, Simon Njami and Olu Oguibe, who have produced a succession of exhibitions and a body of writing on the modern and contemporary art of Africa. South African artists featured strongly in these exhibitions, and local critics joined the debates that took place in the catalogues and journals such as NKA and Third Text. David Koloane, for example, curated Moments of Art as part of the 1995 exhibition Seven Stories at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London. In 1999, essays by Koloane and Colin Richards were included in the seminal collection Reading the Contemporary. The catalogue of the Enwezor-curated The Short Century featured contributions by Rory Bester and Marilyn Martin. Yet within South Africa there has been scant exposure to the work debated – a jarring disconnection between international and local realities.

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Texas on the US-Mexico border, a site of migration and violence currently at the centre of much political controversy in the States. Barthélémy Toguo, who also visited Cape Town to create his installation, painted his watercolours in Paris, found banana boxes and mosquito netting in Cape Town, and augmented his installation with a wooden stamp carved on his visit – part of a series of stamps which mock the bureaucratic processes entwined with travel and migration.

Artists with African connections living elsewhere in the world are, as a matter of course, negotiating their relative distance and closeness to the continent, and these physical, cultural and ideological links manifest themselves on various levels. In a direct response to the lack of exhibition venues and sites of cultural exchange in Cameroon, Toguo has created the Bandjoun Station Institute of Visual Arts. He describes it as “a venue for experiencing life and coming together in that particularly ‘African way’, a convivial venue, for hosting workshops and creating residencies for artists from all over.”7 Owusu-Ankomah also maintains strong links to his home country. He regularly travels to Ghana, and in 2004 he held a solo exhibition at the National Art Museum in Accra. Yet his imagery, which once drew primarily on the Adinkra sign system of the Akan, now incorporates symbols from antiquity through to contemporary culture, from African, Asian and European sources.

Okudzeto, who also regularly returns to Ghana, is registered through the London Consortium for a PhD on commodity fetishism, modernity, memory and material culture in the context of post-independence West Africa. Odita, who was born in Enugu, Nigeria, but has lived virtually all his life in the USA, carefully articulates his desire to work in an abstracted format that subverts preconceptions of contemporary African art. He writes: “African culture is so interregnal to Western culture, and yet the continent continues to exist as a region denigrated in the mind of the world. I wish to rechannel the negative thinking around Africa, speak from the centre of its present beauty, and expand upon what I know and understand about the history of this wonderful and mysterious place.”

The varied ways in which these artists respond to their relative distances from Africa encourage viewers to resist reductive assumptions around geographical and national classifications. Their disparate aesthetic sensibilities, drawing on their different life histories and their fluid movements between capitals and continents, explode preconceptions that the adjectives of ‘contemporary’ and ‘African’ in any way limit or confine their art practice. The display of their work in South Africa also provokes us to think about this country’s schizophrenic connection to its former European colonial powers and its fraught relationship with Africa, as well as its sometimes awkward interaction with people born in South Africa who have chosen to live elsewhere. The dialogue in South Africa with these artists – and their contemporaries who are included on the upcoming CAPE and Africa Remix – will continue to stretch and tease South Africans’ understandings of our relative distances to Africa and the world.

7 Sans, Jérome, ‘Toguo Digests the World’ in Barthélémy Toguo: The Sick Opera (Paris: Paris-Musées, 2004), 14.

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BaRthélémy toguo

Born 1967, M’balmayo, Cameroon Lives and works in Paris, France, and Bandjoun, Cameroon

Works courtesy of Bandjoun Station, Cameroon, and Anne de Villepoix Gallery, Paris

Barthélémy Toguo studied at the Abidjan School of Fine Arts, Ivory Coast; the Grenoble graduate school of art, France; and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany. He is currently setting up the Bandjoun Station in Cameroon, an institution providing facilities and resources to visual and performing artists. The official opening is scheduled for 2007.

Toguo staged a solo exhibition titled The Sick Opera at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in December 2004, his second institutional solo show in Paris after Migrateurs at the Musée d’Art Moderne in 1999. His installation Rain on a Private Garden was recently included on Notre Histoire, also at the Palais de Tokyo (2006). Other group shows include the currently touring Africa Remix; African Art Now: Masterpieces from the Jean Pigozzi collection at the National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC (2005); the 1998 and 2000 Dakar biennales; and Political Ecology at White Box and Drawing Fall at the Drawing Center, both in New York in 2001.

Toguo makes imaginative use of the full spectrum of media available to him, combining painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, video and performance, usually displayed side by side within a dramatised space.

In these circus-like installations, he is a ringmaster, and his artworks are made to perform and surprise in unexpected ways. They can tease and tantalise, disturb and seduce. The overall theatrical display encompasses humour, anxiety, the absurd and the erotic; it is discursive and expansive, resisting classification or reduction to single narratives. The phallic and feminine can be entwined, his intention can be certain and contradictory, he can be the joker and the critic.

