Showing posts with label Photography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Photography. Show all posts
Monday, February 3, 2025
Tuesday, June 21, 2016
NEW YORK: Xaviera Simmons
CODED
June 22 - July 29, 2016
THE KITCHEN
512 West 19th Street
New York, NY
From thekitchen.org:
The Kitchen is pleased to present CODED, an exhibition of works by Xaviera Simmons featuring new and recent photographic, audio, video, text-based sculptural work and ultimately a movement-based performance. Her dynamic, interdisciplinary approach to art-making is rooted in an ongoing investigation of experience, memory, and present and future histories, specifically focusing on shifting notions surrounding landscape and character, as well as conversations between formal processes.
With CODED, Simmons continues to mine art historical sources, Internet media, and archival images, in this case as they relate to queer history, homoerotic imagery as well as Jamaican dancehall culture, to construct a new, cohesive conceptual territory. Simmons’ particular vocabulary of movement, reference, sense, text, breath, sound, and image offers ways of looking at mapping, sexuality, gender, pleasure, and sensuality in a queer context and in an island context. The exhibition is the foundation for a unique choreographic score for the forthcoming performance work. Through the sensual, through movement, her works push towards a committed practice of visual freedom.
Saturday, April 16, 2016
TRANSITION: Malick Sidibé (1936 - 2016)
Malick Sidibé, Photographer Known for Social Reportage in Mali, Dies at 80
Text | William Grimes for NYTimes.com
Published | April 15, 2016
Malick Sidibé, whose black-and-white photographs of young partygoers captured the exuberance of newly independent Mali in the 1960s and ’70s and made him one of Africa’s most celebrated artists after his work was shown abroad in the 1990s, died on Thursday in Bamako, Mali. He was 80.
His son Karim Sidibé said the cause was complications of diabetes, The Associated Press reported.
Read full article here
Thursday, April 14, 2016
CHICAGO: Zohra Opoku
Draped Encounters/Beyond Visage
April 14 - May 14, 2016
Curated by Erin Gilbert
KRUGER GALLERY CHICAGO
3709 North Southport Avenue
Chicago, IL
From krugergallerychicago.com:
Kruger Gallery Chicago presents Draped Encounters/ Beyond Visage, the first US solo exhibition of works by Ghanaian-German artist Zohra Opoku. Opoku is a photographer, filmmaker and installation artist whose work is informed by fashion, nature, Ghana and psychic energy.
Draped Encounters/Beyond Visage presents two recent bodies of work shot between 2012 and 2015. Opoku is a former fashion designer, who employs textiles and the language of fashion to explore issues of identity and representation. In carefully choreographed moments of tropical gardens and urban ruins, Opoku interrogates the relationship of textiles to natural and built environments. In her photographs, films and installations, Opoku uses second hand textiles, imported from Europe and the US to Ghana, to thread an African feminist handwriting in the work. Staged in Accra, Ghana, these images document the travels of a woman of African descent who performatively traced the transatlantic.
The first body of work, entitled Handwash Only, began in 2008 and was originally conceived of as a research series. Named for the washing instructions on clothing tags, this series addresses the daily hassle of washing by hand in Africa. These images capture clothes hung by the owner and rearranged in a gust of wind. These natural compositions offer a glimpse from the public sphere to the private sphere, mythologizing the owners, seen only through their laundry-hanging rituals. These clothes represent a shared experience. Opoku observed that the African wax print, which she associates with a classical Ghanaian dress code, is seldom seen on traditional clotheslines. To create the illusion of Ghanaian identity, Opoku includes the rarely found African print wax in her clothesline compositions.
The second body of work is a set of film stills from Textures in Motion which bears witness to the engagement between the body, textile and environment. In the video Ms. Opoku uses artists as models, then drapes and disguises them to mimic a distinctly west African mystical practice of masquerade. Rather than the physical identity it is the psychic energy, the movement of the artist, which renders them visible in these draped encounters.
According to Okopu, “The entity or force of a spirit: In the African world the Western differentiation between consciousness and unconsciousness does not exist. Africans invented different names for the soul, which can be located outside a body. It is called “sassa” by the Ashantis. In my disguise practices I capture what we can’t see with our physical eye — the dynamic spirit “sassa.” (Ours Lagos Photo 2015 Festival Interviews).
Zohra Opoku (b.1976) is a German born, Accra-based versatile artist whose work employs media including installations, photography and video to explore the sophistication of textile cultures in disparate spaces targeting fashion’s political and psychological role and socio-cultural dynamics in relation to African history and individualistic or societal identities. Opoku received an MFA from the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg.
Opoku has been included in exhibitions nationally and internationally. In 2015 alone she was featured Material Effects at the Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, Michigan; Future Africa: Visions in Time in Denmark; Making Africa at the Guggenheim Bilbao; and Making Africa at the Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Switzerland. Her work has been exhibited in galleries in London; Berlin; Accra, Ghana; and Capetown, South Africa. Her work will be featured in a solo presentation at 1:54 Art Fair in New York, May 6-8, 2016 by Mariane Ibrahim Gallery.
Monday, February 8, 2016
FADED: Zun Lee's Polaroids explore fatherhood and his own dad's absence
Text | Brad Wheeler for The Globe and Mail
Published | Friday, February 5, 2016
His father isn’t in the picture. At the Gladstone Hotel, the photographer and documentarian Zun Lee stands among the sea of mounted Polaroids that comprise Fade Resistance, an exhibition of snapshots portraying African-American families in the 1970s, 1980s and later. Occupying the rooms and common spaces of the second floor, the collection represents a curatorial project of Mr. Lee and Kenneth Montague that involves vernacular photography and an attempt to present an alternative to the dysfunctional-black-family stereotype.
Polaroid photography represents a peculiar piece of pop-art history, come-and-go technology and scrapbook nostalgia. Popularized in an era when photo development entailed considerable rigmarole, the processing of Polaroids happened in presto fashion, right in one’s hands.
On the surface, the rich assemblage of pictures is unremarkable. But, like the magic of the process itself, in speaking to Mr. Lee, a fuller picture develops gradually. Although the shots represent the significant events and everyday life situations of others, Mr. Lee’s own story is part of the narrative – a narrative that involves an alienated son, interracial bonding and a well-hidden family secret.
“This is my truth,” Mr. Lee says. “I’m not trying to create the antithesis of anything. It’s my version of what I saw and lived.”
Growing up in Frankfurt, Germany, young Zun Lee was looked after by the African-American families of U.S. soldiers stationed on a military base near his own home.
“I was a latch-key kid,” explains Mr. Lee, 46, whose South Korean parents were busy working. “Most of the German kids didn’t want to play with me, so I gravitated to the black families of military personnel. There was a lot of parenting and love and kinship happening with them that I wasn’t getting from my own parents.”
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