DANCE WITH ME OWANTO
African Artists’ Foundation 24 NOV 17 - 15 DEC 17
OWANTO Owanto is a multi-cultural Gabonese artist born in Paris, France. She was raised in Gabon and subsequently emigrated to Europe where she continued to study Philosophy, Literature and Languages at the Institut Catholic de Paris in Madrid, Spain. She currently lives and works between Africa, Europe and the United States of America. Described as a multidisciplinary artist, Owanto works across a variety of media including photography, sculpture, painting, video, installation and performative works. She explores her personal heritage, questioning her history as the daughter of a Gabonese mother and French father. Furthermore, she investigates themes relating to identity politics and transformation, sequencing images from personal archives into collages, a universe that defies the laws of time and space and creates cross-cultural and transhistorical dialogues. Owanto’s work often addresses sensitive and somewhat taboo issues, concerning cultural and religious practices which adversely affect individuals on personal as well as social levels. Light, both as concept and as medium, is present in Owanto’s work and symbolises what guides us to a safe place. The feminine, as a creative energy, is another constant in her work, relating to her childhood experiences when women were the family pillars.
Notable solo exhibitions include: The Lighthouse of Memory, Go Nogé Mènè Republic of Gabon Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale (Venice, Italy: 2009); El Faro de la Memoria at Galería Maior (Palma de Mallorca, Spain: 2011); Où Allons Nous at Voice Gallery, Marrakech, Kingdom of Morocco: 2012); Protect, Public Art intervention at Jardins de Saint Martin (Monaco: 2013) and Flowers at Conseil National (Monaco: 2016). Her work also features in the following prominent group shows: Cinquantenaire des Indépendances Africaines at Maison de L’Unesco (Paris, France: 2010); Gabon: Ma Terre Mon Futur at Gabon Expo (Libreville, Gabon: 2010); Neighbours at CAC Málaga (Málaga, Spain: 2012); Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa at Smithsonian National Museum of African Art (Washington DC, USA: 2013); DÓNDE VAMOS Performance at Off the OFF Dak’Art (Dakar, Senegal: 2014); Beauty at La Térmica (Málaga, Spain: 2015), La Jeune Fille à la Fleur at 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair (London, United Kingdom: 2016). Her project Flowers is part of the Permanent Collection of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Cape Town, South Africa: 2017).
DANCE WITH ME In Dance With Me Owanto creates a universe that defies the laws of time and space. The images alternate between past and present, between geographies creating crosscultural and transhistorical dialogues. It is a universe that spotlights the power of words and images in shaping our own personal and subjective understanding of the world around us. The photographs are placed into deep boxes stacked made of metal or Okoume wood, which is native to Gabon, creating deliberate sculptural juxtapositions. As a child of the independence, Owanto reconstructs her heritage as both an African and European woman. A good example of the idea of collage developed by Owanto is the work entitled Indépendance Cha Cha, refers to the popular song by Joseph Kabasele, an ode to (re) conquered freedom. In this work, two rows of boys and girls, who belong to different eras, come together in an invented temporality, a simultaneity of two traditions that coexist inside her. This image represents her ability to observe the ghosts of her history: She is the young girl dancing, the boy who observes her like a stranger, the one who transforms these absences and presences into a luminous image, and the child on the right who looks at her, and at us, suspiciously.
Indépendance CHA-CHA, 2016
In Living Memoriam: Of Memory and Identity — Azu Nwagbogu, October 2017 When we are asked to think about our past or earliest defining moments, we often do so by describing how we felt and sometimes point to the senses that are not necessarily visual. Memories can be triggered by music, sound, smell or taste. They point to things that formulate meaning, things that guide us. They are emotional junctures where new meaning was formed, for example, as we performed at that one concert, as we sat in that particular church service, as we played in the school assembly grounds, or the euphoria that came from a specific celebration. We uphold these defining moments in our hearts as sacred. Dance with Me by Owanto is a percolation of several sensibilities of memory and identity that have shaped the artist. They are drawn out as collages and displayed as an assemblage of lightboxes, signs and text. In Dance with Me she appropriates pictures from her family album as well as images collected from her travels around the world. Owanto takes advantage of digital postproduction processes to make a montage. The resulting pictures are printed and shown in wooden or metal boxes fixed with light which illuminates the images from within. As a young adult, Owanto was shaped by the optimistic vision of her parents towards the euphoria of the new Independent Gabonese nation. Her multiple heritage gave her multiple ways of seeing, which she carries through her work. Her complex histories are narrated genealogically and materialized through objects, highlighting various subject matters, events, attitudes, political movements, paradigms and recollections. There is a narrated flow, but