Throughout Toguo’s work there are references to physical and relative distance, travel and journeys, and to transgressing the political and social boundaries that limit our movement and imagination. His sculptural customs stamps and prints, and a series of performances entitled Transit in airports, train stations and other points of departure, illustrate how integral negotiating our transit between places and spaces has become in our time. He says: We are all in a permanent “transit” state. It’s a notion that is inherent in 20th and 21st-century man.

Whether a man is white, black or yellow matters little. He is in any case a being who is potentially “exiled”, borne along by the driving force that is travel and which is going to make him move. We leave one place for another … while bringing along with us during these different journeys our culture, which runs up against the other. Of course, this coming together can be either beautiful or difficult. The trips follow one another at the frenetic pace of our society today. We are constantly in motion. So this notion of transit is more than ever relevant to the present ...1

Right: Installation view of Who is the true terrorist? and Aids around the world, condoms in Vatican, 2005, woodcut prints, watercolour on paper, 64 x 49cm each, edition of 10 1

Through his various series of drawings, Dream Catchers, What’s your name?, Festivals of Grapes, Baptism and Das Bett, Toguo celebrates the human body by sketching incomplete, amputated figures whose gestures are left up in the air, he explains, lest he restrict their potential to define beauty and life itself – the obsession that is his daily inspiration.

1 Sans, Jérome, ‘Toguo Digests the World’ in Barthélémy Toguo: The Sick Opera (Paris: Paris-Musées, 2004), 12.

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There’s No Place Like Home #2 2006 watercolour on paper 115 x 100cm 16

In The Middle Day 2006 watercolour on paper 115 x 100cm 17

A Priest’s Sexual Thoughts #2 2004–2006 watercolour on paper 115 x 100cm 18

The Eternal Rest #2 2004–2006 watercolour on paper 115 x 100cm 1

Clockwise from above: Cracdown, 2006, watercolour on paper, 30 x 113cm Private Party, 2006, watercolour on paper, 28 x 38cm The Labour Market, 2006, watercolour on paper, 28 x 33cm 20

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Installation view with (right) Une autre vie, 1996–2000 series of six offset lithographs, 67.5 x 89cm each, edition of 20 22

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oDili DonalD oDita

Born 1966, Enugu, Nigeria Lives and works in New York and Philadelphia, USA

Works courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Odili Donald Odita has lived in the United States virtually all his life. Besides being an artist, Odita is also a critic who has written for publications such as Flash Art and NKA, and a professor who, from the beginning of September 2006, will be teaching painting at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. In 2004 Odita was the recipient of a grant from the Thami Mnyele Foundation, and he currently serves on the board of Art Omi in upstate New York after undertaking a residency there in 1998.

This year Odita is scheduled to participate in the inaugural Luanda triennial. His work can be seen on Ordering and Seduction at Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich until August 2006; some recent exhibitions include the 2004 Dakar biennale; A Fiction of Authenticity: Contemporary Africa Abroad at the Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis (2003); Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo Kuti at the New Museum, New York (2003); and Material and Matter at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2000). Odita has previously shown in South Africa with a public art installation (a billboard and bus shelter posters) in Johannesburg exhibited as part of the Projects section of the second Johannesburg Biennale in 1997.

Odita has evolved a distinctive style of painting that explores the subtleties of colour, shape and form by creating fields of tilting and angular horizontal bars of flat and contrasting colour. The artist carefully articulates the thoughts and intentions that inform his imagery in his statement below: The End, and the Beginning The original inspiration for the paintings I make today came from my intellectual rumination and fascination for television, wallpaper, the computer and all they hold in relation to the idea of painting.

I was interested in TV as an evocative, subliminal, manipulative, cultural brainwashing device; in how wallpaper as a visual sign mimicked the effects and seemed to be the conceptual endgame for high-modernist painting; and in the computer for its phenomena involving space which is created in particular through digital code. I began making these specific paintings in 1991 and stopped making them in 1993. At that time, I wanted to focus more on the issue of subject matter that was driving me, and speak more to the point of issues that addressed ‘blackness,’ ie, blackness as an object, and objecthood. I began making work that addressed these points through multi-media based installations and digitally manipulated images. I began to seriously make paintings again in 1998, and only because I never really lost full sight of them – I only needed time to better understand painting, and my relationship to painting. Also, I needed time to understand that more can be said through them than only expressing a basic reaction to the negative side of modernism and modernity that emptied artwork of meaning, and effected a complete denial of cultures that exist outside its model.

The W/hole of Modernity The patterning of the stripes in my paintings began as a reference to a state of being. I saw them as voices, thoughts, sights, ideas, and the space of people – all different yet coming together to create a community within the frame of the canvas. This union sometimes clashes, sometimes harmonises, and often does a lot of both. In the incessant affirmation of the canvas’ edge, and through my painting’s horizontality and verticality, I am also trying to imply ‘a beyond’, as in what might exist outside this centre stage, or centre space. For me, modernism has always been specifically concerned with a reality

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Attention, 2004 acrylic on canvas, 213.4 x 264.2cm 2

inside the frame – one frame; I want to play with what could possibly exist outside of this in the ever expanding/decreasing ‘zips’ that work to imply space and movement from and beyond the canvas edge.

