Gleanings

This solo exhibition presents 50 paintings from the Pigozzi African Art Collection by Congolese artist Chéri Samba, who went by Samba wa Mbimba N’zingo Nuni Masi Ndo Mbasi until 1979. A key member of the Congolese ‘popular painting’ movement, he moved to Kinshasa in 1975 and began his painting career painting signs and billboards, but soon became known as a ‘painter-journalist’ since he chronicled everyday events. He calls his colourful self-portraits — that typically feature text bubbles written in Lingala, Kikongo and French — ‘bubble paintings’. Ever since his art was included in the groundbreaking exhibition ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ (1989), the entrepreneur and photographer Jean Pigozzi has collected his paintings.

This exhibition is divided into five themes: self-portraiture to reflect the world; the multifaceted woman; Kinshasa, Congo and Africa; geopolitical and art stories; and art history revised and corrected. The ‘performer-pioneer’ Samba, who unabashedly sought stardom, managed to power self-portraiture into a vehicle for self-promotion. Although Samba began depicting female nudes when many in Africa still considered such imagery taboo, his nudes exude agency, thus defying convention.

For nearly 50 years, he has maintained a studio in Kinshasa, the world’s largest French-speaking city (18 million inhabitants). It is from this vantage point that he deploys painting to critique Western art institutions, art history’s Western hegemony and global politics. Although his paintings are figurative, their distinctive caricature style, which is more literary than realist, owes a lot to his earlier career in comics — a field in which commentary trumps depiction. (Sue Spaid)

Waldburger Wouters presents ‘Suskewiet Visions’, a project by Belgian artist Filip Van Dingenen (1975, Diest), his fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. The show focuses on Van Dingenen’s most recent body of work, which he developed with Congolese composer and visual artist David Shongo (1994, Kangu, DRC). The concept of this work is based on the folkloric tradition of Suskewiet, an animal sport practiced in Southwest Flanders in which each bird owner tallies each tweet made by their caged songbird on a specially designed, black wooden stick. This project re-contextualises the counting stick as a tool for aural engagement and environmental observation. Imagining each stick’s counting marks as a ‘temporal ephemera score’, Shongo and Van Dingenen have applied the stick as a device for musical composition along the Lys River in Southwest Flanders and the Congo River in Central Congo. Video documentation of this poly­phonic experiment is on view in the exhibition.

The exhibition also features Van Dingenen’s colour pencil, watercolour and collage drawings. Some incorporate actual wooden counting sticks. These light, delicate works form idiosyncratic maps and constellations of the Suskewiet cosmology. Carefully handwritten words label diagrammatic birds, mind maps of ‘Ethno-ornithology’ and cartographies of the Lys River, amongst other poetic imagery. To access the exhibition, visitors are invited to become part of the Suskewiet sport, as they crawl through a small door in an iron gate designed by Van Dingenen. Elegantly encasing the front door and façade, the gate transforms the gallery into a birdcage. (Perri MacKenzie)

The paintings of Colombian artist Emma Reyes (1919—2003), who like Georgia O’Keefe depicted flowers in a style bordering abstraction, invite viewers to intently focus on the depicted subjects. Reyes, who remains largely unknown, was born and grew up in Colombia. After spending her childhood living in poverty in a monastery in Bogota, she received a scholarship and moved to Paris in the late 1940s. Although she spent time studying and working under Diego Rivera, she was primarily a self-taught painter. She learned an important life lesson from André Lhote, who told her to stay true to what makes her work and background undeniably unique, such as her journey across Latin America and her time spent in the Paraguayan jungle. Reyes’ paintings depict individuals set among lush vegetation, in environments where human beings and the surrounding jungle are united. By portraying her subjects alongside animals or with a piece of fruit either in their arms or raised to their lips, she sought to tell an ancient story of kinship. Far from calling for a return to the wild, Reyes rejected the anthropocentric worldview, seeking instead to return humanity to its rightful place, in dialogue with its environment. It’s precisely these topics and approaches that ensure the enduring relevance and appeal of Reyes’ work. Over the years, her style evolved from an indigenist approach to encompass experiments in abstraction and geometric compositions, psychedelic florals, masks and monsters, but she always returned to figuration, and some of her most striking pieces are stark, haunted portraits. The MAMCO exhibition features a selection of rarely seen and mostly unknown paintings from the 1980s and early 1990s. This was the period when her art adopted a distinctively South American worldview that challenged the Western assumption of human beings’ superiority over nature. Her art also anticipated Colombia’s 1991 constitution that recognises the importance of protecting the environment and preserving biodiversity. (Els Roelandt)

To address the climate crisis and our planetary well-being, we must consider the critical situation of marine life on Earth. Oceans, in addition to producing the oxygen that marine animals and microbes breathe, absorb a quarter of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. They are thus both the ‘lungs of the planet’ and its largest carbon sink. Yet how can we recognise the intelligence of the ocean? How can we fully admire the complexity of its ecosystems, feel and see its body and agency, and ultimately respect its rights?

