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“There is no encounter without ‘cultural contamination'. Culture is a living organism, in continuous mutation, which reinvents itself by passing through the phases of decline, loss of direction and renewal, as determined by its external contacts...No society of sound mind would claim the absolute purity of its culture.” - N'Gone Fall - Things Fall apart.

There is a conflict within me each time I have to repress nostalgia of my childhood visits to my hometown in Ijebu-Ode, to maintain a present state of mind. I remember the words of N'Gone and console myself that even the past is borrowed. The real conflict rises from the fear that I may lose a part of me forever. These parts of me are my roots. There is the general anxiety many traditional communities in Yoruba Land (where I come from) express from the old to the deaf ears of the young. This anxiety is for the eventual death of all their existence. I do not want to be deaf to them. I want to take my grandmother's cultural values and evolve with them. But, is nostalgia stronger than migration? Than imperialism? Than change?

Tribute to Artists in Notre-Dame

Arab World Institute (IMA) - Museum (Levels 5,6 & 7)

21 September - 20 December 2019

Translated from French using Google Translate

Donors Claude and France Lemand, upset by the fire that devastated, on April 15, the iconic Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, asked artists from the Arab world and diasporas, also affected by this tragedy, to give their testimony.

On the occasion of the 36 th European Heritage Days, the Museum of the Arab World Institute unveils its first "Tribute artists to Our Lady" , exhibition of works of the first artists to have answered the call: the Franco-Moroccan Najia Mehadji, Moroccan Mohamed Lekleti from Montpellier, Syrian Hamburger Boutros Al-Maari and Iraqi Londoner Dia Al-Azzawi.

This exhibition will be followed by other skirmishes. Thus, over the seasons, will be constituted a collection of works in tribute to Our Lady, by artists from the Arab world and diasporas sensitive to this theme and totally free of their expression and their means - the same freedom that had Claude and guided France Lemand in the constitution of the collection Tondo of East and West or 3 e pane Portrait of the Bird-Who Do Are Not.

And So The Stories Ran Away

Curated by Liesl Hartman & Richard Kilpert

Zeitz MOCAA, Level 1 - Tunnels

08 September - 30 March 2019

And So The Stories Ran Away sees students from Ruth Prowse and Michaelis working under the mentorship of artists: Jill Joubert, Isabelle Grobler, Lynette Bester, Liesl Hartman and Richard Kilpert.

Curated by Zeitz MOCAA’s Centre for Art Education the exhibition is titled And So The Stories Ran Away, and is an innovative collaboration between the museum and Cape Town’s leading art schools - the Michaelis School of Fine Art, the Ruth Prowse School of Art, as well as the Nyanga Arts Development Centre.

This exhibition celebrates stories from Africa and has been created to engage the imaginations of children as the primary audience - inviting them into a multi-sensory, interactive experience with works of art.

“The title is inspired by a Nigerian Ekoi legend of how Mouse visits the houses of all people, gathering stories that she weaves into her story children,” says co-curator and CFAE head, Liesl Hartman.

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Artist Dossier on Péju Alatise

By Oyindamola Olaniyan POSTED 21 August 2019

Born in 1975, Péju Alatise is a Nigerian artist, poet, and writer, as well as a fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. She earned her undergraduate architectural degree from Ladoke Akintola University in Oyo State, Nigeria. While earning her degree, Alatise began to explore her interests in art by visiting Jakande, a crafts market in Lagos. There, she practised various media, including painting, sculpting, and jewellery making. This experimentation led her to begin her art career with painting, subsequently branching out to an interdisciplinary practice, using beads, cloth, resin, and other materials in her work. She would later focus on sculpture, using her art to make statements about social issues, while incorporating literature, symbolism, and traditional Yoruba mythology.

Architecture has a huge influence on her work, Alatise says, especially when it comes to space and structure. In a recent interview, she said, “You can’t go through six years of architecture and not feel structure. Architecture makes you obey all the laws. It makes you so aware of physicality.” As a self-taught artist, she appreciates the huge role architecture has played in her artistic development.