Third Colour – Third Space The organisation and patterning in the paintings are of my own design. I am interested in the painting’s potential, and I am continuing to explore its metaphoric ability to address the human condition through pattern, structure and design, as well as its possibility to trigger memory through colour. The colours are personal: they reflect the collection of visions from my travels locally and globally. This is also one of the hardest aspects of my work as I try to derive the colours intuitively, hand-mixing and co-ordinating them along the way. In my process, I cannot make a colour twice – it can only appear to be the same.

This aspect is important to me as it highlights the specificity of differences that exist in the world of people and things. My commitment to painting has come with a growing understanding of quality and beauty that can be found through painting, and of how beauty, when fully realised, can communicate consciousness.

I am indebted to my past work within the field of photo-based conceptualism. Working with and through photographic imagery allowed me the opportunity to delve deep into issues of identity, and to better understand the world in which I live. It allowed me the chance to see and speak about my innermost concerns in the most graphic of contexts. It also opened the door for me to explore and expand upon my drawing where I can speak more specifically and metaphorically about the condition of the African Body in all its social and cultural contexts. Through this process of work, I was able to come back to painting with openness to the promise of defining possibility within a world of multiple and transmutable realities.

Here is Now At this time, I am still interested in how my paintings can look like the scrambled reception from a television set, a disconnect from recognisable imagery, and yet giving one the sense of a familiarity located deep within one’s own culture. In our overly mediated reality, I am all too aware of television and its doctored way of transmitting the information we consume on a minute-by-minute basis – a type of socio/cultural information that can successfully influence us in the ways that we think, act, see and feel within our environment. It is my intent to mimic this format through painting, but in my way, I want to participate in a type of communication that speaks for Africa. African culture is so interregnal to Western culture, and yet the continent continues to exist as a region denigrated in the mind of the world. I wish to rechannel the negative thinking around Africa, speak from the centre of its present beauty, and expand upon what I know and understand about the history of this wonderful and mysterious place.

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The Space Between Things, 2005 acrylic on canvas, 152.4 x 203.2cm 27

Blaze, 2004 acrylic on canvas, 177.8 x 228.6cm 28

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owusuankomah

Born 1956, Sekondi, Ghana Lives and works in Lilienthal, Germany

Works courtesy of the artist and the October Gallery, London

Born in Ghana shortly before the country gained its independence, Owusu-Ankomah enrolled at the Ghanatta College of Art in Accra in 1971. In his twenties he started travelling to Europe, and in 1986 he permanently relocated to Lilienthal, near Bremen, Germany.

Group exhibitions include the currently touring Africa Remix; the 2006 Dakar biennale; Journeys and Destinations at the National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC (2003); and A Fiction of Authenticity at the Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis (2003). He designed one of the official art posters published in conjunction with the soccer World Cup in Germany in 2006. His work was seen in South Africa in 1995 on the United Nations exhibition A Right to Hope which travelled to the Johannesburg Art Gallery.

Over the past decade Owusu-Ankomah’s imagery has moved away from symbols and references that relate directly to Ghana and Africa, yet he has simultaneously nurtured his relationship with Ghana. In 2004 he held a solo show at the Ghana National Museum in Accra, entitled Heroes, Sages and Saints, and he visits and exhibits there regularly. His imagery in the early 1990s, soon after he moved to Europe, revolved around figures inscribed with traditional African designs and wearing masks. As his work evolved, he started decorating his figures with symbols from the 400-year-old Adinkra sign system – representing “proverbs, historical events, and attitudes as well as objects, animals, and plants”1 – traditionally printed on textiles by the Akan people of Ghana and the Ivory Coast. Gradually the figures recessed into the grids of symbols, recalling textile patterns. In recent years he has introduced symbols from other cultures into his imagery. His choices range from antiquity through to contemporary culture, from African, Asian and European sources as well as graffiti and some scientific and technical symbols. In his experience, these symbols, interspersed to create a universal vocabulary, are remarkably similar to each other and illustrate the relativity of cultures.

Integral to Owusu-Ankomah’s work are ideas around rhythm and movement. He has titled many of his paintings from recent years Movement, and writes: We are tormented by movement. It being the genius of life, we enjoy its pleasures. There is even motion in repose. We are not motionless in death, we are in a state of transition.

To move is to strive for perfection. Music, dance and sports are an expression of the dynamics of movements.

The human has been on the move at all times. Movement of peoples, the shifting of cultures and religions. Free or forced migration of peoples is a form of movement.2 Male figures are set within the rhythmic grids of symbols, the partial outlines of their bodies refracting light.

The figures are in motion, making gestures. His inspirations for these figures are diverse, ranging from the muscular bodies drawn by Michelangelo through to capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian martial art which, disguised as a dance, once served the slaves of Bahia as an instrument of resistance. In his continual reworking of this imagery, he reminds us that we are literally entwined with our particular cultures and universal symbols.

