Decolonising Global Art: 4 Global Collage artists

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Decolonising Contemporary Art?

Four Global Artists and Collage+

Helen M. Hintjens

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Maurice Mbikayi, Collage and painting Wangechi Mutu, Collage

Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo – collage Steve Bandoma, collaged images

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KABK Final Scriptie, May 2014

Helen Margriet Hintjens ([email protected])

Fine Art part-time year 4 (Beeldende Kunst Deeltijd jaar 4)

KABK, Den Haag (Royal Academy of Fine Art, The Hague)

Table of contents

Part I: Opening Up

I-1. Introduction 6

I-2. The Global Art Market 8

I-3. Collage+: What it Signifies 12

I-4. Globalisation as In-between-ness 14

I-5. Introducing Four Global Artists 18

I-6. Six Issues for Four Artists 26

I-7 Two stories: ghosts of times past 30

Part II: Asking the Artists to Fill in the Blanks 31

II-1: A Brief Introduction 31

II-2 Six Little Questions 31

Wangechi Mutu

Steve Bondoma

Maurice Mbikayi

Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo

II-3 What Now? 39

Part III Towards a Logic of Decolonisation? 42

III-1 Nothing lies outside the market 42

III-2 The Mysterious Forrest 43

III-3 Collage+ From Representation to Resistance 45

III-4 Endthoughts 52

References 53

Appendices 1 & 2 55

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to the KABK teachers, Christie, Janice, Onno, Frans, Willem, Pim, Andre and others. Winnie deserves special thanks for introducing me to Tatjana

Macic, whose sound advice saved me from falling into a labelling trap. Thanks to Faustin Chongombe and Felix Kaputu for their encouragement. At ISS,

thanks to Friedl, Katherine, Karin Astrid, Dubravka, Rachel, Veronika, Jan and Shirley. Fellow students, Monika and Sara, in the hope you’ll both complete in

2015. To all other fellow Fine Art part-time students, thanks, you inspired me to complete. And love to my Mum, Amy and Ben, who would not let me quit,

and Katya who make it possible for me to continue.

It is not that I deliberately want to confuse anyone; that is how I experience things", Marlene Dumas.

Home is where the Heart is The Heart is at Home where it is

My fatherland is South Africa My father is Flemish

my mothertongue is Afrikaans My mother is Scottish

my surname is French; My mother tongues were English, Kiswahili and Flemish

I do not speak French. And I especially like French

My mother always wanted me to go to Paris Which I speak with Congolese friends but less often with Rwandans

she thought Art was French, People say I sound Flemish but I have only ever visited Belgium

because of Picasso. I am obsessed by all the wrong artists

I thought Art was American, Hundertwasser’s House, and not Beuys’ work

because of ArtForum. Calm Leonardo, not tortured Goya or Caravaggio

I thought Mondriaan was American too, Mondriaan bores me rigid;

and that Belgium was a part of Holland, Marlene Dumas is more my cup of tea

I live in Amsterdam I live in the Hague and in Swansea, Wales

and have a Dutch passport. and have a British Passport.

Sometimes I think I'm not a real artist, Sometimes it seems to me I have been trying to be an artist all my life,

because I'm too half-hearted; because I am all over the place. I like Luc Tuyman's idea

and I never quite know where I am. that art these days can only ever be an 'authentic forgery'.

Marlene Dumas Helen Hintjens (in the style of Marlene Dumas)

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Part I: Opening Up

In the zest of telling, I thus find myself translating myself by quoting all others (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1994: 23).

I-1. Introduction

This study is a series of stories, a collage of stories if you like,

about what decolonisation means in contemporary art. What does

‘post-colonial’ art look like? I draw on a mix of art theory and

social science, and insight from four selected contemporary

artists, whose images appear on the first page of images in this

study. The whole study circles around these four contemporary

artists, all of whom combine techniques, in which I term

Collage+. Collage, as both method and metaphor, plays an

important role in the artwork of all four artists. Their stories, and

the question of whether contemporary art is being decolonised,

or is not, form the basis for this study.

Artists and art production both echoes the world of nations,

continents and empires, and challenges these constructions. The

production, selling, buying and making of contemporary art are

all mediated through markets, themselves informed by attitudes,

including colonial ones. Art on its own cannot produce meaning.

Yet it continues to appeal because as human beings we hanker

after the truth. In terms of decolonising art, there are signs that

all is not well. The Netherlands has its own annually recurring

controversy over Zwarte Piet, which has become the subject of

contemporary art by Quincy Gario. Along with other

contemporary artists, Gario is seeking a ‘decolonisation’ of

attitudes through challenging Zwarte Piet (Black Pieter)

traditions. These traditions date from the late nineteenth century,

an era when racism was the norm. This apparently innocent

“children’s story”, Gario sees as profoundly colonial, since it

posits that black people can be quite happy being servants to

white people. As well as a tool to influence and colonise the

minds of children, both white and black, the custom helps justify

a set of Dutch realities, where children who are not white have

fewer chances of getting a decent education, and following that

with a university education and that enables them to do well in

their career. Just as so-called ‘allochtoon’ are rendered

permanent outsiders to Dutchness, so too pretty much all of

Europe is now exclusionary in this way.

The controversy over Zwarte Piet shows how powerful stories

can be in informing contemporary art. Gario’s work aims to

decolonise mentalities and practices that are firmly rooted in

tales from the colonial past. Similarly, Dr. Kwame Amoah Labi

concludes from his study of art education in Ghana, that many of

the assumptions of the colonial era remain alive a well in

contemporary education. From his perspective, this impedes a

genuine history from being written. As our study hints, colonial

assumptions about Africans’ limited capacities for ‘modern’ art

have not yet disappeared.1

Stories can be influential. Like elderly relatives or teachers

whom we fail to understand at the time, years later we may

1 See his essay Afro-Ghanaian influences in Ghanaian painting,

http://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/labi.pdf [accessed 4 May 2014].

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remember a story, and come to realise its significance. We may

end up following their advice, even if we are unaware what we

are doing. Stories can be like plans. As Matte Jutila puts it: “The

plot of the story informs us about how to go on…[and] (e)ven

though there may be only a limited repertoire of available

representations and stories, there is always room for new

initiatives and change”. 2

Overall, this study aims to better understand the stories of four

contemporary global artists: Wangechi Mutu, Steve Bandoma,

Maurice Mbikayi and Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo (some of

whose early work is illustrated on p. 3). Through listening to

their accounts of their work, we try to answer the question: is the

globalisation of contemporary art the same as its decolonisation?

Does the advent onto the world art scene of more ‘global’

contemporary artists mean greater equality for artists

internationally? Tentatively, I suggest that although the art world

is much more globalised now than ever before, it does not follow

that the art market is now decolonised. Global themes, forms

and markets are not enough. Unfortunately, Western and other

dominant powers’ ability to define what is worth buying and

selling seem not to have been challenged by globalisation.

Recently, for this study, I invented the term ‘Collage+’ to

describe the use of conventional collage techniques alongside

other and varied means of artistic expression, including

performance, projection, film, painting and 3-D work. Collage+

will be explained more fully soon. Through their use of collage

alongside other media, and through their views, I hope to get a

2 Matti Jutila (2006) Desecuritizing Minority Rights: Against Determinism, Security

Dialogue 37 (2): 167-185.

clearer idea of the locations of the four contemporary global

artists in relation to other contemporary art and artists. I explore

themes in their work related to their place, decolonising

relationships, coming home, the human body and history.

Techniques of Collage+ are of interest both for practical and

theoretical reasons. I try to locate these four artists’ work within

contemporary global art movements. As their work becomes

more ‘mainstream’ and acceptable, how will they negotiate their

perceived ‘exoticism’ within the global art market? Does this

market remain predominantly colonial in outlook and tastes? Do

these artists have a sense of belonging? Or a sense of exclusion?

Directly and indirectly I sought to talk with all four artists. I

contacted them by e-mail or on facebook, and Maurice and Steve

replied right away. Vitshois became a ‘facebook’ friend, and I

communicated with Wangechi’s assistant, subscribing to her

facebook feeds. Maurice patiently and fully answered my six

questions about his artistic practices and I am deeply grateful for

this. Besides this, through Linkedin, e-mail, and facebook and

through blogs kept by the artists and others, I researched each of

their biographies. I also thought about what decolonization

means in contemporary art and about post-colonial theory, about

collage and mixed techniques, about colonial history and about

contemporary ‘global’ contemporary art from African artists, and

its place in art market globalization today. I looked at some

other, related artists as well.

So I will inform you, dear reader, of the shared and individual

backgrounds of the four selected artists, as well as their forms of

artwork, and a few of their experiences, hopes and visions. But

first I want to show you briefly round the contours of the art

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market today. I feel the need to look this structure of exchanges

in the face, so we can gain a more grounded understanding of

where our four selected artists are located - and imagine

themselves - in relation to the wider commercial art world.

Where do they see their own work being valued? Who buys

their work? At the end of Part I, once we have considered the

global art market’s contours, and defined Collage+, we introduce

all four artists, and start to find out.

I-2 The Global Art Market

Map 1 shows global contemporary art markets in 2011-2012.3

The picture is dominated by three major centres: Hong Kong,

New York and London. In Hong Kong, contemporary art is

mainly traded through affiliates of international auction houses

like Sotheby’s and Christie’s. China’s art market is now the

largest in the world, outstripping both Europe and the US.

According to the same report, the Chinese market may be as

regionalised as the European and US markets, or even more so.

Up to 90 per cent of contemporary art bought in China is by

Chinese artists. Even so, 10 per cent of the total Chinese market

can mean very lucrative opportunities for some global artists.

Do the four selected artists ever consider working in China; do

they sell their work there? Assumptions about their own superior

value may preclude European artists from humbly entering the

Chinese market to offer their work for sale, and yet the Chinese

market today is: “the most upscale in the world, ahead of the

United States and way ahead of Europe which is today the

3 The map and related information on the global art market is from Art Price (2012)

Contemporary Art Market 2011-2012 (also in French). Report available in full, including

top 500 selling artists: http://imgpublic.artprice.com/pdf/artprice-contemporary-2011-2012-

en.pdf

densest and most affordable art market” (Art Price: The Latest

Trends, p. 12). Logically, our emerging contemporary artists

might look to China for future for sales. In recent years: “…the

performance in the Eastern planisphere once again belittled the

U.S. and European results” (Art Price: The Latest Trends, p. 12).

In 2010-2011, six of the ten top-selling contemporary artists in

the world were Chinese (ibid.: p. 56). Art markets are thus

highly globalised, whilst tastes remain regionally specific.