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Diass-Aibd: "The airport is an ideal vector to make known the artists of Senegal" (Xavier Mary)

Published 5 September 2019

Translated from French using Google Translate

As part of the animation of its cultural platform, Aerog'Art, Limak-Aibd-Summa (Las), manager of the airport Dakar Blaise Diagne organized the exhibition "Sunu Thiossane".

For this third edition, the Aibd has hosted the works of Senegalese painter Soly Cissé. Who advocated the erection of a museum of contemporary art to preserve the works of all the old artists disappeared. According to the Dg de Las, Xavier Mary, "the airport is an ideal vector to make known the artists of Senegal".

The Exhibition runs 01 September - 31 October 2019

THE ART NEWSPAPER - NEWS - ART MARKET

For African artists, it pays to be female

By Anny Shaw POSTED 13 August 2019

Four women top the auction market for African art as collectors look to 'fill gaps in the market'

Being pale and male is rapidly going out of fashion at auction and, as a result, demand-and prices-for women artists of different ethnicities is on the rise. Nowhere is this more evident than in the African art market where four women lead in terms of auction prices.

They are: Marlene Dumas ($6.3m), Julie Mehretu ($5.6m), Irma Stern ($4m) and Njideka Akunyili Crosby ($3.4m). Their prices eclipse the likes of Nigeria's star Modernist painter Ben Enwonwu ($1.7m), El Anatsui ($1.5m) and William Kentridge ($1.5m).

It should be noted that two of the four women are white and only one—Irma Stern—lived on the continent until she died in 1966, in South Africa. Indeed, Marlene Dumas could equally be considered European (she has lived in Holland since 1976, representing the country at the Venice Biennale in 1995), while Ethiopian-born Julie Mehretu is based in New York and Nigerian-born Njideka Akunyili Crosby in Los Angeles.

Intricacies: Fragment and Meaning

AICON Gallery
8 August – 14 September 2019

Participating Artists: Mequitta Ahuja (b. 1976, USA), Péju Alatise (b. 1975, Nigeria), Rina Banerjee (b. 1963, India), Faiza Butt (b. 1973, Pakistan), Saba Qizilbash (b. 1977, Pakistan)

Aicon Gallery is pleased to present Intricacies: Fragment and Meaning, an ambitious group exhibition that brings together artists who scrutinize the milieu and distill from it modes of production that are both ordered and complex. Saba Qizilbash and Faiza Butt from Pakistan, Rina Banerjee and Mequitta Ahuja from the US and Péju Alatise from Nigeria offer works that transcend the sum of their myriad parts. Presented together, the various works in the exhibition offer the viewer a liminal space to absorb and contemplate the relationship between part and whole, fragment and meaning. Through their use of meticulous detail and balance, the artists featured here unveil and elaborate the intricacies that lie at the core of the human condition. These artists adopt the gestalt format in construing images thus offering unique perspectives on issues of scale and focus in visual art.

ARTnews - MARKET - NEWS

At Auction, Returns for Works by Women Artists Are Outmatching Those of Men: Report
By Annie Armstrong POSTED 01 August 2019

Male artists have dominated auction results for as long as auctions have existed, but according to a new report, women are winning out in the field in at least one respect.

Over the past six years, works by women artists that have returned to auction have seen price gains of about 72.9 percent on average, compared with just 8.3 percent for works by men. The figures come from the team behind Sotheby’s Mei Moses Indices, which tracks the auction world through repeat sales.

Of course, it’s worth emphasizing that we are merely talking percentages here. Because men make up a much larger percentage of the market, and because their art generally trades for higher prices, more money was spent—and made—by the work of men on the auction block during the studied period.

The latest exhibition by Senegalese painter and sculptor Soly Cissé presents a selection of his recent work unified by the representation of bodily forms and aligned to questions about what is it that makes us human, after all.