1 Mafundikwa, Safu, Afrikan Alphabets: The story of writing in Afrika (New York: Mark Batty Publisher, 2004), 33.

2 An excerpt from a statement written for a panel discussion at the St Louis Contemporary Art Museum on the occasion of the exhibition A Fiction of Authenticity in 2003.

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Movement I, 2006 acrylic on canvas, 150 x 200cm 1

Movement II, 2006 acrylic on canvas, 150 x 200cm 2

Movement III, 2006 acrylic on canvas, 150 x 200cm

Installation view of Movement I-III

Julie mehRetu

Born 1970, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Lives and works in New York, USA

Works courtesy of Crown Point Press, San Francisco

Julie Mehretu attended the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal, before moving to the United States, where she earned an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997. A residency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis was followed by her seminal solo show Drawing into Painting at the same institution in 2004. In 2005 she was one of 25 recipients of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, commonly referred to as a ‘genius grant’.

Mehretu’s work can be seen in the currently touring Africa Remix. Other recent group exhibitions include the 2004 Whitney and São Paulo biennials, and the 2003 biennials of Istanbul and Prague; Ethiopian Passages: Dialogues in the Diaspora at the National Museum for African Art in Washington, DC (2003); Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2001); and the 2000 edition of Greater New York at PS1.

Mehretu has developed a distinctive visual language that maps interactions and relationships within our constructed world. Her drawings, paintings and prints encapsulate the frenetic and fragmented energy of cities, buildings and structures through layered mark-making in patterns recalling explosive and centrifugal forces. Mehretu started working on these three prints, which comprise the Heavy Weather series, two weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit the American Gulf Coast, and her visual idiom adroitly conveys the devastating powers of nature as experienced in New Orleans.

In an interview by Olukemi Ilesanmi, published in the catalogue of Drawing into Painting, Mehretu relates how her personal as well as public histories underpin her work: One of the first points of departure in making my work was an investigation of who I am as an artist: what are the foundations of what I am interested in; what am I really trying to make work about? It developed into a “self-ethnographic” project for which I began to dissect my lineage and ancestry in an effort to further understand the formation of my own identity. I tried to approach this process somewhat analytically by systematically organizing and collecting stories and photographs of my family, reviewing family genealogies, delineating their separate geographies, and stitching it all together in an archive of resources. My fascination was with the numerous conflicting stories, histories, and disparate cultures that, through time and place, came together to make me.

I didn’t want to use that material specifically in my paintings – my work was much more gestural and abstract. Through the process of reexamining and challenging my paintings, I arrived at the question of how to link my interest in the formation of social identity with my work. I began to look at my marking lexicon as signifiers of social agency, as individual characters. As the work grew, it developed cities, histories, wars, and geographies, evolving to incorporate the visual languages of maps, charts, architectural renderings, and aspects of popular culture. It has become a personal, semibiographical “thought experiment” of my experience and a response to the social space I inhabit and challenge.1

1 ‘Looking Back: E-mail interview between Julie Mehretu and Olukemi Ilesanmi, April 2003’ in Fogle, Douglas and Olukemi Ilesanmi (eds), Julie Mehretu: Drawing into Painting (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2003), 11.

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Circulation, from the Heavy Weather series, 2005 colour hard-ground etching with aquatint and engraving on Gampi paper chine collĂŠ, 90 x 118.7cm, edition 19 of 25 7

Local Calm, from the Heavy Weather series, 2005 sugar lift aquatint with colour aquatint, spit bite aquatint, soft and hard-ground etching and engraving on Gampi paper chine collĂŠ, 90 x 118.7cm, edition 27 of 35 8

Diffraction, from the Heavy Weather series, 2005 colour sugar lift aquatint with aquatint, spit bite aquatint and hard-ground etching on Gampi paper chine collĂŠ, 90 x 118.7cm, edition 27 of 35

senam okuDzeto

Born 1972, Chicago, USA Lives and works in London, UK, Basel, Switzerland, and Accra, Ghana

Works courtesy of the artist With support from the British Council

The daughter of an African American mother and a Ghanaian father, Senam Okudzeto grew up in Ghana, Nigeria and the UK. She holds a BFA from the Slade School of University College London, a Masters degree in painting from the Royal College of Art, London, and is a graduate of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York. In 2000 she was an artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and in 2003/4 she was a research fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where she held a solo show titled Ghana Must Go. The same title describes a larger body of work and a set of theoretical concerns which form the basis of the book Okudzeto is currently researching on material culture and commodity fetishism Okudzeto recently exhibited at the 2006 Dakar biennale. Group exhibitions include the Paris showing of Africa Remix (2005); Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo Kuti at the New Museum, New York (2003); Fiction or Reality at the Kunsthalle Fribourg, Switzerland (2003); and Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2001).

Her practice ranges from the overtly political to the quiet and painterly, but politics are never entirely absent.