Alessandro Baricco calls these globalised markets ‘mutated’

markets , and suggests that the impact of search engines like

Google images has transformed how we view contemporary art,

‘barbarising’ it. From every part of the globe, we can freely find

and download images of contemporary artists’ work, even if the

focus of the web remains predominantly North American.4

As Map 1 shows, the continent of Africa is a blank canvas

missing from the map. Does this mean artists from the continent

are not part of global art markets? Indeed they are. However,

mostly, their markets are not ‘at home’. Of our four selected

artists, only Wangechi Mutu is listed in the top 500 international

artists in terms of sales in 2011-2012. She is also the only one of

our four selected artists permanently settled in one of the world’s

major contemporary art markets – the US. Her ranking and sales

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Alessandro Baricco a required readings this year, is not available in English yet except

through Kindle. A review in Publishers’ Weekly refers to: “a sort of mental and

architectural restructuring” that results from a shifting cultural landscape dominated by

forces such as Google. Baricco characterizes this mutation as a fundamental change in the

“idea of what constitutes experience” and how meaning is made. Though often theoretical,

Barrico is an excellent guide and presents each short instalment” in a highly conversational,

op-ed style. Ultimately the book is an optimistic defense for this mutation, a mutation “that

concerns everyone, without exception”. Available at:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-8478-4291-9 (accessed 22.1.2014).

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for 2012 and 2011 are shown in Table 1, which includes two

other global artists for the sake of comparison. The first is

Marlene Dumas (Image 2) whose work is familiar in The

Netherlands, and widely collected. Originally from South Africa,

Dumas lives and works in Amsterdam, and identifies as a global

artist without any clear national belonging. Her work is relevant

to this study, since she retains a deep concern with those left out

and living on the periphery of a globalised world, from the

victims of genocide, to children and women victims of sexual

violence. The second artist in Table 1 compared with Mutu, is

Nigerian-born, UK artist Yinka Shonibare. His work brought

colonial mannerism and ‘dandyism’ into debates about art, and

he explored sex and race barriers, using large-scale 3-D works

that juxtapose headless figures, Victorian dress, African-style

prints.

It is also is interesting, and relevant to the globalisation of art,

that more unconventional graffiti art like Indieguerillas from

Indonesia (pos. 388 in 2012), Blek le Rat (pos. 436 in 2012)

from France, and the better-known Banksy (pos. 68 in 2012)

from UK, also feature in the top 500 selling artists. This is

especially fascinating, when we see that the single biggest selling

artist in both US and Europe – who does not feature in the

Chinese top-10 – is Jean-Michel Basquiat. As an artist he too

was famous for his graffiti-style images, and died at just 28. This

may explain the astounding value of his paintings. He was the

world’s top-selling contemporary artist in 2011-12, accounting

for 6 of the top ten sales in Europe for that period (ibid.,p. 16).

What is fascinating is that the work produced by each of the

artists I will study has elements of comparability with the graffiti

work of Blek le Rat and Banksy, and even the work of Basquiat.

Whilst lacking Basquiat’s intimate relations with Andy Warhol,

David Bowie and the like, the artists I look at combine elements

of street art, collage and in some cases the ‘mask’ style of

Basquiat so beloved of art collectors today (Ogiube and

Enwezor, 1999). Two of Basquiat’s works that sold for several

million are shown below in Images 3 and 4. Looking at these,

the connections with traditional African art are clear, from the

mask-like faces, grimacing. Or rather, these images resemble

caricatures of the ‘primitivism’ usually associated with African

art (Rhodes, 1994; Littlefield Kasfir, 1999). Might this even

suggest that Basquiat was mocking the taste of some of those

white people around him, who considered themselves highly

cultured? The quality that Picasso and many other European

artists looked for, from Gauguin onwards, was of ‘spontaneity’

and ‘immediacy’. Was this not a projection of Western orthodox

taste for the exotic, in this case projected in money terms onto

the paintings/collages of Basquiat?

‘Warrior’ on the left, Image 3, was auctioned at Sotheby’s in

2012 and the ‘graffiti art’, ‘Dustheads’ on the right, was sold at

Christie’s the same year for almost $ 50 million. In November

2011, an ‘Untitled’ painting of fishermen, influenced by

Basquiat’s Haitian background, held the all-time record for the

sale price of any contemporary work of art. Basquiat’s

posthumous legacy outstrips Damien Hirst’s sales, by far. The

taste for primitivism is nothing new; the art market in North

America and in Europe, if not yet in China, has for some times

been atune to diasporic African art in general, especially when

associated with ‘traditional’ and ‘primitive’ styles (Oguide and

Enwezor, 1999). A taste for graffiti and street art is more recent,

and is also visible.

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IMAGES

Map 1: The Global Art Market 2011-2012 Image 1: Collage by street artist D*Face Image 2: Obama Collage (Dumas)

Table 1: Ranking of Sales of Three Global Artists in Top 500

Global Ranking Name Turnover and Max Hammer Price (2011-122/2010-11)

431 (2012) 221 (2011) MUTU Wangechi (1972) € 193,668 € 101,724 € 468,083 € 118,456

47 (2012) 60 (2011) DUMAS Marlene (1953) € 2,972,662 € 1,250,616 € 2,555,393 € 1,068,180

408 (2012) 640 (2011) SHONIBARE Yinka (1962) € 208,197 € 116,256 € 104,660 € 89,055

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IMAGES

Image 3 Warrior by J-M. Basquiat Image 4: Dustheads by J-M. Basquiat

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The four artists whose work I explore in this study all expressed

a very uneasy relationship with such popular images of pan-

African art as ‘primitive’, ‘traditional’ or child-like. Like art

historians who suggest that: “The category of primitive is a

historical construction” (and a colonial one) (Rhodes, 1994:

198). Similarly, these artists reject the equation often made

between their work and traditional African art. They make it

quite clear that they want to be known as contemporary artists,

African in origin and global in affinity (Oguide and Enwezor,

1999). Each has definite aspects of ‘African’ identity which they

explore in their work, yet they do not want to be defined as

‘African artists’. Just as in the work of other ‘post-colonial’

global artists like Marlene Dumas, Quincy Gario and Kara

Walker, they reject the idea that there is anything particularly

traditional, or ‘essentially’ unchanging about African and pan-

African art. What they make is thus contemporary art, around

themes that are also global, and seen through the eyes of artists

who come originally from Africa. Today – judging by their CVs

– all four artists see the world as their stage, and sometimes as

their oyster.

Just like smartly-dressed sapeurs, or dandies, of Congo-

Brazzaville and of Congo-Kinshasa (former French and Belgian

Congo, respectively) who refashion Paris clothing trends, and the

youth in post-apartheid South Africa, who refashion colonial

dress and make it their own, so too these global artists claim their

rightful place in the world. They seek their rightful place in the

world of global contemporary art, whether at the Biennale or in a

gallery in New York, Nairobi, or Rio. They are inspired, if you

like, by a Zeitgeist and by a mode of production that cannot be

reproduced in any single location. They have come to depend,

for their survival as contemporary artists, on being able to access

global networks and art distribution sites across the globe. I am

grateful to Congolese cultural scholar, Felix Kaputu, for bringing

home to me, in our discussion in Leiden at the African Studies

Centre, just how vital this mobility is for contemporary artists. It

is a mobility that is at once physical, artistic, metaphorical and

personal.

I-3 Collage+: What it signifies

Collage is often dated to the work of Braque and Picasso in the

1910s. What they sought was to confuse not the eye, but the

viewer. Picasso claimed that collage reflected the era. He

claimed that as the: “displaced object…entered a universe for

which it was not made and where it retains…its strangeness”,

and he aimed through this means: “to make people think…

because we were quite aware that the world was becoming very

strange and not exactly reassuring” (cited in Vaughan, 2005: 5).

Collage remains innovative, often combined with a range of

other media, and David Hockney sees in it: “a great, profound

invention of the twentieth century”, and more straightforwardly:

“a form of drawing”, one way among others to create an image

(Hockney interviewed in Gayford, 2011: 116).

Collage is all these things, and more. There are so many

examples of collage in today’s art galleries and museums that

one hardly knows where to start. Besides Braque and Picasso, the

work of Karl Schwitters has been very influential. Among the

best-known collage artists, quite a number are women, including

those from the global ‘African diaspora’, where collage is quite a

popular medium, mixed with other techniques. This can be seen

in Kara Walker’s work, for example, which we considered later.

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For all four contemporary artists whose stories are considered in

in this study, collage is foundational to their forms of artistic

expression. Collage+ conveys complex ways of combining

collage with other techniques, a collage of techniques, including

painting, printing, projection, film, performance, sculpture and

installation. Michelsen remarks that: “[t]he very nature of

collage demands fragmented materials, or at least materials

yanked out of context” (in Shields, 2010). Decontextualized

rejoining of parts is at the heart of Collage+ as a method.

Overall, as one commentator suggests: “Collage…is a true

reflection of the world we live in today…[it] is all about the

recycling, reinterpretation and reprocessing of our collective

past, present and future” (Gallagher, 2011: 1). This time

dimension is taken into account in this study.

Kuhn, who studied family biographical collage, concludes that

the juxtaposition of contrasting elements, and the quality of

interdisciplinarity make collage a unique form in Fine Art. For

him, this means collage can express cultural critique and invites

ideas about transformation. Collage+ is also meant, as a concept,

to convey that artistic expression can act as a metaphor for the

complex, multi-level processes of globalisation, with its constant

shifting and displacement of human bodies, resources and

meanings. Collage+ suggests the same sense of open-endedness

and provisionality that Kuhn detects within collage more

generally, when he states that: “The products of a collagist

method reflect, reveal, and document the process of their own

creation”, and in so doing: “…this representation deromanticizes

the creative process, bringing the important scholarly

requirement of transparency to the inquiry” (Kuhn, 1995: 14).

What he says here is very interesting to me, since it hints that an

artist who wants to attain the status of a professional may well

need professional ‘secrets’. To me, who earns a living in another

way, rather than through art alone, this view of art invites critical

scrutiny and self-interrogation. If I had to live from my own art,

could I afford the luxury of a transparent production process,

which I allow myself now? Could transparency be alien to true

artistic professionalism?

From the outset, what can be seen in the visual work of many

global collage artists is the juxtaposing of fragmented and

recycled elements to compose a new whole that can seem

difficult to decipher. However, when seen from a distance, the

collaged image may possess a kind of visual power that

‘unaltered’ images may lack. As you get closer the image may

start to break down, not into dots or pixels, but into elements that

had no connection until the artist brought them together to form

this new whole. This is what Picasso wanted to achieve – an

unsettling and strange experience for the viewer. Elements used

in collage and ‘assemblage’ can include all sorts of materials,

such as the left-overs of broken technology, machine parts

including from weapons or cars, household and industrial refuse,

bodily fluids, advertising and even other people’s works of art.

When all of these, and more, are juxtaposed, the resulting images

can have a tragic quality. Thinking of Rothko’s work, David

Sylvester suggests that in tragic art: “violence and serenity are

reconciled and fused” (Sylvester, 1987: 36). Whilst the four

global artists considered in this study are far from tragic, their

work too combines violent elements with a sense of serenity.

