This world thhat we live in: Meschac Gaba on globalisation, citizenship and value
‘Citoyen du Monde’, now on At the Stevenson GAllery in CApe Town, is the second exhibition in A two-round retrospective on MeschAc GAbA, the prolific Beninese artist whose ruminations on what it means to be a global citizen are exceedingly poignant in the midst of a global pandemic.
Entering the gallery space that houses Citoyen du Monde, one is immediately confronted by the Globalloon. Impressively sized (just about scraping the ceiling of the Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town, and spanning at least a quarter of the room), the immense plastic globe is loud in both its bright veneer and its sonic presence.
The noise of the pump that keeps it round and full of air is reminiscent of primary school birthday parties and the promised fun of a bouncy castle. Its low rumble can be heard from every corner of the gallery.
This is fitting because the world seen by Meschac Gaba, the conceptual artist behind the work featured in this ambitious survey show (and its prequel, Money Money Money), is a playful place.
Gaba’s sense of humour and his remarkable way of looking at – and beyond – the ordinariness of everyday life with a refreshing awe is just the perspective necessary to tackle the monolithic topics that fall under the umbrella of globalisation.
The Globalloon is a case in point. It was “made using the design from an artwork called Citoyen du Monde (Citizen of the World),” explains Marc Barben, director at Stevenson Gallery Cape Town.
In the original work, Gaba took an image of every single national flag in the world and elongated each into a narrow triangle. The triangles all connect on a central point, creating a new flag that is an amalgamation of every nation.
Gaba writes that it is “symbolic of a togetherness that can resolve the difficulties and crises that proliferate across our world. The singularity of each flag is lost in the rhythm of the composition, as is the case with countries in the age of globalisation where the national is absorbed into the international.”
That we are all citizens of the world is no longer a debatable topic. It’s clear in the use of services provided by international corporations such as Uber, in small details such as the ubiquity of English Premier League followers (and associated paraphernalia), and in the very nature of the internet and social media, among countless other things.
“It’s been amazing to see how many people have been queuing to take Instagram pictures of this thing,” says Barben, in reference to the Globalloon. “It, in itself, is snowballing, becoming a spectacle on social media.”
It’s done so in other places, too, displayed first at the 2013 Art Basel fair in Switzerland, and to be shown “in a monastery in the Netherlands later this year”, Barben says. The Globalloon, and its bouncy-castle-hum of togetherness, has gone global.
Fantastic. Alas, and Gaba understands this, things are not as simple as that.
Of course, there are downsides to the realities of globalisation, some of which have become far clearer and arguably more sinister in the light of the current global pandemic (whose very existence is a testament to the interconnected world that we live in).
In a way, there is a strange contradiction in the contemporary moment: we are irreversibly part of the globalised world, yet, under the current constraints of the pandemic, it is harder than ever to travel.
Barben shared the experience of how difficult it was to put the show together, given lockdowns and closed borders that continue to plague the world (pun fully intended).
“For the previous show, we were able to get some incredible work from one of his [Gaba’s] other galleries, In Situ – Fabienne Leclerc, in Paris. This was the luck of getting things out literally hours before France imposed another lockdown.”
Here in South Africa, we are currently red-listed from a wide range of countries, including Vietnam, Israel, the UK, Dubai and various parts of Europe, due to the Covid-19 Beta variant that emerged in late 2020. We are banned from these spaces, and are moving towards a third wave with the hope of vaccinations and government measures to control Covid-19 becoming an embarrassing scandal. Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, such as the US, the number of vaccinated people is rising swiftly, and things are returning to normal.
This brings us to an unavoidable reality: a globalised world does not mean an equal one. As citizens of the world, we are, and have been for centuries, on an unequal footing – the Global North (West) takes centre stage in many aspects (such as in the world economy, cultural hegemony etc.), while the Global South, egregiously, lives in its shadow.
This is very apparent in the art world itself, where, historically, art of the Global North has been celebrated and hailed as superior for centuries. The art history canon is undeniably swayed towards Western artists and their work.
Gaba, who was born and raised in Cotonou, the capital of Benin, but who later went to art school in the Netherlands (and now shares time between the two places), embraces and explores his diasporic, transnational identity.
Barben explains that it was when Gaba left Benin for his education in Europe that he was “made aware of his own ‘Africanness’. And it seems that a number of West African artists have encountered that, when they are confronted with racism and xenophobia.”