Her large-scale nudes unapologetically address sexuality and visibility. The paintings in Distant Relatives/ Relative Distance are drawn from two bodies of work, Ghana Must Go and All facts have been changed to protect the ignorant, the latter appearing here in the form of a wall drawing/installation which was produced in situ. Okudzeto touches on these works, and notions of ‘relative distance’, in the following interview with Courtney J Martin conducted in May 2006: What was the impetus for the scale of this work?

These large works are unusual for my practice, as they stand alone. Recently, I have worked on multimedia installations incorporating video, text, sculpture and painting into a single work. The two nudes began as studies for a larger installation work of figures dripping into each other, which would have been made of several smaller works. But there are rare times when concept fades and I simply get carried away with the execution of a work.

Regardless of medium, so much of your work has a painterly quality. What painting traditions are you drawing from?

My formal training was in painting. I received an undergraduate degree at the Slade and a Masters at the Royal College of Art. If you ask me who my favourite painter is, I may have to answer Poussin. There is a conservative streak in me that thinks painting is the only grounding for a career in visual culture, but at the same time people overly trained in painting can make the worst painters. I can only allow myself to paint for pleasure, whereas my conceptual pieces can be thrashed about for years on end and worked to death. They are more robust, but the paintings must always remain fresh. So, my struggle is always to remain a painter, but to produce as few paintings as possible. When this method works, the paintings always have a life of their own; they vibrate. The medium I use is very honest and will not allow you to lie about your mood – it transfers it directly to the paper. So it’s best to remain enraptured and entranced when making the large works – a difficult state to maintain, hence their rarity.

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Untitled (Large Reclining Nude), 2002/3 acrylic on Somerset paper, 208 x 160cm 1

You have lived in Basel, London, New York, Accra, Lagos and Paris. What relationship do these different geographic locations have with your work? Does your movement from place to place affect your process?

All of my work is commentary on time and space, in particular the idea of the experience of traversing geographical space and the understanding of geographical space as experiential. A journey constitutes an encounter with events, and through this logic, something as simple as a biographical anecdote can constitute a form of mapmaking. So, these large works are not merely studies of the body. They are the early stages of cartographic code under construction. The body moves through space like calligraphic script, writing its own history.

My works also constitute biography, and all comment directly, or indirectly, on my love of displacement and multiple identities. I keep a studio in Basel, live in London, research in Ghana, and spend a great deal of time travelling to other places. I am constantly confronted with the idea that my itinerancy dilutes my Africanness, and yet, in my experience, my itinerancy underlines my Africanness. I spent my formative years based in West Africa, but traversing the globe with my family. This is my African experience. It is frustrating that people feel so comfortable with essentialising African identity, believing in a purely static, authentic African subject that must always inhabit the margins. If I were to describe myself as a ‘migrant worker’, it would set a tone that is easily accepted, but the more honest truth is that I am a boarding school brat who like to travel. Not so romantic, but still authentically African. However, this identity itself is not so straightforward, and also encodes 15 years of exile as a political refugee and the experiences of social vicissitude that forced displacements incur.

Untitled (Big Nude), 2002/3 acrylic on Somerset paper, 208 x 160cm 2

Untitled (Hands and Feet), 2001/2 acrylic on Somerset paper, 184 x 305cm

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All facts have been changed to protect the ignorant, 2001–2006 details, acrylic on silver-wash rice paper, 26 x 20cm each 7

wangechi mutu

Born 1972, Nairobi, Kenya Lives and works in New York, USA

Work courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York

Born in Kenya, Wangechi Mutu attended boarding school in Wales for two years before moving to the United States. She holds a BFA from the Cooper Union in New York, and an MFA from Yale. In 2003 she was an artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.

Mutu’s work is included in the currently touring Africa Remix. In 2005 she held solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Miami Art Museum and at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

Group exhibitions include drawing shows at MoMA, New York, and Tate Modern, London; Greater New York 2005 at PS1, New York; Figuratively (2004) and Africaine (2002) at the Studio Museum; Looking Both Ways at the Museum for African Art, New York (2003); Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo Kuti at the New Museum, New York (2003), and Kellie Jones’ Life’s Little Necessities at the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale.

Using a combination of ink drawings, collage and site-specific wall pieces, Mutu gleans images from ethnographic photo essays, magazines and wildlife journals, adopting the distended and mutated figure as a central part of her work. Creating flamboyant hybrids that reflect the pervasive obsession with physical appearance, she emphasises the violence that comes from the pursuit of affluence and power in Western society, particularly as it impacts on the female body. Mutu’s sumptuous monstrosities parody Western ideals of representation, and the manner in which they grate against the daily realities experienced by the majority of the world’s population.