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Collage is taken by some researchers as a way of expressing the

combination of ‘a fine arts practice with a postmodern

epistemology’ (Vaughan, 2005: 2). Drawing on feminist scholar

Sandra Harding, Vaughan suggests that collage represents a

‘borderland epistemology’, drawing on interdisciplinary ways of

seeing what is ‘at the margins’. Collage+ can be a fruitful

guiding metaphor – or set of concepts and practices – for this

study. Vaughan discusses several different aspects of a collage-

based approach, including juxtaposition, open-endedness, and

inter-disciplinarity. The present study fits well with one of her

criteria for collage as: ‘…critical practice [that] challenges the

profession to adopt fresh approaches to creativity, those that are

critical and experimental in nature’ (Vaughan, 2005: 4).

I-4 Globalisation as in-between-ness

I expect, maybe wrongly, that home-coming, as an on-going

process rather than a single event, may be a central theme in the

stories of all four global artists selected for this study. If through

art we start to make sense of the world, then perhaps through

making art we can feel at home in the world, no matter where we

live? For me personally, only art in its widest sense – including

fiction, music, dance and visual arts - can do that. As the well-

respected post-colonial thinker and film maker, Trinh T. Minh-ha

puts it, for many artists the trick lies in: “[t]ravelling back and

forth between home and abroad [which] becomes a mode of

dwelling” (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1994: 14). We shall see just how

true this is for the four global artists in Part II of this study.

Living in the twilight may be as close to feeling at home in the

world as we can get, since at twilight night and day, here and

there, past and future, mix up inseparably. This opens up post-

colonial possibilities of collage as a relatively unbounded process

that straddles divides. Of art generally, Marlene Dumas puts it in

her own realistic way: “Through art nothing gets solved, so

everything remains relevant” (Dumas, 1998: 83). Past and

present overlap with future, here with there, me, you and others;

these categories become fused, fuzzy and overlapping. We are

like walking collages, and a sense of many selves is also present

in the work of the four selected artists. This layering serves both

for the comfort and discomfort of the viewer, a tension I strive

for in my own work, which tries to mix elements of the familiar

and reassuring with the relatively unfamiliar and disturbing.

The work of Quincy Gario (Images 5 and 7) on Zwarte Piet

confronts Dutch people with a custom that is debated each

December, as white adults and children black-up as ‘helpers’ of

Saint Nicholas, distributing presents to good children, and

supposedly punishing naughty ones. Gario insists this tradition

is unsuited to the twenty-first century, given that it dates from the

late nineteenth century. During centuries, Dutch traders were

involved in the slave trade and in exploitation of colonial

countries. Quincy Gario points to the unwillingness of white

people who still defend the Zwarte Piet ‘tradition’ to

acknowledge the material and psychic suffering it causes. He

questions if most white Dutch people see their own history as it

is. That Zwarte Piet still sparks controversy, indicates the power

of stories, and suggests patterns of colonial domination and

subordination, and colonial mentalities may still be the norm in

much of Europe. The continuing relevance of colonial history to

contemporary art is a theme I cannot look at in detail (see

however Oguibe and Enwezor, 1999). A short history of art in

the former Belgian Congo, now the Democratic Republic of

Congo (DRC), is also provided in Appendix 1.

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IMAGES

Image 5 Quincy Gario’s art Image 6 Zwarte Piet and St Niklaas Image 7: Quincy Gario and ID questions

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IMAGES

Image 8: Carrie May Weems Image 9: Marlene Dumas ‘The Widow’ 2/2 Image 10: Kara Walker, Darkytown Insurrection

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Artworks can express a sense of revisiting the familiar, making it

strange, and bringing the past up close, thus making it less

comfortable. Collage+ breaks down familiar elements and

reassembles them otherwise, and expresses the sense of

unboundedness and indeterminacy of this always coming home,

of perpetual twilight, or dawn. One American artist, Carrie Mae

Weems (see Image 8) takes old archive photos from the slavery

era, held in the Getty Museum collection, and rephotographs

them in infrared to restore a kind of life to them today (Art Price,

2012: 33). Marlene Dumas’ work, most of it loosely based on

photos she finds in the media and on the internet, includes

images that are the more powerfully expressive for having few

personal details (see Image 9). In her words “I do not seek to

represent anyone”. Image 10 shows Kara Walker’s rebellious

and lively cutout images of slavery, which echo more traditional

and conservative types of cut-out crafts (see Image 6 of Zwarte

Piet and St Niklaas, from an amateur website). All this ‘archive

retrieval’ is part of how contemporary Collage+ artists work, and

is common also in writing, music and film. Retrieval and

recycling have become the norm. In Part II we discuss the

Collage+ forms of visual art production in more detail with the

four selected global artists.

In my own work I collage with a mix of colonial-era images

from former Belgian Congo, Kenya and Ghana, for example. I

either find these images on the web or am sent them by friends

and family. In the background, landscapes can be painted,

projected from slides and so on. When old images are re-

worked, as when I worked with photos taken by George Robert

in 1950s Kenya, the image spans the past and the present; it is

like a visual ghost.

Dear reader, as sometimes happens to me, I am carried away

with the mysteries of the global art market, and the powerful and

challenging images of these global artists. Forgive me please for

not even having introduced you to the main subjects of this

study; the four artists who are waiting patiently to be presented

to you. Without further ado, we leave the world of the art market

behind, for we will return to it at the end in Part III. First things

first.

In introducing you to each artist in turn, I will give them some

individual attention, to already give you an idea of their outlooks,

the type of work they make, their credentials as global

contemporary artists, and some of their stories. I believe they

represent an art stream that is becoming of interest

internationally. They are global in the sense that their scope and

attraction goes beyond the limited range of the market for

conventional ‘African art’ (whatever that means).

Once I have introduced you to these artists, dear reader, I feel

sure you will better understand why I have a few questions to ask

them about their work, how they came to be artists, how they

make their work, what it means, and its place in the world. As

contemporary artists do they all feel equally ‘at home’ in the

world of contemporary art? Let’s find out.

18

I–5 Introducing Four Global Artists

(i) Wangechi Mutu: Acidic pleasure and pain The first artist I would like to introduce you to is Wangechi Mutu, a

real ‘global citizen’, born in Kenya, educated in UK and US, whose

father taught in the US when she was a child. She is now living in

United States. She was the only one in the top 500 selling artists, as I

mentioned to you earlier. And quite recently she was called “One of

the most exciting artists working in collage today” by the New York

Times. She really is a very successful artist, represented by three

galleries in the US, and best known for her work that combines

collage with print and painting, as well as more recent use of video,

projection and film. Wangechi Mutu’s work you can see for yourself,

here at her website, which links to the three galleries that represent her

and sell her work: http://www.wangechimutu.com/. I think you will

enjoy her verve, and whatever your taste, the way she combines

collage with other media is inspiring and highly imaginative. Her

work is as varied as it is coherent, as acidic as it is opulent. There is a

‘pungent’ quality to her work that makes one think of fruit that is ripe;

sometimes over-ripe.

“The way I talk about my work has a lot to do with my personal life

and my journey into becoming what I am right now, and with creating

my art and my practice…Kenya was colonised by the British…and so

was the US. Why I bring this up is I want to contextualise some of

this work I have been doing…and also just to talk about this idea of

broken-upness and coming from a fractured space…The Emergency

years we consider to be….that decade was a very difficult time in

Kenya. I always wonder with my parents and those who were raised

about that time why they never call it a time of war…Mau Mau was

an incredible movement that was talked about as a terrorist movement

but was actually a freedom fighting movement that pretty much

scared the British out of the land that was originally ours. But in the

interim people were tortured and jailed and threatened in the guise of

supposedly looking for the Mau Mau. The Mau Mau were pretty

much…all Kikuyu…the land means everything to the Kikuyu…

(shows image from Congo of a man looking at the dismembered hand

of his child on a mat) I wanted to make sure I found an image that

describes some of the atrocities that came with colonisation and that

somehow has embedded itself into the culture of contemporary

Africa…There is this sort of cycle of violence that has continued ever

since…Often if you did not make your quota [of rubber], your

hands… would be cut off…and sometimes it would not be yours, but

your children’s or your wives…often this violence was played out on

the bodies of women”.

(Wangechi talking of Josephine Baker) “I have replicated some things

that are very much about Josephine Baker because I believe there is

something very powerful and unfinished about stereotypes of black

women, of African women. There are still so many places and ways in

which we misrepresent what we don’t know. Especially places that I

come from”.

Later I return to the video where Wangechi says this (see footnote 16).

The piece below on the right is mysteriously entitled: Nitarudi

Ninarudi, from 2013, with the crossing out being deliberate. This

seems to refer to her original ‘home’ in Kenya, since the title is in

Kiswahili, the second official language of Kenya and the main

language spoken in neighbouring Tanzania. Nitarudi has been

crossed out and means ‘I will return’ in future tense. She replaces this

with present tense: ‘I am returning’: Ninarudi. As she tells us in one

of her videos, she needs to go back to Kenya from time to time to get

inspiration for images that go ‘deeply into her psyche’. Maybe the

present tense reflects how she can transport herself home, as if by

magic as if in a time machine, through her artwork?i

19

IMAGES

Images 11, 12 13: Wangechi Mutu and some her early collage work

Image 14: Installation – Eat Cake (Triennale, Paris) Image 15: Wangechi's cover for German Magazine Image 16: Nitarudi Ninarudi

20

(ii) Steve Bandoma: Futuristic Bodies

The second artist I want to introduce you to, Steve Bandoma, was

born in Congo-Kinshasa in 1981. He describes his artwork as “semi-

figurative collage and mixed media”. Steve is an active international

artist, whose breakthrough into contemporary art circles in the past

few years, came after long years of struggling. After studying at the

Ecole des Beaux Arts (School of Fine Art) in Kinshasa, the capital of

DRC, Steve moved to South Africa in 2005. In Kinshasa, he had been

part of Librisme Synergie, an artists’ collective that tried kick-starting

contemporary art in DRC. Steve explains in his website: “In 2003, in

Kinshasa… Francis Mampuya, Vithois Mwilambwe Bondo, Alain

Mwilambwe, Apolinaire Wantina and three others, created a

movement called Librisme Synergie. We protested against the

academic education system in Congo for not establishing new media

and contemporary practices. At college I had a desire to develop my

career towards the more contemporary side of art”. Steve’s blog has

more details of an impressive career: http://stevebandoma.blogspot.nl/

After failing to achieve this, and given the firm traditionalism in

artistic terms, that reigned in DRC and Kinshasa, Steve decided to

move to South Africa: “It was very important for me to spend times

out of my country, so I moved to South Africa in 2005…I spent

almost a year looking for the right contacts in art circles – first in

Johannesburg then in Cape Town. South Africa was just where I

wanted to be – every hour minute and second…just inspired me

further towards being an artist. And I was not going to give up, even

after many rejections. There was no other option for me, not even

going back home was an option. I had to get what I wanted. I reflected

upon every rejection letter that came my way and was further

encouraged to do my best”.