Currently on view at TBA21 is the group show ‘Liquid Intelligence’, curated by Chus Martínez with Soledad Gutiérrez and María Montero, who ask how intelligence can go beyond its association with human bodies to become plural and embrace the values of the ocean. The curators bring together eight international artists who employ various languages to draw people closer to the ocean and its aquatic ecosystems, tides and currents. This immersive exhibition conveys a plurality of alternative futures based on the single idea that all life forms are permanently interconnected. With works by Saelia Aparicio, Lucas Arruda, Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Sonia Levy, Jumana Manna, Ana Mendieta, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz and Inês Zenha. The exhibition also hosts performances, encounters and conversations with curators, artists, musicians, performers, scientists, philosophers and researchers. (Thessa Krüger)

The major Gego retrospective ‘Gego. Measuring Infinity’, which opened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York earlier this year, has come to Bilboa. The exhibition includes over 150 of Gego’s early paintings, experimental prints, suspended spheres, dangling ‘waterfalls’, free-standing ‘tree trunks’ and her 3-D ‘drawings without paper’.

Born Gertrud Goldschmidt (1912—1994) in Hamburg, Gego died in Caracas, Venezuela. Following her move to Venezuela in 1939, she worked as a furniture designer, mother of two, urban planner and interior architect, before becoming an artist in her late 40s. Given Düsseldorf’s parallel ZERO movement (1957—1966), whose respective artworks explored the relationship between movement, light and space, she might have found like minds had she returned to Germany. One suspects, however, that they likely would have overlooked her, as they did Mary Baumeister.

Similar in effect to Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic structures and Kenneth Snelson’s suspended tubes, Gego’s major artworks investigate structural systems involving tension, spatial relations and transparency. Unlike theirs, her pliable sculptures exude fragility, flexibility and the optical effects of motion and vibration. Being totally collapsible, they also seem the obvious solution to the perennial problem of shipping large-scale sculptures across continents. Of course, no one would dare to flatten them these days, even if she once did.

Later in her career, Gego created numerous two and three-dimensional reticulárea, flexible structures made of stainless steel and aluminium wire. Bendable like nets yet structured like grids, the reticulárea evoke animate beings such as trees and waterfalls. By far her most famous, Reticulárea (1981), is a room-sized immersive installation on permanent display at the National Art Gallery in Caracas. (Sue Spaid)

Rather than working on his own, visual artist Sammy Baloji started engaging in collaborative projects early in his artistic practice. Mainly, his collaborators are researchers, activists and other artists. Baloji attributes these collaborations and interactions with others to his lack of a formal art education. His background is in science and communications, fields with strong links to the public sphere and requiring constant interaction. Moreover, colonial history was not taught at the University of Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo when Baloji was a student there, so he began to question this history through collaborative projects as an artist. While working as a photographer at the Institut français in Lubumbashi immediately after graduating, he met Johan Lagae, who heads the department of Architecture at Ghent University in Belgium. Together, they started photographing architectural sites in Lubumbashi or places related to the city’s industrial heritage. These photographs highlighted the typology, history and orientation of the buildings in the city, as well as its segregated structure, which goes back to colonial times. They uncovered a multilayered architectural history that they felt could not be represented through the medium of photography alone, so they adopted other forms of documentation. In order to address the history of mining in and around his native city of Lubumbashi, Baloji began investigating and documenting the ways in which extractive industries have caused extensive destruction in the Katanga region, disrupting social structures, transforming the land into resources and reducing entire communities to a mere pool of potential labourers. He juxtaposes this harshness with the memories, hopes and projects of people who live amidst these colonial ruins, industrial mining and the global capitalist economy. When he was invited to Kunsthalle Mainz, it was only logical that Baloji would extend the invitation to include other colleagues. The art centre Picha, which he co-founded in 2008 with artist friends in Lubumbashi, plays a central role in his collaborative efforts and in this group exhibition. Together with curator and theorist Lotte Arndt, Baloji invited twelve DRC and European artists who have worked with Picha in the past: Nilla Banguna, Jackson Bukasa and Dan Kayeye and Justice Kasongo, Sybil Coovi Handemagnon, Fundi Mwamba Gustave and Antje Van Wichelen, Franck Moka, Hadassa Ngamba, Isaac Sahani Dato, Georges Senga and Julia Tröscher. Several artists have focused on issues and approaches that relate to the specific context of Germany. The exhibition’s starting point is Baloji’s critical questioning of the photographic archives of German ethnologist Hans Himmelheber (1908–2003), who collected images during a trip to Congo in 1939, when the country was still under Belgian colonial rule. In a series of collages mounted on mirrors that discreetly reference divinatory nkisi figures, Baloji brings together Himmelheber’s photographs with X-Ray images of various objects from the ethnologist’s collection. X-ray imaging is commonly used by museums to visualise the material structure and ‘hidden content’ of objects — a medical method of gaining information. By questioning such practices, Baloji offers a counter-narrative to the translocation of artifacts, which separates them from their use and cultural meaning. He thus invited writer Fiston Mwanza Mujila to create a kasala, a Luba poem, combining the recitation of elements from the genealogy of a celebrated person with mythological, cosmological and historical fragments. Baloji merges colonial images with the experiences and practices of people from the south-eastern region of DRC. (Els Roelandt)

