I feel it as one of the important tasks of a social engaged artist like myself and other artists, activists and cultural innovators to subvert and change the culture we find ourselves in. We are in a cultural war and, to echo Gordon Parks, the camera is our weapon of choice.
After a week of all kinds of art fairs, New York is looking back and reflecting on the results. Because the Armory 2016 decided to focus on Africa – ‘African Perspectives’ – African artists and African galleries got a lot of attention in the media. Is there more interest in contemporary African art? Is the African art market growing? Can we speak of a hype?
Edo Dijksterhuis reviewed the exhibition ‘What About Africa? 14 contemporary African artists’, organized by Africanah.org and Witteveen Visual Art Centre in Amsterdam. He calls the works top-notch but the concept of the exhibition highly problematic. “…..in this show they (the different countries) appear lumped together as if Africa were a homogeneous “country”—as it still is in many people’s minds.”
The coloring book and existing fairy tales may be his most important inspiration, but there are more influences. His work is a tribute to folk art because of the imagery, the setting and the absence of nuance. It also refers to the comic book tradition. When you see a presentation of Bankston’s work, it reads like a comic strip, it reads like a coherent story with a scene on every page. With one big difference: the viewer has to ‘write’ his own text.
Her endeavor at writing with light or rather writing herself into being, being black, blacks out in the face of her existential predicament. Instead of offering a critical reflection on negrophobia, Muholi’s game of parody gets entangled in negrophilia. This isn’t to disavow the potentiality of subversion, but to note the risky slippage of it subsidizing the already existing white jouissance. From this point of view, activism meets stasis.