Steve talks of his temptation to keep breaking expectations of what

‘Black’ artists are likely to make; who can blame him? As Bandoma

puts it, in South Africa: “It [was]…tough working as a full time artist

in another country, for years, with no family around. But then again

that was my decision. At times my art has been (commercially)…

unviable and as such I have had to lean on my family for support.

Another thing about living in South Africa has been my inability to

articulate myself fluently in South African languages which is made

worse by my not being a South African Citizen…I am a conceptual

artist…I believe that good or inspired art brings meaning in life and

also allows an intellectual body to grow”. Steve is confident about his

future as a contemporary artist: “I see myself in Documenta, Venice

Biennale, etcetera!” When I contacted Steve he was in US for several

months, and appeared to be succeeding in his aim of working as a

conceptual artist, on the global scene. On his return to Kinshasa, after

time for unpacking, he replied to my questions. I am grateful to him.

It was in South Africa, first in Johannesburg and then in Cape Town,

that Steve’s career took off, after he won numerous awards,

fellowships and residencies. This included Pro Helvetia, Zurich/Visa

and Culturesfrance/Buzz Book in 2009. He became involved in the

Art Collection, USA, and taught and coordinated projects initiated by

Visual Arts Network in South Africa. Steve jokes about his varied

style. Like Wangechi Mutu, he combines collage, painting, print,

sculpture and performance all together. He is forward looking, and as

we will see in Part II, very much oriented towards the future. Yet he

faced similar problems in South Africa to the conservatism of

Kinshasa’s art scene: “…some white artists here in South Africa told

me not to consider myself as a conceptual artist. Maybe because I am

black? I don’t know. The attitudes seemed to be similar; that as a

black African, Steve ought to be interested in traditional art, and in

‘folkloric’ forms of artistic expression.

21

IMAGES

Images 17-20 Steve Bandoma A recent solo exhibition of Bandoma’s Collage by Bandoma Steve Bandoma at work

22

(iii) Maurice Mbikayi:5 Techno Suffering, Fashion’s Slaves

Maurice (Image 21) was born in Congo-Kinshasa, and is a collage

artist, painter and performance artist all at once. In 2014 he will

complete his Masters at Michaelis School of Art in Cape Town. In

recent years, he was shortlisted for the Celeste Prize in New York in

2011, being one of 50 finalists. Then he went to Basel, Switzerland in

2012 for an IAAB international exchange and studio programme,

working in studios in the Basel region. In 2012 he had his first solo

exhibition in the US and 3-month live/work artist’s residency in New

York City as a result of his grand prize nomination at the 3rd Ward

Gallery. He has his own blog/website, which can be accessed here:

http://mauricembikayi.blogspot.nl/ 2012 must have been his busiest

year yet for travel, as he also was in Ethiopia for some time, as part of

an Artist in Residency Programme (AIR) facilitated by the Africa

Centre, Cape Town. This aims to support artists who are technically

gifted, provocative, innovative and highly engaged with social issues.6

Maurice seems to be all of these things. Image 22 shows a portrait of

his ‘Dirty Face II’, which shows his graphic style and use of spare

computer parts, something that will be discussed in Part II. Of the

four artists I have worked on for this study, Maurice’s visual language

and themes resonate most powerfully for me, and the connection with

street art is the most obvious, too. The powerful illusions in Maurice

Mbikayi’s collages do not sacrifice aesthetics for politics, or vice

versa. Somehow he manages to balance the two in a kind of dance.

What one sees in his work are graphic, beautifully crafted and

surprisingly simple yet powerful images, as in Image 23, for example.

5 This is his personal website which includes his up-to-date CV and in case you are

reading this on paper and cannot click on embedded links:

http://www.mauricembikayi.com/about.html (accessed 15 January 2014.). 6 His achievements in 2011 are discussed here:

http://www.jeanettablignaut.com/projects/the-creative-exchange/

Then you look again, for example at Image 22 or Image 23, and you

see that this image is more complex and disturbing than the calm,

graphic appearance suggests. The image starts to reveal the expression

of a mix of hope and outrage about how globalisation affects people,

for example in DRC, South Africa or worldwide. For the five billion

people without access to internet, what do computers mean? Mbikayi

encapsulates these problems of unequal power in some of his graphic

work. The political message is hard to miss, yet the artwork remains

aesthetically strong. His work, to my view, resembles the work of

anti-capitalist street artists like Banksy and Blek Le Rat. When I

contacted him, Maurice was completing his Masters in Fine Art in

South Africa, and suggested I see several videos of his work. One of

these: http://vimeo.com/22385743 shows a performance piece entitled

‘Voices’. This is about the fictitious Article 15 of the former Zairean

constitution (which had only 14 articles). It was a joke that this

(invented article) simply said: ‘debrouillez vous’, which translates as

‘sort yourselves out’, or manage on your own. As Maurice explains

of his way of working with collage: “I use the term ‘recontext-

ualisation’ as appropriate for myself. And also because the materials I

use, especially the computer parts, and magazines, are media products

that are transformed through the contemporary medium of collage.

Collage for me, is thus analogical, semiotic and metaphorical, all at

the same time. For me, this technique signifies ‘deconstruction’ or

‘deconstructivism’, and I am inspired in this respect by Jacques

Derrida, one of my favourite philosophers, who influenced my work a

great deal”.7

7 On the notion of deconstruction, which was his principal contribution to theory and

artistic practice, see Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the

Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1978) .

23

IMAGES

Image 21: Maurice Mbikayi Image 22: ‘Dirty face’, collage Image 23: from ‘Notre Peau (our Skin) Image 24: Voices, South Africa

24

(iv) Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo: Metamorphosis

The fourth global contemporary artist is Vitshois, who works at Kin

Arts Studio and studied at the Fine Art Academy of Congo-Kinshasa,

with Steve Bandoma, forming part of Librisme Synergie later on. He

then studied in Strasbourg and the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam.

Vitshois has strong links with Netherlands, and his career has been a

real success. Like other Kinshasa-based artists, he has exhibited at the

French Cultural Centre in Pointe Noir. In 2011 he obtained a Francis

Greenburger Fellowship on Managing and Mitigating Ethnic and

Religious Conflict, and has recently worked on some films. His CV

and website show the range of his impressive international experience

to date: http://www.vitshois.com/index.html Performance is very

much part of Vitshois’ work, which goes well beyond collage. In

2005, for example, in the capital of Benin, Cotonou, Vitshois brought

traffic to a standstill in a performance to show the absurdity of war.

This piece can be seen in a video which is quite alarming.8 Another

short video shows his work at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.9

When I contacted him on facebook, Vitshois soon replied.ii Since he

was working very hard on his latest projects, I did not hear from

Vitshois in the end. We spoke briefly on the phone, but were cut off.

To answer the questions, In Part II, I used extracts from his website

and artist’s statement. Since he: “…lives between the Congo and the

Netherlands”, there is every possibility we will meet in the future.

Zonga is a film he made collaboratively, at Banyan Tree Art

Encounters in Berlin.10

As the on-line Urban Dictionary line explains:

“Zonga on its own is a word that defines the movement of expertise or

8 http://vimeo.com/66337350 (accessed 15 Feb 2014).

9 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QcEfet1Urs (see 4.30-5.00 minutes). His two huge

canvases, also collages, each had smaller works stuck to them, and a series of six mainly

red and black smaller, square paintings were in a red room, with guns, marching sounds, a

coffin and television. 10

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQ8kuNLiZpI (accessed 2 May 2014).

performance level of an individual. Basically meaning, moving to the

next level where the audience know of the level, and occasionally

experience it and get hyped up. If you duplicate the word, as in Zonga

Zonga, this would mean the individual has gone beyond the next

level. So, it’s really someone who knows his/her field so well, that

they can produce results beyond the expectation of the audience. A

typical example (although not strictly associated with) would be a DJ

set. The DJ can be playing a mediocre mix-set, and then branch out

into new territory - this is known as Zonga. But if the DJ then reaches

deeper into another level of unknown territory, this is where Zonga

Zonga comes into its own”.11

As ‘Zonga’ implies, as an artist,

Vitshois is at least as much of a performance artist as a visual collage-

based artist. For him, indeed the term Collage+ could be substituted

with Performance+. His art work is often very physical, combining

painting/sculpture and performance. The human body, its multiplicity

of forms and deformations, its journeys through metamorphosis and

rebirth, is a recurring theme throughout his oeuvre.

Vitshois is interested in that sense of belonging in the world that I

would place somewhere between the meeting place and a violent

physical encounter. And his vision is global; as the blurb of one of

his exhibitions puts it (translated from French): “when you first see

his artwork, you realise he is part of a younger generation of artists of

African origin, who, from Kinshasa to Lagos, via Johannesburg and

Douala, are moving away from the clichés of so-called traditional

Africa, in order to come face to face with the contemporary realities

of their continent, and with the realities of art of global dimensions”.12

11

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Zonga (accessed 25 April 2014). 12

Original in French is available at:

http://www.africultures.com/php/index.php?nav=evenement&no=27865 (accessed

19.1.2014).

25

IMAGES

Image 25: Collage by Bondo Image 26: Vitshois in the studio Image 27: Vitshois’ Master Class Image 28: 0.5 Vitshois

26

I - 6 Six Issues for Four Global Artists

To ‘have issues’ with something means you are outside the

norm, deliberately setting yourself outside the mainstream. If

you reject the right of those in authority to make your decisions

for you, for example your boss or teachers, you are said to ‘have

issues with authority’. Almost everyone I know has had this

feeling at some time of not ‘fitting in’ with expectations of them,

of being an outsider in the mass. And later on in life, crossing

boundaries, negotiating our way around several contrasting

worlds, for example as contemporary artists, can be a lonely

existence. When I interviewed him in Leiden in March 2014,

Felix Kaputu reminded me that nomadism and crossing borders

can result in richly rewarding experiences for artists, who can

potentially feel at home wherever they find like-minded people,

artists and institutions with which they can work fruitfully. Once

your community spreads beyond the streets of your

neighbourhood and the people of your country or region, you

become part of a global society, composed of networks of people

and organisations that cut across the boundaries of nations and

states. Through building connections in the art world, you may

gain a sense of belonging that you have been looking for all your

life. Yet many people seek a home in this world and never find

it. Marlene Dumas’ poem, which I adapted at the start of this

study, refers to the uneasy, strangely exhilarating feeling of

never quite coming to rest, nowhere being quite at home. This is

a sense I will explore with the four artists whom I have just

introduced.13

13

“Home is where the heart is”, poem by Marlene Dumas in her book (1998)

Sweet Nothings: Notes and Text, Galerie Paul Andriessen-De Balie: Amsterdam, p. 82.