‘The Bark’, the current group exhibition at CRAC Alsace, concerns inhabitants’ relationships with environments that have been violently transformed. As such, it’s partly a show about how land can be made distant, without any shadow or relief, silent and toxic. This transformation embedded in Western divisions sees humans and nonhumans as separate and not interlinked. One question the exhibition asks: how can both humans and nonhumans reconcile with their environment?

Curated by CRAC Alsace Director Elfi Turpin, ‘The Bark’ includes artworks by June Crespo, Mathilde Rosier and Ana Vaz that challenge these violent frameworks by highlighting other voices, stories and bodily experiences based on notions of care and resistance. Their gestures empower the visitor to establish alliances and affective relationships with the living world. A series of sculptures by June Crespo’s explores the object of the saddle. On the one hand, the saddle is point of connection between two bodies, a human being and a horse; on the other, it is a symbol of domestication. Mathilde Rosier’s paintings delve into anthropogenic environments that embody a desire for regeneration, ranging from farm machinery to dancing or marching hybrid bodies and dreamy landscapes. Additionally, the Brazilian artist and filmmaker Ana Vaz reflects upon cultures of extraction and dispossession. With Atomic Garden (2018), we discover a flower garden sprouting in Naraha, a Japanese town evacuated after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. It invites the viewer to consider the unexpected lives of newborn flowers and the gatherings of bees, in spite of this toxic wasteland. Her poetic film Olhe bem as montanhas (Look Closely at the Mountains) (2018) similarly invites us to engage with the mining areas in Minas Gerais, Brazil and Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France. (Thessa Krüger)

The exhibition ‘The Great Cosmic Mother’ is the first museum retrospective dedicated to the work of the British-Swedish artist Monica Sjöö (1938–2005). Previously on view at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, this retrospective is now on view at Modern Art Oxford. Sjöö described her life as an interwoven tapestry of experiences and pilgrimages guided by the spiritual path of the Goddess. This pagan religious movement, which revolves around the divine feminine, grew in reaction to Abrahamic religions that use male pronouns to refer to God. Her travels led her from her native Sweden to the British Isles, where Sjöö was ‘transformed’ (as she called it) by the remnants of Neolithic and Celtic culture. Following a pagan calendar of equinoxes and solstices, Sjöö traveled to sacred sites across the world, finding more inspiration for her paintings that mostly depict the Cosmic Mother and primal female power. In addition to being a painter, she was a prolific writer, activist and ecofeminist who left an enduring legacy in which art, politics and spirituality are inseparable. Her lifelong mission was fighting patriarchy. Sjöö’s deep commitment to gender and environmental justice is more relevant today than ever, and her oeuvre has attracted increasing interest from scholars and artists alike. British artist Olivia Plender, whose work and library are discussed elsewhere in these pages, describes how, as a young girl, she had been a member of a South London coven where she first encountered the work and ideas of Sjöö. In the exhibition catalogue of ‘The Great Cosmic Mother’, Plender testifies beautifully about her encounter with Wicca, as the witchcraft tradition is known, and the allure of the witches of South London: ‘I am still trying to understand,’ she writes, ‘why it was so compelling to me as a teenager that instead of attending exhibition openings in fashionable central London with art students my own age, I would travel for an hour on the bus every week to suburbia, for evenings in the company of witches open to different ways of thinking and feeling.’ (Els Roelandt)