Mutu refers indirectly to notions of relative distance to Africa in an interview in which Lauri Firstenberg asks for her thoughts on the conceptual framework of Afro-futurism: I have to admit that being transplanted changes your notions of self and survival. I’m sure the more extreme your migration story is, the more complicated do issues of personal and cultural survival become for you. Displacement anxiety and a fractured identity are implied in my drawings; there are mutilations and awkward attachments in the collage work. I think one of my most poignant moments in my teens was realizing that my father’s generation was this group of men who’d been raised to understand the true traditional value of a large herd of cattle and goats, yet they were expected to mutate and become middle-class, Mercedes-owing intellectually rigorous, three-piece-suit-wearing urbanites.1 Cutting, the work shown in this exhibition, marks a return to the medium of video for Mutu. The work was filmed in the US-Mexico border town of Presidio, at sunset in the desert, during a residency at Art Pace in San Antonio, Texas, in 2004. Isolde Brielmaier writes in Parkett: Given her affinity for collage, the work seems unexpected. But it also made sense. In Cutting, Mutu uses her own body as a central site for investigating history and culture. Her figure is seen against a vast rural landscape repetitiously hacking away at a large pile of wood and debris with a machete. Exhausted after

1 Firstenberg, Lauri, ‘Perverse Anthropology: The photomontage of Wangechi Mutu’ in Looking Both Ways: Art of the contemporary African diaspora (New York and Gent: Museum for African Art and Snoeck, 2004), 136-143.

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Cutting, 2004 still from single channel video projection, 5 min 44 sec looped, with sound

breaking down the pile into a mass of rubble, she leaves her machete stuck upright in the wooden bits, its handle forming a strong, foreboding vertical against the horizon, and turns to walk up a hill.

When asked why she had now decided to work with video, Mutu explained, “the world – and perhaps by extension people – is in a period of self-destruction. It exists in a constant state of pain that is in many ways self-inflicted. This work conveys immediacy and highlights this anxiety. I also wanted to draw on a sore connection between the idea of a rural space and the fear of elimination and infestation as well as the idea that tools used for providing and creating can so easily be transformed into weapons for murder.” Mutu created videos back in the late 1990s, so in some sense she wanted to move back to where she started. “Nothing is clear cut. Issues shift. Video allows me the capability of creating yet another world and putting myself in the middle of it because I am part of it ... the problems and the solutions. Video, for me, is a means by which to dramatize urgent issues, to invent and re-invent.” Mutu sees the medium as being very much linked to her love of assemblage, to the acts of cutting, splicing, and combining elements. It expands her repertoire. She then has more to work with as she creatively and continually re-works her bodies, builds her environments and re-imagines her art and the world.2

2 Brielmaier, Isolde, ‘Wangechi Mutu: Re-imagining the world’ in Parkett, No 74 (2005), 13.

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Cutting, 2004 still from single channel video projection, 5 min 44 sec looped, with sound 1

Cutting, 2004 still from single channel video projection, 5 min 44 sec looped, with sound 2

Bye-Bye, BaBaR

oR, what is an aFRoPolitan?

By taiye tuakli-wosoRnu

It’s moments to midnight on Thursday night at Medicine Bar in London. Zak, boy-genius DJ, is spinning a Fela Kuti remix. The little downstairs dancefloor swells with smiling, sweating men and women fusing hip-hop dance moves with a funky sort of djembe. The women show off enormous afros, tiny t-shirts, gaps in teeth; the men those incredible torsos unique to and common on African coastlines. The whole scene speaks of the Cultural Hybrid: kente cloth worn over low-waisted jeans; African Lady over Ludacris bass lines; London meets Lagos meets Durban meets Dakar. Even the DJ is an ethnic fusion: Nigerian and Romanian; fair, fearless leader; bobbing his head as the crowd reacts to a sample of Sweet Mother.

Were you to ask any of these beautiful, brown-skinned people that basic question – “where are you from?”

– you’d get no single answer from a single smiling dancer. This one lives in London but was raised in Toronto and born in Accra; that one works in Lagos but grew up in Houston, Texas. ‘Home’ for them is many things: where their parents are from; where they go for vacation; where they went to school; where they see old friends; where they live (or live this year). Like so many African young people working and living in cities around the globe, they belong to no single geography, but feel at home in many.

They (read: we) are Afropolitans – the newest generation of African emigrants, coming soon or collected already at a law firm/chem lab/jazz lounge near you. You’ll know us when you see us by our funny blend of London fashion, New York jargon, African ethics, and academic successes. Some of us are ethnic mixes, eg Ghanaian/Jamaican, Nigerian/Swiss; others are merely cultural mutts: American accent, European affect, African ethos. Most of us are multilingual: in addition to English and a Romantic or two, we understand some indigenous language(s) and speak a few urban vernaculars. There is at least one place on the African continent to which we tie our sense of self: be it a nation-state (Ethiopia), a city (Ibadan), or simply an Auntie’s kitchen. Then there’s the G8 city or two (or three) that we know like the backs of our hands, and the institutions (corporate, academic, etc) that know us for our work ethic. We are Afropolitans: not citizens, but Africans of the world.

