africanah.org

Sanford Biggers’ works integrate film/video, installation, sculpture, drawing, original music and performance.  He intentionally complicates issues such as hip hop, Buddhism, politics, identity and art history in order to offer new perspectives and associations for established symbols.  Through a multi-disciplinary formal process, and an equally syncretic creative approach, he makes works or ‘vignettes’ that are as aesthetically pleasing as they are conceptual. I got to know Biggers through a sort of patchwork of conversations as I interacted with him and his work over the years.

Writes Sasha Dees.

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The work of younger generations of artists such as Aboudia and Boua opens up interesting questions for art history, curating and criticism: focused on the idea of the contemporary and the African continent. I am concerned, not in refracting the work of these artists through a western art historical, curatorial and critical canon (broadly speaking). Rather I am interested in the practice of paying attention to the artist’s particular relationship to medium, process and place, and the conditions from which the work emerges (historical, social, economic, and political).

Yvette Greslé compares the work of two young African artists.

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Warm and textured, sensuously appaeling and grand in scale, the prints envelope their viewers, simultaneously attracting spectators with their physicality and repelling them with the implications of the subject matter they depict: palatial chambers in tatters, roofs and walls blown apart, objects (chairs, pianos, beds, chandeliers, tools) once used to sustain and enrich life, now metaphors only for survival in the face of death.

Shelley Rice analyzes recent photowork of Wafaa Bilal.

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“The work refers to apartheid, an era that’s behind us. But it also speaks to the present that is very much impacted by apartheid. Everything that is now, the economy, black families living in townships, white people in suburban areas, is a result of the past. So the series also talks about current issues in South Africa, such as land. There have been quite a lot of debates around the redistribution of land. In the work I talk about my family who stayed on a farm for so many years but had no claim to it. And then they came to the city and moved to the townships because that’s just where black people had to live. That doesn’t make sense.”

Manon Braat interviews Lebohang Kganye.

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Packer looks for tenderness, for vulnerability, for intimacy. The viewer has to feel the human contact, the realness of the person. “My work is about love and generosity. It does not have anything to do with image making.” Her generosity towards her models may be big, but the space, the context, is very important too. There is no hierarchy. It’s about body and space together. Therefore many times they have the same color.

Rob Perrée analyzes the work of Jennifer Packer.

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