Why I chose these four global artists should by now have

become clear. My own artistic strivings, often characterised as

amateurish or hobbyistic by my teachers at KABK, may not be

comparable with what these professional artists make, especially

since they live from their artwork. Yet I chose to study these

artists because I felt ‘at home’ with their work, and felt an

affinity with them, both artistically and personally. Three of the

four live outside major global art markets, and their relationship

with the global art world might be expected to be a love-hate

affair. For artists whose daily lives are spent in secure and

predictable surroundings, with a reasonably steady job, like me,

it is hard to imagine one’s self straddling two such different

cities as Kinshasa and New York, or Cape Town and LA. Yet

these artists do so, and show resilience and versatility in

managing all this transmigration and more. Neither am I

assuming that for Wangechi Mutu to live on a permanent basis in

the USA is easy or peaceful. Yet it cannot compare to being

based quasi-permanently in Kinshasa.

Even though Europe has long ceased to be a haven of tolerance

and democracy, I can fully understand why contemporary artists

like those in this study, might wish to work in the relative peace

and quiet of The Hague or in Geneva, when developing new

ideas for their artwork. They might then need to return to the

hustle and bustle of Kinshasa for further inspiration, at some

point, and due to visa restrictions. The violence and poverty one

sees in New York or the misery of the poor in The Hague can

hardly compare with the struggles of making a living through art

in either Congo or Kenya, or indeed in South Africa. These four

artists thus straddle the complex global divisions of our world,

and of the art world. They produce and sell, exchange and

27

exhibit across the segmented spaces of today’s global art market.

Listening to their experiences in this art market, should help us

examine how ‘decolonised’ (or not) the global art world really is.

What they say about their work is the central focus of the second

part of the study. We will just listen for a while to what they

have to say, in response to six questions, which now follow.

And this will help me to briefly tell part of my own story of

making visual art on the basis of Collage+. This is the ‘zest of

telling’ that Trinh T. Minh-ha refers to in the opening quotation

(1994: 23).

Each artist, as will emerge, has their own ways of combining

collage, painting, film, performance and other techniques. For

the sake of simplicity these mixtures and combinations have

been termed ‘Collage+’, as already explained, which is also a

useful metaphor for how such global contemporary artists

manage to negotiate their way through the global art markets,

their rules and their boundaries. Art cannot heal broken societies

like Congo or Kenya on its own. Even so, I expect to find that

these artists continue to hope for recovery, and expect them to

believe that art can contribute to this. In Civilization and its

Discontents, Freud said that art can give solace, but he warns that

this sense of relief is temporary and can be painful as well. In

his own words, he expressed it this way: “Those who are

sensitive to the influence of art do not know how to rate it high

enough as a source of happiness and consolation in life. Yet art

affects us but as a mild narcotic and can provide no more than a

temporary refuge for us from the hardships of life; its influence

is not strong enough to make us forget real misery” (Freud, 1929:

10).

Does art also enable our four global artists to forget the ‘real

misery’ of life on this planet, in its more insecure and violent

moments, and to focus on some form of human redemption and

recovery? I am curious about this, and also sceptical, since I

have a hunch that Freud was right. As we heard earlier, Marlene

Dumas similarly rejects the idea that art can solve humanity’s

problems on its own. How we view the past, present and future

matters; how history informs these four artists is a question that

intrigued me. Does the use of Collage+ techniques reflect,

detach them, or help to reinforce their distance from the ‘real

misery’ around them? How are colonial and post-colonial

violence and suffering expressed in the mixed media artwork of

these four individuals? How do they connect the local and

personal dimension of their work, with global currents in art?

Which galleries, shows and auction houses are they most

interested in? How do they view time, memory and the healing

of past wounds in relation to their artwork? How does each

artist see him or herself amidst the globalised art market, whose

contours were roughly outlined at the start of Part I? With which

other artists do Bondo, Mutu, Bandoma and Mbikayi feel an

affinity? Who buys and sells their work? And where do these

artists feel they most belong?

With the exception of Wangechi, who is now too busy to deal

with individual enquiries, I was able to speak and communicate

with three of the four artists I chose to work on, surely a luxury.

I asked them to explore the images and techniques they used, and

the content of their work. Since all four artists move a lot, and

exhibit in different places, continents, and settings, travelling,

visiting, and leaving for a ‘home from home’, I formulated six

simple questions. These I sent to them early in the research

28

process, and in January 2014, Maurice Mbikayi accepted me on

Linkedin, and we started to communicate also through gmail.

Whist he said he was ‘honoured’ I would study his work, I feel

that it is me who was honoured by his agreeing to answer these

six questions. Steve Bondoma also answered my questions

directly, and succinctly. Wangechi Mutu was not in touch with

me herself, and so for her case I drew on articles, statements and

videos by her and about her, to answer the questions as best I

could. I used her precise words wherever I could, as I did also

with Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo, whose artist statement and

website provided answers for most of the questions, though not

all. In any case, here are the questions I asked: 1. How, when did you start to be an ‘artist’? How did you discover

that this was what you wanted to do?

2. How do the forms you use to make your art (especially Collage+)

relate to the content of your art?

3. How is history present in your work? What about the human bod?

4. How do you connect local, global and national in your work?

5. Where would you situate your art work within contemporary global

art streams and markets? What other artists do you feel close to?

Who mainly buys (and sells) your work?

6. Do you associate making artwork with a sense of homecoming, or

with the journey, and being a nomad? Both?

Answering these questions did not call for the artists to provide

me with intimate details of their personal lives. It is vital to

respect the privacy of artists as much as that of anyone, and I

have tried to do so. I have taken Dumas’ eloquent text “No more

interviews” to heart. In this, she explains that she needs to

protect her privacy so she can continue with her work. She

prefers to write about her work, she says, than to talk about it

with strangers. As she puts it: “they just want you to confess and

spill your guts out, to entertain them”.14

She also comments

elsewhere that people can look at her art instead of interviewing

her, since: “Through art we talk to strangers”.15

As others have

said of the work of Dumas, and as I also think is true of the four

artists selected for this study: "the work invites you to have a

conversation with it" (van den Boogert et al, 1999: 12). The

conversation that the pictures tell is another kind of story, and is

informed by the way that: “[a]s individuals, we make choices on

the basis of the stories that we tell ourselves about who we are,

what is happening and where we are going next’ (Zalman, 2012).

In a recent talk, Mutu explained the context of her artwork in

much more depth, and showed a video that was especially useful

in explaining the logic of her body of work overall, and which

now helps to introduce my own.16

Mutu presents slides in this

talk, while explaining the content and context of her work for the

audience, mostly art students. She explains, for example, that

history interests her, especially since as someone born Kikuyu,

she is linked with the Mau Mau ‘freedom fighters’ movement of

the 1950s up to independence in 1964. The Mau Mau were

called terrorists under a state of Emergency. Two stories

informed my work in my final year at KABK - the Mau Mau

‘rebels’ in Kenya and Patrice Lumumba, the first elected Prime

Minister of the former Belgian Congo, killed on orders of US

and Belgium, just a few months after assuming office.

14

The quotation is from Domingo van den Boogert, Barbara Bloom and Mariuccia Casadio

(1999) Marlene Dumas, Phaidon. What follows is the text of “No more interviews”, from

p. 38 of Marlene Dumas’ own book (1998) Sweet Nothings: Notes and Text, Galerie Paul

Andriessen-De Balie: Amsterdam. 15

Van de Boogert, Bloem and Casadio, Marlene Dumas, p. 107. 16

It is a video of talk given by Wangechi Mutu:

http://playgallery.org/playlists/stamps#my_dirty_little_heaven (accessed 12 January 2014).

29

IMAGES

Image 29: collage Image 30: Wall painting/projection Image 31: Collage (Congolese soldier, Scotland)

30

I-7 Two stories: ghosts of times past

These two stories – of the Mau Mau and of Lumumba, have

informed my artwork during my final year at KABK. African

elements and European landscapes are combined in my own

visual work. Images 29, 30 and 31 show examples of my

Collage+ work, which combines collage with painting,

projection and photography. The story of Patrice Lumumba’s

death in 1961, which the Belgian government apologised for in

2003, was fully revealed in a Parliamentary report, which

confirmed the Belgian government’s responsibility for

Lumumba’s death. The play ‘A Season in the Congo’, written

by Aime Cesaire, well-known French Caribbean writer and

political figure, was produced by Joe Wright. For Wright,

Lumumba’s death is a foundational event, at global level. As

Wright puts it: “the least we can do is to know what happened.”

Footage in Beijing at the time showed massive protests at

Lumumba’s killing, since he was viewed as a future leader of the

‘non-aligned bloc’ of countries, caught in the Cold War between

USA and Communist USSR. The last photo inside the back

cover of this study (RHS) shows half of Lumumba’s face, from a

photo taken when he was still Prime Minister. This was before he

was arrested, humiliated publicly, tortured, killed and his body

dissolved in acid. Although he was a suspected communist, he

was in fact more of a Congolese and African nationalist. For

many Belgians he deserved to die since he had been ‘rude’ to the

Belgian King at the official independence ceremony. His

rudeness was to take the floor and talk to the Congolese about

the need to take responsibility for their own future, and the need

to overcome the damage done by Belgian colonisation.

The second story of the Mau Mau concerns Kenya, where

Wangechi Mutu’s parents’ families are from. The history of the

torture, mass killings and disappearances of suspected ‘Mau

Mau’ insurgents and sympathisers, was covered over by the

destruction of evidence by the British. Despite this, a legal case

is now passing through the UK courts, and more than 8,000

Kenyan families, after 60 years of official silence and denials,

are busily suing for damages. The court case started in 2014, and

is historic. The implications for the future are enormous, with

other former colonial powers, including France, Belgium and the

Netherlands, as well as the US, likely to be sued in this way

before long. Reparations cases, to repair for past damage even

dating back to slavery, may soon emerge all round the globe.

And there is thus no running away any more from historic

responsibility of Europeans for the huge damage done to the rest

of the world. The claim that they did not know anything about

the atrocities and depredations, and denial of historical

responsibility, simply won’t wash. The last pictures inside the

back cover, on the left, show a (cropped) photo of George

Robert, of the trial sixty years ago of Mau Mau leader, General

China, tried in a British colonial court in Kenya. These two

stories have inspired me, and also remain real for millions of

people round the world. They are not obscure. I grew up in

Kenya, and my brother and sisters were born in former Belgian

Congo. I was born the year Lumumba was murdered. These

stories interlock with those of my own family in complex ways

and this juxta-positioning I try to convey in my artwork. This is

not an autobiographical study, however. I think the poem at the

start, adapted from Marlene Dumas, has said enough.

