SWAB GATE
Eva Barois De Caevel. Credits: Étienne Dobenesque
SWAB GATE consists
of solo presentations of African and Caribbean artists, living and working in
Africa and Europe, or between these continents, with a strong focus on
painting.
The participating
galleries for this section of the fair have been selected and invited by
curator Eva Barois De Caevel.
The selected
galleries are located both in Africa and in Europe.
This program aims
first at presenting the work of four great contemporary painters, but it also
hopes to question the history and the actuality of categories such as the one
we use here — painting as a
medium and the geographical origin.
Participating Galleries:
-Steve Bandoma
Born in 1981 in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo.
Lives and works in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo.
Gallery Angalia,
France
-Hamid El Kanbouhi
Born in 1976 in
Larrache, Morocco.
Lives and works in
Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Gallery Van De Weghe, Belgium
-Sébastien Jean
Born in 1989 in
Thomassin, Haiti.
Lives and works in
Haiti.
Maëlle Gallery, France
-Wycliffe
Mundopa
Born in 1987 in
Rusape, Zimbabwe.
Lives and works in
Harare, Zimbabwe.
First
Floor Gallery Harare, Zimbabwe
The
artists whose work I selected for this program inside SWAB are Congolese,
Zimbabwean, Haitian, and Moroccan. They
are painters or
also painters.
If
one remembers the historical and yet quite recent struggles during which the
African and African-American artists had to negotiate their right to modern
painting, to abstract painting, to conceptual painting, while having to answer
for their (desired or criticized) “traditionalism”, thus one realizes that painting offers a fertile
ground, at least as fertile as other ones, to question assignations,
temptations of essentialism, appetite for exoticism, that any non-Western
artist has to deal with.
This
selection also hopes to produce a dialogue in the space of the fair itself, that
could exist between the works, beyond the booth walls: Steve Bandoma, Wycliffe
Mundopa, Sébastien Jean and
Hamid El Kanbouhi are four artists who paint nightmares, fantasies, bodies on
which we can read sufferings, haunted still lives.
They
work on paper or canvas, with gouache, acrylic, pastel, oil, ink; they are — maybe — expressionists.
Kura Shomali, whose work I admire a lot, says: “Art is a straight jacket and I do not know
how to wear it; an inner fear of not being able to meet the collective fears.
Only art can soothe.”
I found interesting to
bring together two categories — and their fundamental impotence as categories:
one related to a medium, the other to a geographical area.
I was happy to believe
that this “African painting” conveys above all a Humanism, here, in Europe,
where people collect it and give it prizes. A Humanism according to Edward
Saïd, “a coming Humanism”, and not
its substitute from the Enlightenment — the will to understand the others that,
as long as it is fiercely authentic, excludes any domineering ambition.
Text by Eva Barois De Caevel
Hamid El Kanbouhi - Strand - Oil on canvas 2011. 200x200cm
About the curator:
Eva Barois De Caevel was born in France in 1989. She
is assistant curator at RAW Material Company, Dakar, and works as an independent
curator, researcher and art critic. She is based in Paris. She was the
recipient of the ICI 2014 Independent Vision Curatorial Award.
Eva graduated from the Université de Paris-Sorbonne
Paris IV in Contemporary Art History in 2011 and in Curatorial Training in
2012. Her research focused primarily on moving images. Her main interests were
the evolution of experimental cinema, the history of production structures and
the artistic entities behind them, and the question of the porousness of borders
between cinematographic genres. During her first year of Master’s, she worked
on a cultural study of the interactions between contemporary creative arts and
cinema. During the second year, she wrote a critical history of structures
dedicated to the production and promotion of artists’ films, while she was
working for the production structure Red Shoes | SOME SHOES. She took part in
the film shoots of Clément Cogitore and Neïl Beloufa. More recently, she worked
with photographer and videographer Mohamed Bourouissa.
Jointly to this research, she has been working on
postcolonial questions and socially engaged practices in contemporary art, and
on their interaction: how socially engaged practices in contemporary art can
become think tanks on postcolonial issues concurrently with academic research.