Perhaps you have had the experience of travelling abroad and realising that you have an accent. When you’re at home, everybody
The singularity of each flag is lost in the rhyythm of the composition, as is the case with countries in the age of globalisation where the national is absorbed into the international
talks the same way, but when you are somewhere new, an outsider, you become aware of the material signs that mark where you are from, that make you different.
But it’s also this reductive idea of “African” and what it means to be an “African artist” that Gaba unpacks and undermines.
An exhibition plaque on the wall of the Stevenson includes a quote by Simon Njami that sums it up succinctly: “Gaba, while considering himself a citizen of the world and acting as one, refuses to fall into the globalisation trap. At a time when some would have us believe we have entered the era of post-ethnicity, a jarring intellectual absurdity – his work wears its rootedness proudly.”
Gaba himself puts it like this: “There is no originality in my work other than my own. In this sense, I have no artistic nationality. I love Benin, but that doesn’t mean my inspiration ends there.”
Just as our background shapes us, we are all much more than where we are from.
The cold, hard reality, however, is that this universal humanity is very often not recognised by global systems of control.
Human bodies are barred from certain places, depending on the passport that a person may hold.
Nothing says this more poignantly than the piece Memorial for Drowned Refugees (2016), which sits, elegant in its minimalism, in a corner of the Stevenson gallery. Comprising a pile of grey blankets and three lamps, the piece is a funerary object of sorts.
Barben explains that Gaba “suggests that it’s based on what happens in Beninese culture when fishermen drown at sea. There would be these sorts of monuments or memorials left on the beach.” The artwork was made when there was a mass exodus and migration to Europe, “and people dying in the Mediterranean”.
By bringing attention to human beings who drown after travelling great distances, having fled their countries of origin, and whose global citizenry was unfairly ignored, Gaba asks a big question: who has access to this globalised world and who does not? Why do we place more importance on certain people and places? Whose bodies and lives do we value?
Value here is the keyword and plays a central role in Gaba’s thinking. Although Money Money Money explored this theme more explicitly, it’s impossible to escape when talking about globalisation.
To quote Gaba, “Money is the sinews of war; it’s the chief. You see, I don’t like talking about colonisation, but at the same time money can colonise. Maybe that’s why I use money, because I refuse to use the word colonisation. Besides, money travels.”
That it does – not only within the world but also throughout most of Gaba’s works. In many of his pieces, such as Zimbabwe Survival and the Diplomatique series, Gaba makes use of the CFA Franc as a material, moulding it into his installations like any other form of paper. A currency used in Francophone Western Africa, the CFA Franc suffered a radical devaluation in the 1980s, making it totally worthless.
Ironically, this “nothing money”, a currency worth less than the paper it was printed on, became an iconic part of Gaba’s conceptual work, which has catapulted him into fame, at least in the art world sphere.
This point is brought home most effectively in Money Money Money (still available for viewing on Stevenson Gallery’s website) in a piece called Colours of Cotonou,a series of frames made out of the same CFA notes, that encapsulates seemingly arbitrary objects. With some left totally empty, and some framing wallpaper, trousers, or just background colours that Gaba found in Cotonou, it forces viewers to focus on the frames themselves rather than the content within them.
This could be read as a metaphor for a larger frame, the frame of systems of value in the art world. In a typical postmodernist critique, Gaba asks, “What constitutes art?” Why do we value (some of) it so highly? What role does the frame (the gallery, the museum) have in creating this value?
In Zimbabwean Survival, Gaba places a minefield of little birds, crafted by a Zim babwean tradesman who was selling his work on the streets of Kalk Bay, in a section of the Stevenson Gallery. The piece is about Zimbabwean migrants, struggling to make ends meet in South Africa, but it’s also about making art out of everyday things.
According to Barben, Gaba was sourcing material for another piece when they came across the tradesman. “He was just so inspired on the spot that he bought them all and recreated them as art, not craft.”
Gaba pokes fun at the system from within the system itself. His pieces – themselves framed by the museum – ask us to consider why we pay mind to them here and not elsewhere.
In Barben’s opinion, “Maybe it wasn’t so much critiquing the kind of game at play, but asking questions and prompting reflection.”
Whether questioning the concept of art itself, systems of value in the world, or what it means to be a global citizen, Gaba’s playful prodding truly brings to light some deeply disturbing power imbalances in the world. The asymmetrical relationship between the Global North and the Global South is brought to the fore.