31

Part II Asking the artists to fill in the blanks

II-1. A brief Introduction

Thanks for your patience and interest so far. I hope it has been

worth it. In the second part, we plunge into what the artists have

to say about their own work, questions of form and content, and

come back to the somewhat dirty business of the global art

market. The questions already listed are addressed one by one,

for all four artists. Here we start to see how their artwork

interconnects with the past, with Collage+, and with

contemporary art streams. In Part III I ask whether globalisation

of the contemporary art markets has meant they are becoming

decolonised, or not. The CVs of the artists and their artist’s

statements can also be viewed through their websites, provided

in the individual artist’s profiles in Part I. Detailed information

about their numerous exhibitions, the galleries and institutions

they have worked with, their many prizes, grants and special

awards, are all there. The order of the questions is as in Part I.

Let’s now see what each artist has to say.

II-2. Six Little Questions

Question 1

Helen: How, when did you start to be an ‘artist’? How did

you discover that this was what you wanted to do?

Wangechi Mutu : I’m not too sure where exactly I came

from…like many an artist I was born with an inner restlessness, a

heightened curiousity, and an innate weirdo-ness…I knew I was

a bit of an odd-ball…But not so much in school, more in my

family. I was outspoken and pretty shy. I was melancholic – still

am – sensitive, and a natural-born feminist from a very young

age.

Steve Bandoma:

I was born an artist. I didn’t choose art; but art chose me. I

started drawing when I was kid. That was not a surprise because

on my mother’s side of the family there are many artists. One

day my mother brought me to my grandfather who was a

sculptor and had very deep spiritual and prophetic talent in the

village. I was still 3 months old; very little. My grandfather

looked at my hand and told my mom: wow! This one is going to

be a ‘big’ artist! My mother never told me that until I started to

become a professional artist and became known in South Africa,

around 2008. I always knew what I was meant to do since my

childhood. Art and politics are both my fields of predilection.

Maurice Mbikayi: As a child, I was already passionate about

fine art and animated cartoons. I remember drawing a lot when I

became teenage, copying old paintings and cartoon heroes. This

32

led me to art school, to my dad’s disapproval. He knew that I had

a lot of passion for art but wanted me study something more

‘realistic and sustainable’ (according to him). Which I tried, but

did not have the heart for…After three years of high school

(option maths-physics) at a private school, I quit and enrolled

myself at the Institut des Beaux Arts (Institute of Fine Art; a six

year advanced high school programme) with the support of my

mum (For a whole year Maurice did not talk with his dad). Until

he realised that I was like a fish in the sea in the art world and

advised me to push (on) with my studies in order to be

independent. He was still not convinced that I was serious: “Art

is not reliable”, he would say. Then he sent me to UNIBAZ

(University of Bas-Zaire) outside the capital, to study Physics

and Industrial Design. But after a year, I came back and enrolled

as an undergrad at the Academie des Beaux Arts de Kinshasa

(Kinshasa Fine Art Academy, see Appendix 1). After my

undergrad, I envisaged to explore art, in other Countries. And

only five years later, I moved to South Africa. Art is everything

to me, but (in Congo-Kinshasa) where I come from it is

considered a luxury or a caprice (fancy thing); not a real job!

Thus, I was determined to prove my people wrong.

Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo:

I live and work in Kinshasa - in the heart of the chaotic

megalopolis of the Democratic Republic of Congo…I was born

there in 1981. In my early childhood I lived in Kalemie - a city in

the province of Katanga in the south East of the DRC. I returned

to Kinshasa - to my birthplace, which is a phantom for me. [In

the absence of a reply from Vitshois, who was very busy, and

could not answer me, I was unable to find further information to

answer this question].

Question 2

Helen: How do the forms you use to make your art

(especially Collage+ i.e. the mix of collage and other

techniques) relate to the content of your art?

Wangechi Mutu: I do think my work is kind of very personal,

first and foremost. In a way I have a tremendous amount of fun.

I guess I enjoy where I go with these works. I revel in the

making of the works to the point that it comes out as something

that’s super internal…I think they are dream-like, I think they are

child-like…and I also think there is something very personal and

intimate about it...I do have specific things that I try to push

forward, and those are my opinions and my political inclinations

and so forth. But I think ultimately, the fictional, fairy-tale,

myth-like element of the work is something very universal in the

way that humans create stories about their life, about what is

going to happen…With the large collages I’ve thought a lot of

about dioramas, and looking into worlds and looking into

places…meanwhile it’s not necessarily possible to find out

what’s happening in another environment, in the past behind us.

But that’s how I create them, with that mindset… I know that

people are less familiar with the sculpture (than the

collage)…my other obsession is this idea that not only is it

possible to recreate and reuse ideas and form and shape them

however you please, in that way that artists can. Material is

similarly susceptible and malleable. In this installation,

Suspended Playtime, I am really just in love with the way that

children make things…

33

Steve Bandoma: It does relate to the content as my work is

avant-garde according to the place I am living. So collages and

new media go well with it…Even putting colour on paper is

unusual in my country – so can you imagine! And the work [I

make] is sold by professional art dealers, and galleries...

Maurice Mbikayi: Both the form of the work and its content

inform each other, or I would say I produce work based on the

content that I develop, which is mainly the impact of

contemporary technology on society. In other words it’s my

perception of technology as an African and migrant, considering

its positive and negative impacts. Computer parts (or other

additional e-waste) are my main focused material. However, in

the process of working and depending on the context, I…judge

necessary or not to include ‘photo collage’ in some particular

work of art. For me, collage is symbolic of a kind of skin, as the

key term. When damaged (this skin) repairs itself. Initially, the

Skin concept was the Title of my Solo exhibition in South

Africa: it illustrates an African response to various injuries as

well as positive impacts of technology on the continent. Even

while exposed to these injuries, skin can be extraordinarily

resilient. Then I realized that fragments of pieces taken from

another context or reality, and transferred into another one make

a statement evocative of Africa and the West’s trade relations,

not to mention capitalism and consumerism. It's about Western

products reconceptualized into African realities and viewed from

within an aesthetic frame.

Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo:

My art provides the creative space for experimentation, a

territory in which I try to co-habit painting, installation,

performance and the act of joining recycled images from fashion

magazines and photographs. I use all the means of expression

available to me as a vehicle, a lens through which I highlight the

political, social and economic situation in the world staging

interventions through my work by recreating.

Question 3

Helen: How is history present in your work? What about the

human body in your work – is it a contemporary human

body?

Wangechi Mutu: I have obliterated the face and placed it on top

of that as a gesture for eradicating identity…The mugshots that I

have done are from images that…remind you of a police

mugshot. This is the typically ethnographic thing to do….I have

redone my mugshots in the way that I see people and things…but

also to confuse the eye because I think there’s something about

seeing things from a distance and thinking you see one thing,

then coming closer, even if it’s psychological or historical or just

personally, and what happens in that process of moving closer or

further away from the image. So these are all taken from actual

pictures from this particular series of photographs…I have

continued this mask or profile theme in my work for some time

now. This is a medical series which has a focus on the

gynaecological diseases of the female reproductive organs…

specific textbook illustrative style…I was in awe of these

pictures when I first got them…I started placing features on

them, and before I knew it they were these sort of characters, and

these personalities. More recently I have started to play with the

disappearance of these multiple parts. I have thought about this

34

idea of not having skin…what that is like to have a sort of

unified look because we have no epidermis…

[speaking of Kevin Carter’s famous press picture of a small,

starving girl]…There’s a kind of a violence that happens in

photography, sometimes…there is something that happens,

where you kind of completely separate every other moment in

time, and you have this one thing standing for everything, then

onwards…this severing, this cutting thing is very much a part of

the world…using the female body as a…language to describe

everything – both things that are happening to women, have

happened mythologically, historically, and performance for that

matter…

Steve Bandoma: The human body in my work is my main

subject as I am fascinated by the future of humanity. The day

that they (human, machine and alien) will come together… I

wish I could be there by curiosity and see what will happen! My

human body is contemporary and futuristic. I like it being

grotesque and surrealistic. I am more concerned about the future

than the past.

Maurice Mbikayi: I visually and metaphorically portray Africa

as a body with an injured skin, needing a transplant: building up

an imagery of layers. The deconstruction (from images

decoupage to dismantlement or cut plastic) and reconstruction

into aesthetic narration suggest notions of transplantation or graft

in order to compensate a damaged or missing part or skin -

reconstructing parts of history using sometimes a subversive

approach. In other words, the symbolic impression of collage in

my work offers the opportunity for conversations on several

level (like with skin itself).

Historical, socio-cultural, and environmental as well as

technological issues arise as the African continent has to grapple

with the detritus of obsolete technology (e-waste). The (forms

used) also speak of vulnerability, modern identity and difference.

Finally with the dominant presence of computer parts, my work

could be seen as the interpretation of encoded messages or socio-

cultural and political statements. With that in mind, this idea of

history and time, I really obsess upon how difficult it is to

represent a moment.

So for example, coming from Africa what of the things that I feel

is a problem…an absolute conundrum, but also an interesting

thing to tackle from a visual perspective is how an entire

continent is codified as archaic and old, as from the past. And I

always try to think, well what is the past, what does the past look

like? Does the future have shiny things, and the past not? Is the

past black and white? Is it sepia? I try to play with these

stereotypes. What is a sci-fi futuristic world, really? Time is this

thing that we are creating as we go along…that’s how our world

becomes this aestheticized space. I play with that assumption of

myself as someone who can understand the future and the

present, the past…and then I fuse them together, because in the

end they are malleable as visible elements in our minds, we can

mush them together. Everything today is in the present, whether

you go to Dubai with this incredible new architecture and new

money or you go to the Amazon, to a little village, they are in the

present…Something that I learned and wanted to learn in

anthropology. I wanted to understand why we are so convinced

35

that we can understand other people by looking at a specific

moment in their time...

Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo:

I was a member of the collective of young Congolese artists. We

tried to explore with passion and engagement free and innovating

creations. The collective was constituted as a framework to

exchanges the different experiences in our lives, spirits and

expressions, but also to fight for human rights and our freedom.

All the attempts are articulated around a concept which is called

Librisme. This is a movement of young revolutionary thinking

artists in the Democratic Republic of Congo and other countries

of the African continent, who are opposed to colonial and old

school academic art…

My technique of using cuttings to compose figures, bodies,

portraits and heads starting from fragments of faces and body

parts cut out from reviews in fashion magazines, in a multitude

of parts of unknown bodies is a way for me to recreate the

human body construct a new society and question the

multiplicity of races and the various challenges arising from this

multiplicity. The body is mutilated and chaotic, confronting us

with the chaotic situation reflected in current political and socio-

economic trends in Africa and worldwide. [From the artist’s

website].

When Vitshois was in Strasbourg, after completing his degree in

Fine Art in Kinshasa he had an exhibition at the School of

Decorative Arts on ‘The Body and power’, suggesting he

certainly deals with the body as a central theme in his work.

Question 4:

Helen: How do you connect local, global and national in your

work, if at all?