This led her to travel to Morocco, Madagascar, and Senegal, and to study
contemporary art exhibition structures in Africa and the modes of collaboration
and relation between Western structures and African ones and more specifically
the way otherness is dealt with and the issue of mimicry. Through these
experiences, she started considering the necessity of specific curatorial
presentations that challenge the Western patterns on which the design and
making of exhibitions are globally based. Within this context, she completed a
curatorial residency at RAW Material Company – centre for art, knowledge and
society, Dakar, which consisted of coordinating a long year program (January
2014 to January 2015) on sexual liberties in Africa through contemporary
African art. She curated the first event of the program: Who Said It Was
Simple, a curatorial proposal based on archives. The exhibition included
screenings, debates, a performance, and a seminar. She is currently working on
an upcoming publication documenting the program. At the end of this residency,
she was offered a position as Assistant Curator at RAW Material Company. She
also continued her collaboration with its director Koyo Kouoh, working with her
on several projects, such as Body Talk - Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in
the Work of Six African Women Artists (at WIELS, Brussels, February-May
2015, currently at Lunds konsthall, June-September 2015, and to be held at Frac
Lorraine, Metz, October-January 2015), Streamlines, a project which
makes the oceans the metaphorical focal point for an international group
exhibition which will examine the cultural repercussion of the global stream of
goods and trade between the South and the North (to be held at Deichtorhallen,
Hamburg, in December 2015), and the 37th EVA International, Ireland
Biennial of Contemporary Art (April-July 2015).
Eva was part of the first TURN Meeting “On
Perspectives, Facts and Fictions” (June 26-28, 2014, Berlin), a project of
Kulturstifung Des Bundes, Germany. The TURN fund was established in 2012 with
the purpose of promoting artistic exchange and cooperation between German and
African artists and institutions. During the meeting she hosted a talk with
writer and curator Simon Njami about appropriation and rewriting of History
according to postcolonial issues. Eva contributes to the online reviews Contemporary And (“Platform For
International Art From African Perspectives”) and AFRIKADAA (“Afro Design and Contemporary Arts”). She was a member
of the jury of the 60th Salon de Montrouge in June 2015 and is a
member of the jury of the upcoming 7th Celeste Prize. As an art
critic she recently wrote an essay about the artist Thu Van Tran. Her upcoming
projects will focus on ways to display colonial legacies and contemporary
imperialisms in vernacular and daily elements (sexuality, language, body image,
garments, food, etc.) through art forms and specific curatorial tools.
Eva is also co-founder of Cartel de Kunst, an
international collective of 10 curators based in Paris. Cartel de Kunst is an
association created in 2011 whose members are Kuralaï Abdukhalikova
(Kazakhstan), Viviana Birolli (Italy), Adélaïde Blanc (France, Mauritius),
Manon Gingold (France), Éric Jarrot (France), Salma Lahlou (Morocco), Ana
Mendoza Aldana (Guatemala), Alexandra Perloff-Giles (United Kingdom, USA),
Gloria Sensi (Italy), Jaufré Simonot (France). Cartel de Kunst is a solidarity
network of emerging curators, a tool for support and dialogue aiming to think
about the very function of the curator and the opportunity to work as a group.
Cartel de Kunst is deeply committed in working with independent places such as
Mains d’Œuvres and La Générale en Manufacture, both located in the Parisian
suburb and involved in developing communal modes of operation and community
outreach. Cartel de Kunst works in close touch with the Parisian emerging scene
and very young artists. It pursues since its beginnings a close collaboration
with the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris. Ana Mendoza Aldana
was selected among 500 international applicants to be part of the 21 young
curators (or curators group) invited to curate an exhibition during the
“Nouvelles Vagues” season at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in 2013. She invited
Cartel de Kunst to present The Floating Admiral, an exhibition working
as an exquisite corpse inspired by The Detection Club methods (a group of
British mystery writers formed in 1930). The exhibition and the catalogue,
written communally, retrace the death of painting. Each curator, through one
section of the exhibition and an essay, takes up the investigation where it was
left off by his or her predecessor to offer a depiction of contemporary
painting.