The‘Invisible artists’of Africa
cigarette dangles nonchalantly from her lips.
Several artists, such as 22-year-old, Paris-born Walid Layadi-Marfouk, who grew up between the French capital and Marrakesh, but now lives in New York, explicitly challenge negative stereotypes about life in Africa. Shot in Marrakesh, his series Riad, featuring intimate yet theatrical tableaux set inside a traditional family riad, was inspired by memories of his own childhood - as well as frustration about the representation of Muslim culture in Western media, which, he says, seldom reflected his own memories and sense of identity.
“I was only seeing black-andwhite images representing pain, submission, extremism,” he tells me. “Usually, they were set in the desert. You would never see a woman’s face. I wanted to attack all that.”
You still hear the same old narrative: that Africa is poor, its people are starving and unhappy, everyone wants to go abroad to live in Europe - Joana Choumali
The 43-year-old Ivorian artist Joana Choumali, who, at MACAAL, is showing two beautiful portraits from her series Hââbré, focusing on migrants from Nigeria and Burkina Faso with scarified faces in her hometown of Abidjan, is also conscious of lingering prejudices concerning Africa.
“You still hear the same old narrative: that Africa is poor, its people are starving and unhappy, everyone wants to go abroad to live in Europe,” she says, while sipping sweet mint tea. “This is part of the story, but it isn’t the whole story.” She smiles. “Me, for example: I am happy to live in Africa. I want to stay in Abidjan.” Untold stories Choumali, who studied art in Casablanca, regrets the fact that indigenous African culture was rarely celebrated when she was young: “We were fed by other cultures, and the local culture was not promoted enough,” she says. “But the world is opening to other cultures, and Africa is so rich: there are so many unexplored stories.” She pauses. “Now is the time for African artists to tell them.”
How does she feel, though, about being labelled an “African” artist? Given the size of the continent, isn’t the notion inherently absurd? “That’s a tricky question,” she replies, “because I am proud to be African. I’ve lived all my life in Ivory Coast, so my identity is Ivorian. But if you ask me, ‘Are you an African artist?’, I would say, I am an artist who lives in Africa, who happens to be African.”
“Of course, being categorised as ‘African’ isn’t very interesting for artists,” says Touria El Glaoui, founding director of the 1-54 art fair. “But I think they also recognise the usefulness of the label in getting the visibility they deserve.”
El Glaoui says that her primary motive for initiating 1-54 was “to give visibility to African artists and artists from the diaspora”. While a lot has changed since she founded the fair almost a decade ago when, El Glaoui says, “African artists were simply not present in the international art scene” - there is still a long way to go.
Even today, when she mounts the fair in London and New York, she encounters surprise: “People discovering the fair for the first time often go, ‘Oh, my God, I had no idea there was contemporary art in Africa.’ Perhaps they still have preconceived ideas of civil war. But it’s a booming economy now, with so much development.” She smiles. “If people with a negative view of Africa could experience what I experience when travelling on the continent, they would be amazed.”