Exhibitions

Selling the Shadow is still on view at the C-Gallery in Milan, Italy until September 15, 2017

C-Gallery in collaboration with South Africa’s Gallery MOMO is bringing Selling the Shadow a touring exhibition curated by the American artists Ayana V. Jackson and Ingrid LaFleur. Selling the Shadow is an international, cross disciplinary presentation that examines the relationship between art and social practise. The exhibition’s title recalls the abolitionist and women’s rights activities of African-American activist Sojourner Truth. From 1859 through the early 1900 Truth financed her political work by selling a small “Carte de Visite” of her portrait inscribed with the words: “I sell the shadow to support the substance”. A pioneer not only politically but also in her method of appropriating and ultimately controlling her own image during a period, the United States Civil War, when alternate presentations of a black woman body prevailed. To this day Sojourner Truth invites us to reflect on the mechanisms of signs and signifiers, identity constructs and narrative strategies utilized in creating and maintaining power structures.

Gareth Nyandoro: Stall(s) of Fame is still on view at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, France until September 10, 2017

For his first solo show in France, Gareth Nyandoro conceives an immersive installation inspired by the urban Parisian space. Both graphic and sculptural, his works on paper are deployed down to the floor and reproduced as ephemeral constructions in public spaces. The volume of the incised and suspended sheets, as well as the adjacent objects, “allows the work to connect the representation with the world and the visitors”. In his work, Gareth Nyandoro takes an attentive look at business exchanges and social interactions in the public space. Scenes of life, which he extracts from his environment, are depicted in ink on large superimposed strips of paper. Once the motifs have been applied to the blank sheets, Gareth Nyandoro cuts and lacerates with precision the pictorial layers into long, fine strips. This play of incisions reveals the colours of the lower sheets. A network of lines from these cuttings amplifies the depicted movements or else disturbs the figures, which then tend towards abstraction.

Kassou Seydou: Kings of the new cities is still on view at Galerie Cécile Fakhoury in Abidjan, Ivory Coast until September 23, 2017

The gallery Cécile Fakhoury is happy to present works by the Senegalese artist Kassou Seydou in Abidjan for the first time. This exhibition Kings of the new cities explores the duality between rural and urban life. Kassou Seydou’s work is poetic and very close to narration and he expresses his vision of a complex and changeable world. Using a palette of warm colors and quite animated characters, Kassou Seydou presents us with a world in a constant state of disorder. The works exhibited at the gallery Cécile Fakhoury allow us to immerse ourselves in the allegoric and expressive world of the artist’s imagination. The tensions and alterations, which we find in his imagined shapes and figures, evoke a critique of society, while the attributes, emblems, and representations of various fetishes attest to a strong faith in humanity and its traditions.

Art Fairs

FNB JoburgArtFair 2017 will take place at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa from September 8-10, 2017

2017 marks the tenth anniversary of the FNB JoburgArtFair and the theme for this year’s fair is Celebration. The FNB JoburgArtFair attracts up to 10,000 people over one weekend each year for a major art and social event showcasing some of the most impressive contemporary art from South Africa, and across the African continent including sculpture, painting, photography, prints and multimedia installations. The FNB JoburgArtFair welcomes local and international galleries and in particular, those which have an interest or link to African Contemporary Art. This year’s art fair will feature 60 exhibitions within 5 categories including Contemporary and Modern Art, Solo Presentations, Limited Editions and Art Platforms. The selected galleries and organisations hail from 12 countries across Africa, Europe and the United States, including all of South Africa’s leading contemporary art galleries such as Gallery MOMO, Everard Read and Circa galleries, Stevenson, SMAC Gallery and Goodman Gallery.

Conference

Positioning Nigerian Modernism will open at Tate Modern in London, United Kingdom from September 28-29, 2017

Taking place during the centenary of pioneering Nigerian artist Ben Enwonwu, this major international conference explores new positions on West-African Modernism before and after Independence. Jointly hosted by Bea Gassmann de Sousa, independent curator and Kerryn Greenberg, curator, International Art, Tate Modern, this one and a half-day conference is a unique opportunity to examine strategies of cultural independence and to reflect upon the impact of transnationalism and de-colonization in art criticism and museum collections today. Positioning Nigerian Modernism launches on the evening of 28 September, with a keynote lecture by Chika Okeke-Agulu; artist, curator, art historian and author of Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria. This is followed by a day-long conference on 29 September, featuring four sessions: Modernism and Independence in West Africa, The Formation of National Identity and Preservation of History, Knowledge and Legacy: Unexpected Tropes and Collecting Modern African Art: 1950–2017.