When warriors were women
Nandipha Mntambo’s Agoodjie is a thrilling celebration of the elite female warriors of Dahomey that restores an important insight into a proud and decolonised African history
Much has been made of the need to decolonise art, but what it entails is broad and elusive. It can mean the repatriation of artworks looted or stolen from African societies. Or it can refer to a more cerebral approach: how contemporary art from Africa addresses colonialism’s continued oppression and subjugation still shapes the ways artists see and experience the supposedly post-colonial world. Here, contemporary African art — particularly in the politically charged Black Lives Matter environment — plays an important role in visualising black experience and culture in ways not beholden to white or Western modes of knowledge and power.
And if you need an exhibition that demonstrates — in breathtaking beauty — how art performs this decolonising process and exists in its own right as an aesthetically important and compelling narrative, then a viewing of Nandipha Mntambo’s Agoodjie at Everard Read Johannesburg is compulsory.
The artist has consistently dealt with themes of metamorphosis, life and death in her work, and has frequently alluded to classical Western culture and art history to subvert its visual tropes. She has taken the role of Ophelia, of the Minotaur, of the bullfighter; supplanting these key figures in Western art and myth with her own black, female body acting as a radical visual gesture to displace and disturb the power structures and histories these classical narratives build on.
As she puts it: “Through the act of recreating the attire worn by the Agoodjie, engaging with modern day historians and custodians of this history, my intention was to excavate a portion of the past. By occupying their spaces and embodying these women, I created a fiction based on a complex history. Like the zebra that has its own distinct patterning but can merge and camouflage into the rest of the herd ... I transform and reincarnate — becoming a symbol of living many lives.”
The Agoodjie were visually referenced in Marvel’s Black Panther blockbuster, but Mntambo’s incisive and visually stunning exhibition goes much further, uncovering and restoring an important insight into a proud and decolonised African history.
Nandipha Mntambo
‘Agoodjie’
Everard Read Johannesburg until November 6