Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/10757163-10434938
Leena Habiballa
{"title":"The Visual Life of Revolution","authors":"Leena Habiballa","doi":"10.1215/10757163-10434938","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-10434938","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41573,"journal":{"name":"Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83353577","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}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/10757163-10434952
Manthia Diawara, Terri Geis
{"title":"Ellen Gallagher and Edgar Cleijne","authors":"Manthia Diawara, Terri Geis","doi":"10.1215/10757163-10434952","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-10434952","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41573,"journal":{"name":"Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art","volume":"52 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81963086","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}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/10757163-10127111
Lauren Kroiz
ABSTRACT:In 1971, Harold Cousins published an essay explaining the sculptures that he had begun creating in the mid-1950s, following his relocation in October 1949 from New York to Paris. Cousins described his series named Plaiton, his own neologism combining the English word plate with the French word laiton (brass). This linguistic combination paralleled Cousins’s description of himself as a “sculptor-welder,” a practice that grew from experiments in oxyacetylene welding while studying in Paris with funding from the GI Bill. Providing the first scholarly analysis of sculptor Cousins’s rich career, this article recovers the artist’s early biography through family archives, including correspondence and period criticism. It then examines Cousins’s early artwork and his own description of his artistic practice culminating in Plaiton. Finally, it considers Cousins’s 1950s sculptures, particularly Plaiton Suspendu, and speculates on its relation to his later work. In considering Cousins’s sculpture in relation to racial constructions of the immediate postwar period, I draw on prior scholarship focused on postwar African American artists in Paris. I also look to studies of the ways Black artists employed abstraction—histories that often begin in the mid-1960s or 1970s. In examining the mid-1950s Plaiton works, I hope to both bring Cousins and his work back to visibility and suggest that this history actually began substantially earlier.
{"title":"Harold Cousins’s Plaiton Sculpture","authors":"Lauren Kroiz","doi":"10.1215/10757163-10127111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-10127111","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:In 1971, Harold Cousins published an essay explaining the sculptures that he had begun creating in the mid-1950s, following his relocation in October 1949 from New York to Paris. Cousins described his series named Plaiton, his own neologism combining the English word plate with the French word laiton (brass). This linguistic combination paralleled Cousins’s description of himself as a “sculptor-welder,” a practice that grew from experiments in oxyacetylene welding while studying in Paris with funding from the GI Bill. Providing the first scholarly analysis of sculptor Cousins’s rich career, this article recovers the artist’s early biography through family archives, including correspondence and period criticism. It then examines Cousins’s early artwork and his own description of his artistic practice culminating in Plaiton. Finally, it considers Cousins’s 1950s sculptures, particularly Plaiton Suspendu, and speculates on its relation to his later work. In considering Cousins’s sculpture in relation to racial constructions of the immediate postwar period, I draw on prior scholarship focused on postwar African American artists in Paris. I also look to studies of the ways Black artists employed abstraction—histories that often begin in the mid-1960s or 1970s. In examining the mid-1950s Plaiton works, I hope to both bring Cousins and his work back to visibility and suggest that this history actually began substantially earlier.","PeriodicalId":41573,"journal":{"name":"Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art","volume":"85 1","pages":"20 - 6"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75311351","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}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/10757163-10127139
Quinn Schoen
The catalyst of millions of arrests, fervent protests, and a police-led massacre, the passbook is a haunting relic of apartheid South Africa. Operating as a colonial appendage to be carried, tucked away, and presented to police on demand, these pocket-sized identification books radically constrained the mobility and selfhood of Black South Africans. They also gesture toward a perhaps unanticipated symptom of South Africa’s democratic turn: the issue of confronting the stuff of apartheid, the archival debris left over from a system reliant on exhaustive administrative documentation to surveil and compel its subjects. This article contends with the material status of the passbook, examining legacies of haptic contestation enacted upon it in protest alongside a close study of Apartheid Scrolls (1995), a series of intaglio photo-etchings by South African artist Rudzani Nemasetoni, derived from the pages of his father’s thirty-year-old passbook. Tearing, collaging, flattening, printing, Xeroxing, and reconfiguring the document, Nemasetoni signals the fundamental instability of the passbook and the potential to upheave its function, composition, and materiality, and in doing so, joins a lineage of actions that deconstruct and delegitimize the object. Passbooks did not disappear with the abolition of pass laws nor at the end of apartheid. Preserved in institutional and personal archives, thrown in trash heaps, stored in drawers and closets, or configured anew in art, they survive as objects to be faced and contended with. Nemasetoni’s Apartheid Scrolls offers one such way.
