The Clément Foundation joins forces with the Dapper Foundation to open its doors to the exceptional creativity of artists who, yesterday and today, bear witness to the richness of a plural Africa. Never Martinique, or even more widely the Caribbean, has previously hosted a demonstration of this type and scope.
Africa: a continent made up of fifty-four countries with thousands of languages and cultures. Some of them crossed the Atlantic with slaves, became rooted and transformed in the Americas and the Caribbean. This means that Africa is both near and far for those who carry with them part of their heritage. The works of ancient art come into resonance with his heritage place that constitutes the space of the Clément Foundation. A fang reliquary gure (Gabon), a dance stick in honor of the god Shango (Nigeria), a "consecrated" object from Congo, a statuette of Ivory Coast embodying a mystical spouse evoke practices that in the West Indies touch the deepest intimacy of individuals.
The selection of nearly 100 major pieces from the Drapper Foundation's collections was made as widely as possible to showcase a vast repertoire of representative crop styles of sub-Saharan African societies. The aesthetics of some of them marked mainly by naturalism, stylization, assembly or accumulayion of various elements has inspired many artists such as Picasso or Matisse and contributed to renew the art of the early twentieth century. But masks, statues and insignia of dignity speak above all about the history of peoples, their initiation to social and political life, solicitations addressed to ancestors, gods and deities to protect, heal or accompany the dead in the afterlife.
Not to enclose Africa in a fixed image and to look at it, today, with its realities thanks to thirty creations: sculptures, paintings, photographs, photomontages, collages and textiles reflect the dynamism of a contemporary art that makes legible traces collective and personal stories that rub shoulders or overlap.
The seventeen artists presented, beyond the diversity of their respective approaches, share strong challenges: to bring out new forms of reflection and commitment.
With the work of Ousmane Sow and Omar Victor Diop, questioning history gives life back to the heroic gurus of slavery it also suggests an exacerbated look at the colonial and postcolonial periods (Samuel Fosso, Malala Andrialavidrazana) and identity issues (Hassan Musa), not to mention the dramas of apartheid (Sam Nhlengethwa) and internal wars (Freddy Tsimba).
Productions explore the territories of collective memory and inspired by beliefs and rituals (Cyprien Tokoudagba). Some of them interpret or divert them to submit to their imagination (Ouattara Watts, Omar Ba, Barthelemy Toguo); others open the dialogue between presences of the invisible, ancestral beliefs and the urban world (Cheri Samba, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, Nyaba Leon Oueddraogo, Stanley Ransome, Soly Cisse, Joana Choumali).
Christiane Falgayrettes-Leveau