Goodman Gallery hosts group exhibition curated by African art luminary

The title, borrowed from Nigerian writer Eloghosa Osunde’s essay “& Other Stories,” is A Different Now is Close Enough to Exhale on You,  guest-curated by Yaounde-born, Berlin-based curator and writer Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung. He is a contemporary African art luminary whose CV includes being a biotechnologist and curatorial work on major fairs and festivals such as Documenta, Dak’Art and the Bamako Encounters photography show in 2022. He’s also a bit of a “sapeur”.

The exhibition’s conceptual framework hangs on an extended analysis of the lyrical content of Cameroonian singer-songwriter and political activist Lapiro de Mbanga’s anthem No Make Erreur (1986). As with the subject matter of the lyrics, the otherwise quite disparate works in all three venues focus on “an exploration of the systems and relationships that comprise the history of power, extraction and exploitation”, obviously but not exclusively centred on the African experience post-colonialism and post-independence. The artistic responses to this history are not always direct or obviously politically charged.

The selection of works is by about 20 artists from across multiple regions in Africa and the diaspora. There is a broad and interesting range of intellectual and aesthetic responses to the largely dehumanising histories of African countries in the contemporary era, with its focus on military dictatorships, economies of exploitation and extraction, and multiple genocides.

In this regard the show is instructive to read alongside the major survey retrospective currently showing at the Zeitz MOCAA museum in Cape Town, When we see us: A Century of Black figuration in painting. That exhibition’s focus is on the neglected history of black figurative painting as a corrective to narratives of trauma and displacement, instead focusing on domesticity and the everyday. In contrast, Ndikung’s show brings a range of subtle and contrarian sociopolitical responses to the same oppressive cultural history, with hardly any painting on exhibition.

“I wanted to bring together artists whose works I have deeply admired, especially because their works are framed between the polarities of poeticality and politicality. What they all have in common is an ability to approach some of the most sensitive sociopolitical issues with prudence, profundity and in solidarity, while still possessing a strong aesthetic bearing ….[The title] symbolises something of a trust that in these times of dread, artists and culture at large play an important role in crafting our worlds,” says Ndikung.

Many of the works engage with climate change and the history of excavation and resource extraction — including, memorably, the work by Nigerian/UK artist Leo Asemota, which is a sculptural block of earth measuring the symbolic dimensions of a grave and installed in the gallery. The space vacated by it he filled with proteas in a companion piece in the gallery grounds. Other works, such as the photographic series by Nigerian Abraham Oghobase, Metallurgical Practice, and the bewitching and incisive manipulated photographic and painted African landscapes by German artist Dior Thiam, focus on contested spatial histories and narratives of conquest and oppression. Evident in Thiam’s work especially, the idea of a “terra nullius”, an empty landscape waiting to be filled by colonial settlement, looms large in SA’s own art history.

The Cape Town leg of the exhibition features a rather more abstracted and in some ways more traditional view of this confrontational postcolonial thematic, with the exceptions of an intriguing installation by Keli Maksud, entitled Provisional notes on freedom (2021), and a text-based panel of prints, Sex work is honest work (2022) by well known curator, writer and artist Olu Oguibe.

A key part of the exhibition is the idea put forward by Mbanga’s 80s pop song. Crucially it is performed in pidgin, one of the most important postcolonial responses to the control over language exerted by colonial powers. Ndikung makes this an allegory for the work on the show. Its subtle range of responses not only to colonial history in Africa, but in the multivalency of the present moment, is a testament to the nuanced and resonant forms of African contemporary art.

Across three venues: Umhlabathi Collective, Market Photo Workshop, Johannesburg; Goodman Gallery Johannesburg; Goodman Gallery Cape Town through to January 16.

Featured artists: Theresah Ankomah; Leo Asemota; Karimah Ashadu; Rehema Chachage; Ange Dakouo; Adama Delphine; Fawundu; Tanka Fonta; Eric Gyamfi; Paul Maheke; Keli Safia Maksud; Georgina Maxim; Danielle McKinney; Sabelo Mlangeni; Abraham Oghobase; Olu Oguibe; Farkhondeh Shahroudi; Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum; Dior Thiam; Rubem Valentim; Sunette L Viljoen.