Wangechi Mutu: One thing you never see in adverts for Kenya

is people. It is like a safari place, like a big zoo…and the truth is

it’s an incredibly beautiful country…but there are people a lot of

them. And it’s not like the Lion King…We all know that but at

the same time that is what the media is feeding us and it’s what

trickles down even into the most intellectual spaces in our

lives…I first encountered Grace Jones from this program that

used to play on TV when I was a girl…They would have all

manner of horrific German pop music, and then a terrific

performance, and I remember seeing Grace Jones and at that

particular moment she was wearing a leopard print catsuit with a

tail, and everything to make her look like an animal creature…it

was the most horrific, gorgeous thing I’ve ever seen. What is this

woman, and why would she do this? So I know that’s kind of

embedded in my love and fascination for her.

Steve Bandoma: My work is not yet understood locally or

nationally. Here in Africa we developed stereotypes. This is the

reason why I don’t even sell my work in the region or in my

country.

Maurice Mbikayi: I would prefer to look at the experience as a

reverse triangle: I start from global, continental, national and

finally bringing it down to my own experience of Contemporary

Technology. But, to answer your question, as a Congolese I'm

concerned with the technological underdevelopment of a country

36

[i.e. Congo DRC] that provides 80% of coltan worldwide, at

blood price, with child slavery, and gets back junk technology.

The reliance on mining for natural resources for instance, has

made its people vulnerable to low-wage labour abuse, as well as

a range of issues beyond their control, dictated by international

economic markets. This has had a devastating impact on the

country’s cultural and environmental diversity. Contemporary

technology is an essential element in our society, not always

negative, but the DRC itself does not really benefit from it. Thus

I see my art as a tool for information and education on a global

level. My work is limited to raising questions, and

unfortunately I do not have the ability to provide solutions. To

summarize, I would say that I am more interested in presenting

an ambiguous and evocative work that allows the viewer to raise

their own questions, a sort of indeterminate or continuous

language that exposes the beauty, fascination and benefits

together with the prejudices and the ravages of contemporary

technology.

Vitshois: [in his artist’s statement he explains]: “Through art I

seek to represent the violence that has rocked the African

continent and the rest of the world and the law by which the

strong dominates the weak through guns trade and exploitation.

My work is also a reflection on the positive and negative effects

of a modern society dominated by multinationals and by

powerful people who apply justice according to their interests,

neutralizing the weak through the use of violence and war.

Wars, massacres, mutilation of populations, injustice, religious

and ethnic conflict, child soldiers, human rights violations, acts

of violence committed on women and children, these are

universally topical issues that are reflected in my work. The

mutilated bodies are a confrontation, making us aware of the

chaotic situation and reflecting on current contemporary conflicts

in Africa and in the world (for example the religious and ethnic

conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda,

Angola, Israel, Iraq, Palestine, Iran, Libya, Gaza,...and various

parts of the world.) In my art I question the catalysts of these

global conflicts and the impacts particularly on the African

continent and the world in general.”

[Vitshois is involved in African Artists for Development,

organised by some wealthy art-lovers on the grounds that:

“contemporary African artists’ commitment to development

projects is one of the best ways to secure a better future for the

continent” (AAD website). Vitshois designed the AAD logo

when he was studying at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. As

the AAD website says of Vitshois: “Bondo, who lives between

the Congo and the Netherlands, is one of the young African

contemporary artists seeking to turn away from ‘traditional’

clichés of Africa and confront their continent’s reality at the

same time as art in its global dimension.”

37

Question 5

Helen: Where would you situate your art work within

contemporary global art streams and markets? What other

artists do you feel close to? Who mainly buys (and sells) your

work?

Wangechi: Part of my fixation which is also hard to explain for

all contemporary Africans, is that there is this incredible gap, this

incredible left-overness, of colonisation, that is just reality. It has

to be filled with something, a language has to be created, life

must continue, nations must continue attempting to prosper. And

at the same time…we are all unable…the outside and the people

who live within the continent…unable to go back to the past. We

choreograph these realities for ourselves, in a true way, because

the information is not there, or if it is there, it is completely

tainted. So there is always a schism and there is desperation,

there’s melancholy, in what the African continent…represents to

many of those who don’t belong there.

[Wangechi is the only one of the four artists for whom gallery

purchases appear to outnumber private purchases. She has work

in MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and several

other museum collections in North America. Her work is also in

the Saatchi collection, based in London].

Steve: I see myself as a contemporary artist rather than as a

Contemporary African artist. I prefer to avoid stereotypes of

being an African artist. For me, before being African I was an

artist. Therefore I usually say: “My culture is my physic and my

art is my metaphysic”. My art is without borders. It’s dedicated

to humanity. I am now freshly entering the NY [New York] art

market; I know where I am pushing it. And I see myself

appearing in the Tatshen publication one day soon. I live from

my art; a very big challenge for many artists in Africa. This

means that the market for my work is good. I feel closer to, or

inspired by many artists such as Barthelemy Toguo, José

Bedia…My work is mainly brought by private collections,

museums and galleries. And it is sold by professional art

dealers; and galleries. My work is attaining a large public in

Europe and America… I work with gallery owners and art

commissioners such as Jack Bell Gallery in London; Antonio

Nardone Gallery in Bruxelles, Magnin-A in France.

Maurice: I would sincerely leave that answer to the experts in

the matter. My concern or passion is to produce works that

contribute to contemporary art history. That is why challenges

and creativity help me thrive as an artist to be more visible

within the contemporary art world. I would prefer to say without

exaggeration that my art is on the cusp of a global breakthrough.

It’s only a matter of working hard at it. I relate to artists like

Yinka Shonibare, Meshac Gaba and El Anatsui who I’m

researching on currently, because I have found common

concerns in their approaches [to mine] in terms of concepts and

materials, as well as the relationships to the West. Also to some

extent, they all subvert one’s expectations and distort the familiar

which I’m also doing. But I have a lot of admiration and respect

for Artists such as Marlene Dumas, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Wim

Botha, William Kentridge, Kehinde Wiley, Wangechi Mutu and

Abdi Farah to name but a few. My work is mainly bought (and

sold) by the Jeanetta Blignaut Art Consultancy, Nandos, and

Robert Sherwood Design. But there are also private South

38

African and international collectors interested in collecting a few

of my works.

Vitshois:

My art is neither limiting nor restrictive; instead, it reflects the

openness and dialectical denial of physical, geographical and

mental boundaries. Globalization leads to continuous random

exchanges. It is an expression of resistance to homogenization, to

the creation of a world of uniform people, but also a reaction to

the confusion of aesthetic codes and cultural references. My

approach is meant to present and examine the problems of Africa

in particular and the world in general. I create art to conscientize,

to show things in a different way, through elements

simultaneously hidden and revealed.

[I found that on Vitshois’ website, some purchasers were from

the corporate sector, or wealthy individuals in business. I

explore an example of this, later in this document].

Question 6

Helen: Do you associate making artwork with a sense of

homecoming, or with the journey and being a nomad?

Neither? Both?

Wangechi (from Penny W. Stamp Lecture): I had been away

from home long enough that I wasn’t just seeing home as one

place, and this new place as the other. But now I was seeing this

other creation, and that other creation was this possible

solution…to the binary that you always have when you are either

a foreigner or a minority or out of place in some way or another.

Maurice: 6. I would say both. Making art is a kind of journey.

Because it draws from my past experience in the DRC and that

of the present. Also, as an artist, I’m a citizen of the world. But

personally, I will always be physically and spiritually connected

to my source and family. Having said that, it’s doesn’t matter to

me, sometimes to be between two worlds for inspiration and

production. Some ideas and energies are more productive

depending on the environment.

Steve: I like traveling, being nomadic. But because of some

limitations in term of budget I don’t waste time. So I play with

both [being at home and being nomadic]. It depends… but when

I travel I get more and more inspired.

Vitshois:

I search myself asking questions about society, the cultural

encounter of humans as well as the dialogue between different

peoples. I try to make sense of my current realities, investigating

various means of expressing this reality through the hybridity of

my artistic journey and utilising the image of new territories to

research a true mobile identity….My creative vision is to awaken

consciousness through my art, through the subtle decomposition

of body parts in recombined compositions, assemblage and acts

of joining, I veil and reveal at the same time. My work is a

mirror of the negative effects of a contemporary world,

dominated by political, religious and ethnic conflicts.

39

II-3 Now what?

The art of Maurice Mbikayi, Steve Bandoma and Vitshois

Mwalumbwa Bondo is partly about their home country of

Congo-Kinshasa, just as Wangechi Mutu’s art is partly about

Kenya. Yet it is far more about the globalised world we live in,

all of us, whether we realise it or not. All these artists have

travelled more than they have stayed still. They are often away

from ‘home’, and indeed home may be wherever they are at that

time. Yet each of them goes back to somewhere when their

studies, their tour, their artist in residency is over, because of the

way the world is organised, the visas, the restrictions, the

problems. As far as I know, the only one of the four who has a

‘Western’ passport is Wangechi. She is also the only one who is

in the top 500 artists in terms of sales, and whose work hangs in

several major museum and gallery collections in the West. She

can travel more or less where she likes, and should not have

excessive difficulty obtaining visas for most countries. Mobility

is less likely to be a problem for her.

For Steve, for Maurice and for Vitshois, mobility must be a

major headache. And unless they one day ‘become’ Dutch,

British, Belgian or Chinese, they will continue to have trouble

travelling as if they were nomadic. However free their spirits,

however global their outlook, and however extended across the

globe their artistic kith and kin, and their art markets, they live in

a kind of open prison; they can leave DRC, but only if they are

invited, and only if they return.

The entire system of states operates more or less like a globalised

apartheid system, ensuring that ultimately, those who have

passports from countries outside the ‘privileged core’, are

obliged to return to ‘where they came from’, if they are to be

given a visa the next time. They return home, to strategise their

next move, and wait for the next opportunity to leave. No

wonder Steve Bandoma’s latest exhibition combined a chess

board with pieces of sculpture, representing traditional

Congolese sculpture, replicated fetishes. The need to be strategic,

anticipating your opponent’s moves by three or four steps, is

vital for surviving in the contemporary globalised art world, if

you are an artist living in DRC or even South Africa.

Wangechi Mutu grew up in UK and US, and it is interesting that

her nostalgia is very much for Kenya, whereas the feelings that

Steve and Vitshois express are not nostalgic for Kinshasa, but

rather look forward to travelling outside their country again. All

three Congolese-origin artists, Maurice, Steve and Vitshois,

relish departure rather than return, it does seem so. And little

wonder when all three have experienced home as a painful place

that does not see their art as ‘real art’. This is what Vitshois

referred to in his artist statement as a ‘chaotic megalopolis’, that

is also a ‘phantom’, a place where dreams are hard to realise in

contemporary art. It is about as difficult an urban environment as

any in which contemporary visual artists have to work, anywhere

on the planet. Very few artists would choose to live and work,

and sell their art in Kinshasa, if they had other choices.