{"title":"The Passbook, Deconstructed","authors":"Quinn Schoen","doi":"10.1215/10757163-10127139","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-10127139","url":null,"abstract":"The catalyst of millions of arrests, fervent protests, and a police-led massacre, the passbook is a haunting relic of apartheid South Africa. Operating as a colonial appendage to be carried, tucked away, and presented to police on demand, these pocket-sized identification books radically constrained the mobility and selfhood of Black South Africans. They also gesture toward a perhaps unanticipated symptom of South Africa’s democratic turn: the issue of confronting the stuff of apartheid, the archival debris left over from a system reliant on exhaustive administrative documentation to surveil and compel its subjects. This article contends with the material status of the passbook, examining legacies of haptic contestation enacted upon it in protest alongside a close study of Apartheid Scrolls (1995), a series of intaglio photo-etchings by South African artist Rudzani Nemasetoni, derived from the pages of his father’s thirty-year-old passbook. Tearing, collaging, flattening, printing, Xeroxing, and reconfiguring the document, Nemasetoni signals the fundamental instability of the passbook and the potential to upheave its function, composition, and materiality, and in doing so, joins a lineage of actions that deconstruct and delegitimize the object. Passbooks did not disappear with the abolition of pass laws nor at the end of apartheid. Preserved in institutional and personal archives, thrown in trash heaps, stored in drawers and closets, or configured anew in art, they survive as objects to be faced and contended with. Nemasetoni’s Apartheid Scrolls offers one such way.","PeriodicalId":41573,"journal":{"name":"Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48640191","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}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/10757163-10127125
Carol Boram-Hays
ABSTRACT:Wasswa Donald Augustine a.k.a.,Waswad (b. 1984), is a reanimator—taking materials derived from once living organisms and breathing new life into them through the creation of sculptures, installations, and two-dimensional works. He is among a number of artists working around the globe to consider a future where humans are transformed through technology and/or evolution into “transhumans.” Exploring Waswad’s practice, this article will situate his work within the context of transhumanist theories and their application within Africa. It will examine how the artist, inspired by current social, political, and economic events, is using his work to respond to the historical and contemporary impacts, both positive and negative, of technology to the lives and bodies of those on the African continent as well as the wider environment. The works of art that he creates refer directly to his experiences in Uganda and, more broadly, the hybrid technological and natural quality of his forms resonant with many global anxieties about the current changes going on in the world. This article examines how Waswad’s exploration of new avenues for evolution asks us to consider the wider impacts of the Anthropocene age in which we are now living.