It isn’t hard to trace our genealogy. Starting in the 1960s, the young, gifted and broke left Africa in pursuit of higher education and happiness abroad. A study done in 1999 estimated that between 1960 and 1975 about 27 000 highly skilled Africans left the continent for the West. Between 1975 and 1984, the number shot to 40 000 and then doubled again by 1987, representing about 30% of Africa’s highly skilled manpower. The most popular destinations for these emigrants included Canada, Britain and the United States; but Cold War politics produced unlikely scholarship opportunities in Eastern Bloc countries like Poland as well. Some three decades later this scattered tribe of pharmacists, physicists, physicians (and the odd polygamist) has set up camp around the globe.

The caricatures are familiar. The Nigerian physics professor with faux-Coogi sweater; the Kenyan marathonist with long legs and rolled r’s; the heavyset Gambian braiding hair in a house that smells of burnt Kanekalon.

Even those unacquainted with synthetic extensions can conjure an image of the African immigrant with only the slightest pop cultural prompting: Eddie Murphy’s “Hello, Babar”. But somewhere between the 1988 release of Coming to America and the 2001 crowning of a Nigerian Miss World, the general image of young

Africans in the West transmorphed from goofy to gorgeous. Leaving off the painful question of cultural condescension in that beloved film, one wonders what happened in the years between Prince Akeem and Queen Agbani?

One answer is: adolescence. The Africans that left Africa between 1960 and 1975 had children, and most overseas. Some of us were bred on African shores then shipped to the West for higher education; others were born in much colder climates and sent home for cultural reindoctrination. Either way, we spent the 1980s chasing after accolades, eating fufu at family parties, and listening to adults argue politics. By the turn of the century (the recent one), we were matching our parents in number of degrees, and/or achieving things our ‘people’ in the grand sense only dreamed of. This new demographic – dispersed across places like Brixton, Bethesda, Boston, Berlin – has come of age in the 21st century, redefining what it means to be African. Where our parents sought safety in traditional professions like doctoring, lawyering, banking, engineering, we are branching into fields like media, politics, music, venture capital, design.

Nor are we shy about expressing our African influences (such as they are) in our work. Artists like Keziah Jones, Trace founder/editor Claude Grunitzky, architect David Adjaye, and novelist Chimamanda Adichie exemplify what Grunitzky calls the “21st century African”. What distinguishes this lot and its like (in the West and at home) is a willingness to complicate Africa – namely, to engage with, critique and celebrate the parts of Africa that mean most to them. Perhaps what most typifies the Afropolitan consciousness is this refusal to oversimplify; the effort to understand what is ailing in Africa alongside the desire to honour what is uniquely wonderful. Rather than essentialising the geographical entity, we seek to comprehend its cultural complexity; to honor its intellectual and spiritual legacies; to sustain our parents’ values.

For us, being African must mean something. The media’s portrayals (war, hunger) won’t do. Neither will the New World trope of bumbling, blue-black doctor. Most of us grew up well aware of being from a blighted place, of having last names linked to countries linked, in turn, to corruption. Few of us escaped those nasty ‘booty-scratcher’ epithets, and fewer still that sense of shame when visiting paternal villages. Whether we were ashamed of ourselves for not being more familiar with our parents’ culture, or ashamed of that culture for not being more ‘advanced’, can be unclear. What is manifest is the extent to which the modern adolescent African is tasked to forge a sense of self from wildly disparate sources. You’d never know it looking at those dapper lawyers in global firms, but most were once supremely self-conscious of being so ‘in between’.

Brown-skinned without a bedrock sense of blackness on the one hand, and chided by family members for acting white on the other – young immigrants can get what I call ‘lost in transnation’.

Ultimately, the Afropolitan must form an identity along three dimensions: national, racial, cultural – with subtle tensions in between. While our parents can claim single countries as home, we must define our relationship to the places we live; how British or American we are (or act) is in part a matter of affect. Often unconsciously, and over time, we choose which bits of a national identity (from passport to pronunciation) we internalise as central to our personalities. So, too, the way we see our race – whether black or biracial

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or none of the above – is a question of politics rather than pigment; not all of us claim to be black. Often this relates to the way we were raised, whether proximate to other brown people (eg black Americans) or removed. Finally, how we conceive of race will accord with where we locate ourselves in the history that produced ‘blackness’, and the political processes that continue to shape it.

Then there is that deep abyss of Culture, ill-defined at best. One must decide what comprises ‘African culture’ beyond filial piety and pepper soup. The project can be utterly baffling – whether one lives in an African country or not. But the process is enriching, in that it expands one’s basic perspective on nation and selfhood. If nothing else, the Afropolitan knows that nothing is neatly black or white; that to ‘be’ anything is a matter of being sure of who you are uniquely. To ‘be’ Nigerian is to belong to a passionate nation; to be Yoruba, to be heir to a spiritual depth; to be American, to ascribe to a cultural breadth; to be British, to hold the passport. That is, this is what it means for me – and that is the Afropolitan privilege. The acceptance of complexity common to most African cultures is not lost on her prodigals. Without that intrinsically multidimensional thinking, we could not make sense of ourselves.

