HOUSE OF REASONED TRUTHS /
HOUSE OF REASONED TRUTHS /
RECENT VIDEO ART FROM AFRICA
Curator: Kisito Assangni
Technological advancement and interculturalism have transformed contemporary African art, introducing a broad range of new forms of expression along with new perspectives on culture and society to Africa's thriving art scene.
With particular attention to contemporary video art, House of Reasoned Truths taps into the vitality of this recent work, capturing its aesthetics and broad range of formal strategies, while focusing specifically on its capacity to address the challenges of modern life in an era of globalization.
The artists in this show come from across the continent. They work reflexively, using the conventions on their respective social worlds to meditate on them and their contradictions. They speak to questions of community, social cohesion, feminism, diasporic subjectivity, geopolitics, environmental forces, performativity, and power – provoking reflection on Africa and the world today, beyond historically reductive classifications.
The programme will be introduced by its curator Kisito Assangni.
Gold Leaf
Halida Boughriet, Algeria, 2022, digital format, colour, 6' 41'', ap, svp
The colony, the empire, the archive, the vast collections of photographs of the disempowered, on the web, searchable and up for purchase. Has much changed since they were taken? The rhythm of the voice questions and seduces, the flame, briefly revealing a brutal history, connects us to the sticky web of primitivism that saturates Western culture, without ever touching the image. We are trying to remember and re-member a different history.
Blue Womb
Cesar Schofield Cardoso, Cape Verde, 2023, digital format, colour, 8', bd
Cabo Verde endures a complex relationship with its surrounding ocean, officially fourteen times greater than its land territory. Centuries of slavery, a history of gruelling labour practices on whaling ships, forced migration, to the present scarcity of fish due to foreign industrial overfishing, and climate change deny us access to our oceanic citizenship. As such, how could we re-imagine life with the ocean?
Negotiations II
Anna Binta Diallo, Senegal, 2013, digital format, colour, 6' 06'', bd
How do we reconcile different and sometimes conflicting legacies? Can we long for places we have never known? How do we re-appropriate part of a cultural heritage whose transmission has been interrupted? Combining family archives and video excerpts from the Internet, this video triptych continuously and alternately juxtaposes moving images of her family, Senegal, the country of her birth, and the Canadian Prairies, where she was raised.
Eldorado
Abdoul-Ganiou Dermani, Togo, 2019, digital format, colour, 2' 50'', bd
This video was shot on three continents, Africa, Europe and North America, including three countries, Togo, Italy and USA. The video Eldorado is about the search for opportunities and a better life in another country or continent by crossing the sea.
Quake
Minnette Vári, South Africa, 2017, digital format, B&W, 6' 23'', bd
A reflection on contemporary geopolitics, in particular on the world existing in an apocalyptic mode. Besides the narratives of tumult handed on from ancient mythologies through contemporary popular science fiction to the portrayals and posturings of global news, I wanted to retain the original sense of an apocalypse as a ‘lifting of the veil’ – a discourse of revelation.
The Stone Opera
Haythem Zakaria, Tunisia, 2022, digital format, colour, 15' 47'', ap, svp
How to look at the landscape and how to recount it? The Stone Opera attempts an answer in the continuity of the investigations of Interstices. This plural work is composed at the same time as a musical piece, a visual experiment, and a sound documentary in an attempt to totalize the genres, without, however, claiming to be exhaustive. The work follows a look that discovers, without the desire of conquest, the surroundings of the town of Redeyef, starting from the top of its mountain massifs.
Kisito Assangni is a Togolese-French curator who studied museology at Ecole du Louvre in Paris. Currently living between London, Paris and Togo, his research interests gravitate towards the cultural impact of globalisation, psychogeography, critical education, and archival systems. His discursive public programs and exhibitions have been shown internationally, including the Venice Biennale, ZKM Museum, Karlsruhe; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Centre of Contemporary Art, Glasgow; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Malmo Konsthall, Sweden; Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles; National Centre for Contemporary Arts, Moscow; HANGAR Centre of Contemporary Art, Lisbon among others. He coordinates a vast array of cultural projects.
Halida Boughriet (Algeria) graduated from the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Exchange Program of the SVA New York in cinematography. She explores a broad media range and does make performance a central issue to her artistic expression, through varied elements, references and tools. The omnipresence of human bodies is an essential aspect of her poetical/experimental work. Halida Boughriet has exhibited at several institutions such as the Documenta, Museum of Modern Art of Algiers; Hood Museum, Hanover, USA; Centre Pompidou, MAC/VAL Museum, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Dakar Biennale to name a few.
Cesar Schofield Cardoso (Cape Verde) is a photographer, videographer, and software developer. His work engages with history, memory, politics, and everyday life, aiming to grasp the complex dynamics that characterize the conditions and possibilities of the place where he was born, Cabo Verde, at the heart of the Atlantic Ocean. Cardoso’s work has been showcased in a variety of contexts, including Venice, S.Tomé e Príncipe Biennales; Apexart, New York; Hangar Artistic Research Center, Lisbon; Es Baluard Museu d'Art Contemporani de Palma, Spain; La Base sous-marine, Bordeaux.
Anna Binta Diallo (Senegal) is a multi-disciplinary visual artist who investigates memory and nostalgia to create unexpected narratives surrounding identity. She completed her BFA at the University of Manitoba’s School of Fine Arts (2006) and received her MFA from the Transart Institue in Berlin (2013). Her work has been shown internationally including exhibitions at The McMaster Museum of Art, Ontario; Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei; BOZAR, Brussels; Savvy Contemporary, Berlin; Biennale de l'image, Montreal; Dakar Biennale, etc. Anna Binta Diallo is a Professor at the University of Manitoba's School of Art.
Minnette Vári (South Africa) lives in Johannesburg. Her work conflates self and history, examining how identity arises out of the traumatic past. In her videos and drawings, Vári frequently depicts her own body enduring a disfiguring metamorphosis – she merges with and emerges from nature as well as from the concrete architecture of modern cities. The female “protagonist” of her video works is sometimes archetypal and sometimes spectral, a persona who ingests and is ingested by time. Vári has exhibited her work since the early nineties, participating in such group exhibitions as Banquet, ZKM Karlsruhe; Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art, Museum for African Art, New York; the Venice Biennale (2001 and 2007); the 10th Havana Biennale and The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Hell and Purgatory Revisited by Contemporary African Artists, MKK Frankfurt.
Abdoul-Ganiou Dermani (Togo) was born in Togo and graduated from the College of Arts in Kpalime. His practice encompasses painting, mixed media, video and photography. His work deals with African identities and social issues. Dermani has participated in major exhibitions at Venice, Havana Biennales; Los Angeles Center for Digital Art; Bortolami Gallery, New York; ZKM Museum, Karlsruhe; Pera Museum, Istanbul; CICA Museum, Gimpo, South Korea to name a few.
Haythem Zakaria (Tunisia) attended the Fine Arts School of Tunis. His visual creations, largely imbued with Sufi spirituality, use unconventional visual techniques (glitch, meta-image, cine process) that guide him and involve him in the experimentation with matrix and protocol devices. He is thus led to explore methods aimed at ‘over-producing’ the image through integration, grafting, and superimposition of visual or sound information. His works have been hosted by Fondation Hippocrène, Paris; Centre Wallonie Bruxelles, Paris; Halle 14, Leipzig; Japan Media Arts Festival, Tokyo; Kamel Lazzar Foundation, Tunis; Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg among others.