{"title":"Waswad the Reanimator","authors":"Carol Boram-Hays","doi":"10.1215/10757163-10127125","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-10127125","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Wasswa Donald Augustine a.k.a.,Waswad (b. 1984), is a reanimator—taking materials derived from once living organisms and breathing new life into them through the creation of sculptures, installations, and two-dimensional works. He is among a number of artists working around the globe to consider a future where humans are transformed through technology and/or evolution into “transhumans.” Exploring Waswad’s practice, this article will situate his work within the context of transhumanist theories and their application within Africa. It will examine how the artist, inspired by current social, political, and economic events, is using his work to respond to the historical and contemporary impacts, both positive and negative, of technology to the lives and bodies of those on the African continent as well as the wider environment. The works of art that he creates refer directly to his experiences in Uganda and, more broadly, the hybrid technological and natural quality of his forms resonant with many global anxieties about the current changes going on in the world. This article examines how Waswad’s exploration of new avenues for evolution asks us to consider the wider impacts of the Anthropocene age in which we are now living.","PeriodicalId":41573,"journal":{"name":"Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art","volume":"93 1","pages":"22 - 33"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85690252","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}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/10757163-10127153
E. Giorgis
Ethiopian artist Dawit Abebe’s Jerba paintings were first exhibited in Addis Ababa in 2015. Jerba, a word that means “back” or “background,” is a series of mixed media and acrylic paintings concerned with historical memory and the political and cultural accounts attending to that memory. Abebe’s jerbas explore the contemporary predicaments of Ethiopia, where ethnic tensions have proliferated and where the trademarks of the human body are objectified to one’s ethnic identity rather than to the body’s lived experience as a human being. The evocative power of the composition, texture, and detail of Abebe’s paintings in representing the human image is exquisite while adding a conceptual component that conjures up, for instance, notions of memory and nostalgia, conflicting imaginations of the nation, and the place of Ethiopia in the passage of history. While the Jerba series skillfully navigates the perspective of the past and its remnants in the interpretation of the present, the visual metaphors connect personally with the spectator. Seemingly faint voices transpire from individual panels, and sounds communicate with the viewer through particular stories. Likewise, impressions of silence also materialize, as if the jerbas are telling the viewer that there are histories and stories one cannot comprehend. Abebe’s critical engagement through these works responds to the changing pressures of time and place, particularly the ambiguities of modern citizenship in the Ethiopian state.
{"title":"Monumental Bodies","authors":"E. Giorgis","doi":"10.1215/10757163-10127153","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-10127153","url":null,"abstract":"Ethiopian artist Dawit Abebe’s Jerba paintings were first exhibited in Addis Ababa in 2015. Jerba, a word that means “back” or “background,” is a series of mixed media and acrylic paintings concerned with historical memory and the political and cultural accounts attending to that memory. Abebe’s jerbas explore the contemporary predicaments of Ethiopia, where ethnic tensions have proliferated and where the trademarks of the human body are objectified to one’s ethnic identity rather than to the body’s lived experience as a human being. The evocative power of the composition, texture, and detail of Abebe’s paintings in representing the human image is exquisite while adding a conceptual component that conjures up, for instance, notions of memory and nostalgia, conflicting imaginations of the nation, and the place of Ethiopia in the passage of history. While the Jerba series skillfully navigates the perspective of the past and its remnants in the interpretation of the present, the visual metaphors connect personally with the spectator. Seemingly faint voices transpire from individual panels, and sounds communicate with the viewer through particular stories. Likewise, impressions of silence also materialize, as if the jerbas are telling the viewer that there are histories and stories one cannot comprehend. Abebe’s critical engagement through these works responds to the changing pressures of time and place, particularly the ambiguities of modern citizenship in the Ethiopian state.","PeriodicalId":41573,"journal":{"name":"Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42876607","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}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/10757163-10127223
E. Chambers
ABSTRACT:This article concerns itself with a new body of work by Jamaican artist T’waunii Sinclair. The work utilizes the machete, in some respects a common, everyday implement but one which is imbued with all manner of associations, some challenging (for example, the British media’s reference to machetes as code for Black criminality). Other associations, ones that Sinclair is keen to advance in his work, relate to the African diaspora, Caribbean history (particularly that of Haiti), and the machete as a symbol of enslavement and a tool in insurrections against slavery. The article places Sinclair’s work into several machete-related contexts and considerations. While a machete is not an expansive surface on which to execute a figurative painting, Sinclair achieves a copious amount of expression in these works, creating images that range from cartographic depictions of Hispaniola to an insurrection in progress to sets of eyes expressing horror, terror, or surprise. Through these images, the cultural life of the lowly implement is given the most dramatic range of fillips.