The exhibition ‘Seeds and Souls’, curated by Christine Eyene, explores connections between botanical histories, colonial legacies and diasporic experiences. The title of the show is meant to be understood both literally and metaphorically. ‘Seeds and Souls’ is presented at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, which was built in the late nineteenth century on the grounds of Copenhagen’s then botanical garden. Eyene interprets this coincidence as a call from ancestors imploring her to investigate and bring forward the untold histories of the plants present in the garden. The participating artists, most of whom have dual heritage, are all from regions where plants and resources have been extracted for transport, with impacts that continue to reverberate around the globe. The artworks reflect on the ideas and consequences of this extraction, consumption and transplantation through various forms of tangible and immaterial excavations, the uncovering of overlooked and sometimes contentious histories, and through ‘re-rooting’ as a method of reclaiming agency over these histories and cultural expressions. Eyene has been researching modern and contemporary South African art since the late 1990s, specialising in the stories of artists in exile during Apartheid and their cultural interactions with the Black Diaspora in France and England. She is well known throughout Europe for her thoroughly researched exhibitions that present emerging artists from the Black Diaspora. In ‘Seeds and Souls’ includes new works by Brook Andrew, Shiraz Bayjoo, Sonia Boyce, Ishita Chakraborty, Annalee Davis, Michelle Eistrup, Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, Linda Lamignan and Yvon Ngassam. (Els Roelandt)

Coco Chanel is said to have owned no less than 32 folding screens during her lifetime. The exhibition ‘Paraventi: Folding Screens from the 17th to 21st Centuries’ on view at the foundation established by Miuccia Prada features over 70 paraventi (Italian for folding screens).

Exhibition curator Nicholas Cullinan captures their elusive essence by introducing their long history among different civilisations on distant continents. The exhibition’s scenography is structured as a series of questions and a play of oppositions, unravelling amidst an ambiguous and enveloping echo through time. This spectacular display, designed by the Japanese architects SANAA, reinforces the curator’s intentions by presenting an astonishing array of screens, many of them with exceptional provenances.

On the exhibition’s first floor, visitors experience the folding screen’s historical development as a crescendo that starts with the majestic screens of seventeenth-century China, passes through the Viennese Secession onto mid-century Eames, and ends with contemporary screens by Cy Twombly and Mona Hatoum.

The ground floor is dedicated to a series of oppositions, such as ‘Readings: East and West’. Here, the complex history of migration and translation underlying folding screens is explored through the reading of their images from left to right and vice versa. Continuing on, one encounters the section ‘Public/Private’, which invites viewers to reflect upon these objects’ spatiality, their ambiguous status between two- and three-dimensionality, as well as their erotic connotations. In the same spirit, the section ‘World of Interiors’ explores the interplay between decoration and function, ‘lowbrow’ items and fine art, and how queer aesthetics subverts such binaries. Screens created especially for this exhibition by artists such as Tony Cokes or Cao Fei are also on view. (Lorenzo Csontos)

Visual artist Kapwani Kiwanga, who will represent her native Canada at the 2024 Venice Biennale, is presenting a site-relational artwork called Rootwork at Bozar Brussels. Interestingly, her presentation coincides with the exhibition ‘Victor Horta and the Grammar of Art Nouveau’ also at Bozar. 2023 is the year in which Belgium commemorates the construction of the Hôtel Tassel in Brussels, the first Art Nouveau house designed by Victor Horta for Professor Emile Tassel, a member (as was Victor Horta) of the Masonic lodge called Les Amis Philanthropes, an organisation linked to the exploitation of Congo during the colonial period. At Bozar, Kiwanga exhibits a carpet with floral motifs including baobab flowers and white rubber vines. These motifs underline the importance of community and interconnectedness, but also reference hidden cruelty and exploitation. It is no longer a secret that the development of Art Nouveau in Belgium was linked to the exploitation of Congo by King Leopold II, the Belgian state and the political, cultural and economic elite of the late nineteenth century. Thanks to recent research revealing hidden or covered-up ties between Congo’s exploitation and Art Nouveau’s flourishing, such links can now be publicly discussed, as is the case with the exhibition ‘Victor Horta and the Grammar of Art Nouveau’. Kiwanga makes the link between aesthetics and the movement’s power structures extra clear in her work. In an essay published in the exhibition’s catalogue, professor Deborah Silverman argues that the Belgian design of Art Nouveau set up an aesthetics of domination and was an exclusionary project that privileged patrons, while refusing to acknowledge Congo’s influence on the movement. Art Nouveau architect Henry Van de Velde described the liane (French for creepers), one of Art Nouveau’s central motifs, as a ‘whiplash’ in reference to brutal instruments of torture used in the former colony. In the exhibition ‘Victor Horta and the Grammar of Art Nouveau’ and its accompanying catalogue, one finds illuminating passages, archived material and recent research that explicitly demonstrate how the roots of European Modernism are linked to a violent and oppressive colonial regime. In his catalogue introduction, CEO and Artistic Director of Bozar Christophe Slagmuylder promises to further investigate Western heritage through contemporary art. Those interested in the connection between Congo, Art Nouveau and early modernism ought to check out Congo Style: From Belgian Art Nouveau to African Independence, the absolutely marvelous study by artist and researcher Ruth Sacks published in 2023 by the University of Michigan Press. (Els Roelandt)