Men and Lives sees this contemporary master interrogating some of the darker reaches of the psyche, though, as ever with Cissé's work, imbued with humour and irony. His paintings sometimes show groupings of two or three figures who seem to be refraining from conversation or interaction, as though consumed by their own thoughts or search for some hoped-for "inner identity" not accessible to others. At other times he reveals a seeming procession of human forms, some overlapping and some set apart; again, each element stands apart even as they enter each other's space. In some paintings, the canvas is divided into two registers or segment, at once seeming to be in conflict but nonetheless harmonised aesthetically, as if the artist is seeking for an impossible unity between fraught human relations.

Cissé's incomparable understanding of the relation of line to the fulfilment of form (as well as a subtle use of detail in the form of pattern and crosshatch) can be seen in the works on Men and Lives. At over four metres wide, the astonishing canvas Untitled (Triptych) of 2018 shows the artist developing this subtle message of the relationship between the human and the lived at a magisterial level and forms a central axis for the exhibition as a whole.

DIPTYK - NEWS - ART MARKET

Contemporary African Art: A Brief History of a Future Market

By Emmanuelle Outtier POSTED 25 July 2019

Translated from French using Google Translate

Twenty years after the sale of part of the Pigozzi collection, a look back at the evocative evolution of contemporary African art whose valorization goes through Paris, London and New York.

If we had to remember a single date marking the start of the contemporary African art market, it would probably be the one of June 24, 1999. That day, Sotheby's organizes in London the session "Contemporary African art from the Jean Pigozzi collection ». We no longer present this collection patiently constituted by the Paris gallery owner André Magnin who bought, on behalf of the heir to Simca, tens of thousands of works while furrowing Africa during twenty years. The 1999 dispersion marks a turning point not only because it is the first major sale organized by a leading company in the international art market, but also because it is a remarkable achievement. The price of the works is then low (not exceeding $ 18,000) and almost all are sold (2% unsold only), a rare phenomenon that can be explained both by the pedigree "Pigozzi" and by the purpose of this sale, the proceeds of which are shared between Unicef ​​and the endowment of the Jean Pigozzi Prize for Contemporary African Art.

Business and Arts South Africa - BIZART_ZA - Issue_01 - Winter/Spring 2019

FOUND OBJECTS: The Figurative Works of Vivien Kohler

I am fascinated both by the ability of the human spirit to transcend ‘the conceptual decay’, and the unique liminality of the post-apartheid South African city. My works illuminate the contrasts of lived experiences by showing people mentally cocooned from, yet physically enveloped by, life’s detritus. I incorporate, cast and paint discarded, packaging material as a signifier of transience, migration and displacement of people on the ‘periphery’.

—    Vivien Kohler

Experimental mixed media painter, Vivien Kohler, makes art that is infused with South African complexity. Socio-political ripples and reflections are inherent in his work but rise from the pieces rather than being the point of them. At the simplest level Kohler takes found objects and transforms them into something new. His work ranges from figurative snapshots of urban South Africa through to the abstract and metaphorical. His mid-career work features sleeping human forms surrounded by their stuff. The forms look like the cardboard Kohler has found in the throwaway corners of the city but they are actually realistically painted images of those finds. As such they offer neatly re-contextualised snapshots of the shrouded figures most South African encounter every day in their peripheral social vision.

National Arts Festival - Creativate Digital Art Festival

'Songsmith & the Living Will' talk by Jenna Burchell at Creativate Digital Art Festival 2019

Grahamstown Foundation - Ntsikana Gallery

1820 Settlers Monument Fort Selwyn Drive, Grahamstown, South Africa

Friday 28 June 2019, 12:30 -13:30

In this talk, the artist Jenna Burchell shares her process and experience in the creation of her internationally acclaimed Songsmith project. She explores the nonsensical, yet beautiful, depth in technology when it is used with art; especially when it appears to act according to its own will. She poses the question; how can we merge art and technology into our physical world so that we can access knowledge otherwise
invisible to us.

Jenna is represented by Sulger-Buel Gallery in London and Everard Read Gallery in Johannesburg.