it is not a chronological one. Rather, like the second law of thermodynamics it is a transfer of energies that flow from a cooler locale to a hotter one. In other words, when Owanto’s memories hibernate within her, they perhaps remain dormant. However, when she wills for them to manifest into sculptural installations, others can feel the endearment emanating from the warm memories. Owanto’s mother, whose presence and image are very immanent fixtures within her work, assumes the role of energy and heat source in this very personal body of work that reimagines, invents, narrates and inspires. Dance with Me is also a Pan-African gesture, one that embraces African nationalism and Negritude as ideological foundations to formulate a new identity. A pluralistic African identity that absorbs and accepts the natural thermodynamics of heat flow. It takes our utopia from cooler to hotter as we become engaged with impassioned newly emergent postcolonial hybridity. Africa is currently experiencing a cultural shift from the dominant Euro-centrist ideals to the multicultural turn similar to that experienced in that last two decades of the 20th century. Be it linguistic, cultural, racial or religious hybridity, this shift has further opened up the field of cultural politics. Hybridity can be seen as a potent political tool, and this reflects in Owanto’s multidisciplinary approach to her practice. Owanto’s work shows the collision of multiple times (heterochromia) and multiple spaces (heterotopia) in material and visual aesthetics. These have become
essential to artists who inhabit liminal, in-between, intermediary spaces. By inhabiting the liminal space there is a certain liberty that allows one to draw from the known to the unknown, place and no-place, the nostalgic to the yet-to-be-invented. A definitive energy transfer. It opens up the contradictions inhered by the potentiality to be or not to be. Like the popular mantra of Ghana’s first president Dr. Kwame Nkrumah in the context of the direction of the nonaligned movement regarding Cold War politics, “We face neither East nor West; we face forward.” Indeed, we seek our own destiny and our own history. Owanto seeks to create her own tune and invites the rest of the world to dance to this new rhythm. In this hybrid, there are no binaries, it posits forward. But where is forward? Forward could be towards the East, the West, the South, or the North. Or again, it could be up, down or to the side. There are always blind spots dependent on perspective or position, for we cannot measure displacement and position at the same time. We stay fluid, we keep it moving. We dance. In art as in life we are faced with stark realities that question, realities that critique, realities that adapt, and realities that contextualize paradoxes that are prevalent in our everyday. In this vein the documentary, tableau and archival form as well as the materiality of affective objects, and sometimes surfaces of images, text, and doodles dance on the same plane. Ideas of time, history, geography, nationhood, statehood, and borders, have impregnated the already complex systems of [re]presentation. One finds good commentary on the above subject doted
sometimes overtly and other times very subtly within Owanto’s artistic oeuvre, particularly in this project Dance with Me. The iconographic references reveal a sense of nostalgia, due to the remixing of historic documents and family archives to create new pictures shattering any sense of the perspectival truth of straight photographic images. There is free play of signs, linearity succumbs to plurality and different topias collapse into one surface like the mythological Parrhasius veil. In these works, the centre is often displaced by seemingly deliberate compositional strategy. Everything seems planted in an almost matured state as if to evoke a prochronic time, but quickly contrasted by images of movement, religious procession, airplanes in flight, text inviting “us” to “come through for real” –a warm gesture that compels one to also move–. Sometimes, the pictures become objects that sit on top of one another on the bare floor. Through the lightboxes the pictures become objects in our world, sharing the same floor with spectators. The iconography doesn’t only sit in the lofty realm of contemplation but partakes in the politics of the ground. Through carefully crafted fictive narratives with archival images Dance with Me invites constructive cross-cultural and trans-historical dialogue. Dance with Me is the art that the parochial world needs today. Perhaps all we need to do is get closer and dance to a newer fresher tune as current global disequilibrium needs urgent reversal.
Come Through for Real, 2017
Meeting Point, 2016
Arrivée Depart, 2016
I am watching you, 2016
C’est en croyant, 2016
She is a Star, 2017
Whatever (Girl with a cookie), 2017
Installation view
AZU NWAGBOGU Azu Nwagbogu is the Director of the African Artists’ Foundation (AAF), a non-profit organization based in Lagos, Nigeria that he founded in 2007. Nwagbogu is also the Director of LagosPhoto, an annual international festival of art and photography that he founded in 2010. Additionally, Nwagbogu is the Director and Editor-inChief of Art Base Africa, an online journal that focuses on contemporary art from Africa and Diaspora. He is a collector and advises other private collectors. Nwagbogu has curated numerous exhibitions internationally, including Dey Your Lane! Lagos Variations at BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts (Brussels, Belgium) in 2016, co-curated with Ruth Simbao Tomorrows/Today at the Cape Town Art Fair (Cape Town, South Africa) in 2016, and Tear My Bra at Rencontres d’Arles (Arles, France), 2016. He is Curatorat-Large for photography at the Zeitz MOCAA Museum in Cape Town. Nwagbogu has contributed texts to several publications, including the Martin Roemers: Metropolis, Berlin, Germany, Hatje Cantz, 2015, Hääbré, The Last Generation by Joana Choumali and Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design, Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany, 2015. Nwagbogu is a Juror for Contemporary African Photography Award CAP (Berlin, Germany), and has served as a juror for the World press Photo, Prisma photography award (2015) and Greenpeace Photo Award (2016) and several other art and photography related prizes. Nwagbogu lives and works in Lagos, Nigeria.
OWANTO · DANCE WITH ME 24 NOV 17 - 15 DEC 17 African Artists’ Foundation
EXHIBITION CURATED BY
Azu Nwagbogu
CREATIVE ASSISTANTS
Kadara Enyeasi and Princess Ayoola DEVELOPMENT MANAGER
Nguveren Ahua
GALLERY MANAGER
Olayinka Sangotoye GRAPHIC DESIGN Owanto Studio
All images © OWANTO COVER IMAGE Meeting Point I, 2016 owanto.com | africanartists.org