{"title":"T’waunii Sinclair: and the Ongoing Cultural Life of the Machete","authors":"E. Chambers","doi":"10.1215/10757163-10127223","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-10127223","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article concerns itself with a new body of work by Jamaican artist T’waunii Sinclair. The work utilizes the machete, in some respects a common, everyday implement but one which is imbued with all manner of associations, some challenging (for example, the British media’s reference to machetes as code for Black criminality). Other associations, ones that Sinclair is keen to advance in his work, relate to the African diaspora, Caribbean history (particularly that of Haiti), and the machete as a symbol of enslavement and a tool in insurrections against slavery. The article places Sinclair’s work into several machete-related contexts and considerations. While a machete is not an expansive surface on which to execute a figurative painting, Sinclair achieves a copious amount of expression in these works, creating images that range from cartographic depictions of Hispaniola to an insurrection in progress to sets of eyes expressing horror, terror, or surprise. Through these images, the cultural life of the lowly implement is given the most dramatic range of fillips.","PeriodicalId":41573,"journal":{"name":"Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art","volume":"1 1","pages":"112 - 127"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90491147","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}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/10757163-10127181
Elodie Silberstein
Look Back at It (2016) is a cutting-edge interpretation of Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) by African American multidisciplinary artist Rashaad Newsome. The work is a collage of magazine cuttings. The action is set in the vogue ballroom scene, a counterculture sparked in the 1970s by the Black and Latinx Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer/Questioning (LGBTQ+) communities in New York. The muses are disenfranchised African American trans women who have faced a long-standing subjugation anchored in America’s history of racial slavery and classed transphobic capitalism. Their bodies are made of a collage of dazzling jewels cut from glossy magazines that have rendered them invisible. Drawing on beauty politics, this article maps the visual repertoire of Newsome’s aesthetic and its geopolitical implications. A formal and contextual analysis highlights how the use of high jewelry alludes to the global trade in minerals—most specifically, the diamond industry’s spoliation of South Africa’s natural resources, pionered by British imperialist Cecil Rhodes. Special attention is paid to the way Newsome’s subversion of the codes of high jewelry visually and conceptually echoes voguers’ transgression of high fashion in dance competitions. Newsome stages a transnational and transhistorical dialogue between two distinct but interconnected systems of oppression, imperialism and global capitalism, thus sketching a collective history of Black pain and of creative resilience, guided by trans women, that is essential at the time of the resurgence of global populist nationalistic discourses.
{"title":"Black Transnational Resistance","authors":"Elodie Silberstein","doi":"10.1215/10757163-10127181","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-10127181","url":null,"abstract":"Look Back at It (2016) is a cutting-edge interpretation of Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) by African American multidisciplinary artist Rashaad Newsome. The work is a collage of magazine cuttings. The action is set in the vogue ballroom scene, a counterculture sparked in the 1970s by the Black and Latinx Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer/Questioning (LGBTQ+) communities in New York. The muses are disenfranchised African American trans women who have faced a long-standing subjugation anchored in America’s history of racial slavery and classed transphobic capitalism. Their bodies are made of a collage of dazzling jewels cut from glossy magazines that have rendered them invisible. Drawing on beauty politics, this article maps the visual repertoire of Newsome’s aesthetic and its geopolitical implications. A formal and contextual analysis highlights how the use of high jewelry alludes to the global trade in minerals—most specifically, the diamond industry’s spoliation of South Africa’s natural resources, pionered by British imperialist Cecil Rhodes. Special attention is paid to the way Newsome’s subversion of the codes of high jewelry visually and conceptually echoes voguers’ transgression of high fashion in dance competitions. Newsome stages a transnational and transhistorical dialogue between two distinct but interconnected systems of oppression, imperialism and global capitalism, thus sketching a collective history of Black pain and of creative resilience, guided by trans women, that is essential at the time of the resurgence of global populist nationalistic discourses.","PeriodicalId":41573,"journal":{"name":"Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42219069","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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