And if it all sounds a little self-congratulatory, a little “aren’t-we-the-coolest-damn-people-on-earth?” – I say: yes it is, necessarily. It is high time the African stood up. There is nothing perfect in this formulation; for all our Adjayes and Adichies, there is a brain drain back home. Most Afropolitans could serve Africa better in Africa than at Medicine Bar on Thursdays. To be fair, a fair number of African professionals are returning; and there is consciousness among the ones who remain, an acute awareness among this brood of too-cool-forschools that there’s work to be done. There are those among us who wonder to the point of weeping: where next, Africa? When will the scattered tribes return? When will the talent repatriate? What lifestyles await young professionals at home? How to invest in Africa’s future? The prospects can seem grim at times. The answers aren’t forthcoming. But if there was ever a group who could figure it out, it is this one, unafraid of the questions.

This article was first published in The LIP #5, March 2005 (www.thelip.org) and is reproduced with kind permission of the author.

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selecteD BiBliogRaPhies BArthéLéMY toGUo Njami, Simon (ed), Africa Remix (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2005) Sans, Jérôme (ed), Barthélémy Toguo: The Sick Opera (Paris: Paris-Musées, 2004) Toguo, Barthélémy, Das Bett (Dunkerque: Ecole régionale des Beaux Arts de Dunkerque, 2001) Toguo, Barthélémy, Die Tageszeitung, conversation avec Frau Schenkenberg (Bruxelles: Editions Small Noise, 2001) Toguo, Barthélémy, Erotico Toguo (Paris: Onestar Press, 2003) Toguo, Barthélémy, Head above Water (Paris: Isthme Editions, 2005) Toguo, Barthélémy, Labyrinth Process (Rennes and Nantes, 2000) Toguo, Barthélémy, Migrateurs (Paris: ARC Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1999) Toguo, Barthélémy, You don’t know what you are missing (Paris: Filigranes Editions, 2002) odiLi doNALd oditA Fitzgerald, Shannon, and Tumelo Mosaka (eds), A Fiction of Authenticity: Contemporary Africa abroad (St Louis: Contemporary Art Museum St Louis, 2003) Fortin, Sylvie and Denise Carvalho, ‘Odili Donald Odita’ in NKA, No 11/12 (Fall/Winter 2000), 18-23 Oguibe, Olu, ‘Artists on Artists’ in BOMB Magazine, Issue 89 (Fall 2004), 8-9.

Pollack, Barbara, ‘The Newest Avant-Garde’ in ARTnews, Vol 100, No 4 (April 2001), 124-129 Schoonmaker, Trevor (ed), Black President: The art and legacy of Fela Anikulapo Kuti (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003) www.odilidonaldodita.com

JULiE MEhrEtU Chua, Lawrence, ‘Julie Mehretu’ in BOMB Magazine, Issue 91 (Spring 2005), 24-31 Fogle, Douglas and Olukemi Ilesanmi (eds), Julie Mehretu: Drawing into Painting (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2003) Golden, Thelma (ed), Freestyle (New York: Studio Museum Harlem, 2001) Njami, Simon (ed), Africa Remix (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2005) SENAM oKUdzEto Golden, Thelma (ed), Freestyle (New York: Studio Museum Harlem, 2001) Martin, Coutney J, ‘Post Post-Black: Senam Okudzeto in Basel’ in NKA, No 16/17 (Fall/Winter 2002), 54-59 Schoonmaker, Trevor (ed), Black President: The art and legacy of Fela Anikulapo Kuti (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003) wANGEChi MUtU Brielmaier, Isolde, ‘Wangechi Mutu: Re-imagining the world’ in Parkett, No 74 (2005), 6-13 Farrell, Laurie Ann (ed), Looking Both Ways: Art of the contemporary African diaspora (New York and Gent: Museum for African Art and Snoeck, 2003) Kantor, Jordan (ed), Drawing from the Modern (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2005) Njami, Simon (ed), Africa Remix (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2005) Poddar, S, ‘Collecting Our Thoughts: A conversation between Vicky A Clark and Sandhini Poddar’ in Vicky A Clark and Sandhini Poddar (eds), Figures of Thinking: Convergences in contemporary cultures (University of Richmond Museums, 2005) Schoonmaker, Trevor (ed), Black President: The art and legacy of Fela Anikulapo Kuti (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003)

owUSU-ANKoMAh Fitzgerald, Shannon, and Tumelo Mosaka (eds), A Fiction of Authenticity: Contemporary Africa abroad (St Louis: Contemporary Art Museum St Louis, 2003) Melchers, Joachim (ed), Owusu-Ankomah: Future Track (Wuppertal: Hammer Verlag GmbH, 2006, forthcoming) Njami, Simon (ed), Africa Remix (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2005)

Left: Barthélémy Toguo’s installation in process

Catalogue no 21 June 2006 Curated by Michael Stevenson and Joost Bosland Edited and designed by Sophie Perryer Photography by Kathy Comfort-Skead Scanning by tony Meintjes Printed by hansa Print, Cape town

Senam okudzeto’s participation supported by 60