Listening to their views, I found many resonances between how

these four global artists talk about themes of race, identity, skin,

the body, being in or out of place (mostly out). The stories they

tell are almost seamless, as if they were variations on a musical

theme. Their stories also resonate strongly with how I feel about

the place of art, and about crossing boundaries. They take being

40

out of place for granted, and this is also apparent in their visual

work, I feel. This may be why I have a strong affinity with their

efforts to ‘deconstruct’ normality, to recover and alter media

images, to challenge and change the powerful hold such images

have over our imaginations. These artists help me to continue

questioning what we mean by progress, and what role technology

plays, even though we may embrace it in our ways of working.

In her slide talk for art students, Wangechi showed several

images from Leopold’s Congo, including a famous picture of a

man who is seated on the front porch of a mission building, and

is looking at the tiny severed hands of his own child. This image

is haunting, and it haunts more people than just me and

Wangechi. It haunts the Congolese people, who tangentially

refer to such images in their work, with the severing of body

parts being a common theme in the images of Steve and Vitshois,

for example. Not directly, but perhaps because they fear this

revictimises the Congolese people all over again, visually such

references are indirect, but present nonetheless. It comes as no

surprise that sometimes grotesque severings, emptyings and

reconfigurings of the human body are pervasive across the work

of these four global artists.

When Wangechi talks of a cycle of violence that continues

today, unbroken from the colonial past, she captures what I have

been trying to say in my own work. I realise that more than any

of these artists, I am trying to accuse, to accuse Europeans of not

caring about the crimes of their ancestors, those pillagers, pirates,

criminals, thieves that we now name our streets after. Nelson,

Tasman, Washington, and so many others. All had blood on their

hands. All built what is known as civilisation. This is what I want

to explore in my own work. Wangechi has shown the rawness

and pain of the ‘colonial gaze’ of white people at black women,

whereas I have tried to implicate the Europeans in the wider

story, not to let them off the hook. Instead of simply

condemning, however, I have tried to find a lighter, more

palatable way to treat the painful topics of the ghosts of the past

– the torture, cruelty for economic gain, and advancement of the

market hand in hand with barbarism. All these are the price of

civilisation, or its market value.

On his website, Maurice Mbikayi explains: “My work is

primarily related with Identity, history and technology, and

seeking to interrogate socio-political boundaries. And as cultural

activist I’m interested in identity, origin and space. How an

individual can compromise, renegotiate space, and adapt to

become reborn. I also investigate the effects of technology on

identity and history, while unpacking the ways in which

technology has had an impact on diverse African populations. As

an artist, I draw on the numerous technological resources

available for realizing some ideas more efficiently. I particularly

focus on various ways in which the advanced technological

revolution of the last twenty years has both positively and

negatively impacted on the world generally and Africa in

particular. The reliance on mining for natural resources for

instance, has made Africa and its people vulnerable to low-wage

labour abuse, as well as a range of issues beyond their control,

dictated by international economic markets. This has had a

devastating impact on Africa cultural and environmental

diversity”.

In Wangechi’s talk well-known historical images from the

Casement Report were reproduced. The Casement report was

41

one of several reports that exposed the crimes of Leopold’s so-

called ‘Congo Free State’. The report’s author, Roger Casement,

was British Consul in Leopold’s Free Congo, later reported

similar atrocities in Putamayo in Peru, and was hanged during

World War I for treason, when he joined the Irish forces for

independence. Wangechi Mutu equates the horrible past of

Congo, for example, with present cycles of violence in Africa. In

her work, it is clear she is explicitly interested in history, and

interested in images from the past, often similar to those I have

used in my own Collage+ work with painting, projection and

photography.

For Wangechi, more than the three other artists, sexuality is an

explicit issue. She shows images of African women’s body parts

and is fascinated by legs, breasts, signs of gender. She explains

that Josephine Baker and Grace Jones both appeal to her because

of a fascination with stereotypes not fully controlled by those

who cater for them. Wangechi’s political messages in her work

are not always so explicit, however. Her concern is with the

place of the body amidst the violence of the past and the present.

In her talk, she referred to an even that took place when torture

was the norm in Kenya (during the 1990s), when victims would

be detained in Nyayo House, police headquarters in Nairobi, and

a building worthy of Orwell’s 1984 Ministry of Truth. People

disappeared, as Mutu explains, and mothers protested. When

one group of mothers took off their clothes to protest, however,

nobody – not even the police - dared touch them. Their

‘maternal flesh’ exposed, as Wangechi puts it, was deterrent

enough. She also talks in the video about horrendous medical

experiments in Nazi extermination camps during the Holocaust.

Her themes are universal, not specific to one continent, people or

set of experiences. Similarly, Maurice refers to Jacques Derrida

as a powerful influence on him. These artists are truly global

citizens, and they see themselves as such. Violence against the

Jews and violence against the colonised, says Wangechi, are

similar in form and cause. This is an idea close to my heart; race

as a concept continues to damage even though since the end of

World War 2, it is supposed to be over and done with as a

concept. Ideas can do damage; the idea of race, for instance,

killed one million people in Rwanda’s genocide.

What of traditional African art – how do these artists feel about

their relationship with the forms and representation of so-called

traditions in African art? Well, overall what we have seen in this

part of the study is that the artists selected have a remarkable

degree of coherence, in terms of how they talk about their work,

and how themes of globalisation, the body, the present, future

and past, are present in their work. Of course this may be why I

chose these artists, but I did not know what I would find when I

chose their images initially. In their work, form does appear

constantly to be wrestling with content. They do not fully fill up

the spaces in their work, and there is something restrained about

all their work. Each in his or her own way is working on subject

matter that involves a massive canvas – the global planetary

system, with its complexity of plethoric proportions, and its huge

mass of humanity. This canvas transcends the medium of Fine

Art and becomes planetary. In all four cases, the work these

contemporary artists produce spills over boundaries,

metaphorically and internationally. Talking with Felix Kaputu,

he reminded me that a nomad is a lucky person, and that a

contemporary global artists, cannot be anything but nomadic in

their identities if they are to be true to themselves.

42

Part III Towards a Logic of Decolonisation?

III-1 Nothing – not even art - lies outside the market

So, back to the global art market. All of the artists that I have

profiled here have to sell their work, in order to make a living.

None of them can stop working at art, without arranging another

means to survive. For this reason, I now return to the hard

business of buying and selling art, and the position of global

artists, including the many who have been struggling on the

periphery of global art markets, and trying to get their place in

global art networks. Here things may get a little uncomfortable,

since the market – including the art market - is hardly a place for

sentiment. Or rather, in the market, even sentiment has its price.

So we have seen that those who buy the art of this group of

artists includes collectors, galleries, and foundations. We have

heard of several galleries in Paris, Brussels, New York and

elsewhere. We have heard of some private buyers. In Wangechi

Mutu’s case, galleries and museums play a central role in buying

her work. She is perhaps the most fortunate of the four artists in

being successfully represented by three galleries. Her stars are

high, and she is invited to exhibit. No doubt, the sheer effort of

selling her work remains, but this task is shared by her assistants

and her enthusiasts, so that buyers and fans include art critics. It

may be hard to keep this up, and no doubt it takes its toll, but

Wangechi has enjoyed considerable success in recent years.

The global art market celebrates Wangechi, and she has made it

into the exchanges and networks that represent the open market

of US and European galleries, auctions and museums. This is a

market that seems to be becoming more open to the type of

globalised contemporary art that is represented by the work of

Maurice Mbikayi, Steve Bandoma and Vitshois Mwilambwe

Bondo as well. When Steve and Maurice both explain that they

feel their careers are taking off, they may be part of a wider trend

towards greater globalisation. Does this make the global art

market less colonial? We shall return to this in a minute.

Meanwhile, has the massive entry of Chinese art purchasers and

Chinese artists onto the global stage, made a difference? It is not

yet clear what difference it makes outside China, at least from

these four artists’ point of view, China is hardly visible. Indeed I

have found not one reference to China, to Chinese buyers, or to

planning exhibitions in China, from any of the four artists. I may

have missed something, and I admit I did not ask them this

question, but in future I would be interested to do so. Instead all

four artists appear to be selling their work only in the relatively

declining and densely inhabited markets of Western Europe and

North America. Brazil is also starting to figure as an interesting

place for artists to go, and work with other artists, as well as to

sell their work, and Steve Bandoma makes mention of this.

There is another, quite indirect, link with China, through the

work of another artist. Maurice Mbikayi spoke of the work of

Kehinde Wiley, for example, as one artist he admires. Wiley is

based partly in Beijing, and partly in New York. I return to

Kehinde Wiley’s work later, for another reason. This tentative

connection, however, is the only one I could find between these

43

contemporary artists and the huge Chinese market for

contemporary art.

In the same year that Basquiat posthumously became the world’s

most valuable contemporary artist in terms of the value of his

individually sold works, at auction, one would hope there would

be room for all four of our global artists, and many more besides.

In the European art market, global artists from the periphery are

often pushed to make work that appeals to European and North

American aesthetics and desires (Rhodes, 1994; Littlefield

Kasfir, 1999). This includes notably the ‘desire for the exotic’,

which Wangechi alludes to in her work, in the way she works

with stereotypes of women of African origin. The ‘old world’s’

yearning to get away from it all, to escape the confines of a

grubbily commercial life, and uncover the ‘authentic’ is strong,

and not new (Rhodes, 1994; Littlefield Kasifir, 1999). Many

Europeans would like to buy art that is warm, colourful, lively

and vibrant, a bit like Basquiat’s paintings, rather than a late

Rothko, even if they could afford it. Thus tastes in the art world

reflect common prejudices in daily life, sometimes in mirror

image. This is why globalising contemporary art does not

decolonise it, since the assumption of ‘otherness’ remains deeply

embedded in European cultural desires (Rhodes, 1994). The

marketising of contemporary, cutting edge art from artists of

African origin can therefore take some peculiar twists.

Colonialism formally ended once countries like Kenya and

Congo (and Haiti or the US for that matter) became independent.

However, the substance of colonial relationships of domination

can end only if relations of domination and subordination are

transformed into more equal relationships. As the world gets

progressively more unequal, decolonisation thus poses a real

challenge not only for the art world, but in general.

Art itself – we have tried to show citing Freud and others -

cannot challenge structural domination, nor can it overcome such

subordination, on its own. The weakest and most fragile part of a

work of art is perhaps its content. Whatever the message, and

however critical of the mainstream commercial society, there is

no work of art which cannot become fashionable, and thus be

translated into a monetary value on the market, so it is bought

and sold (Oguide and Enwezor, 1999). There are now markets,

for almost everything, from intimate sexual violence to plant and

animal (and even human) gene pools. Since the post-colonial

literature is vast, in this last chapter, I provide two specific

examples of how contemporary art markets, though globalised,

cannot be considered decolonised. These two examples are to

provide food for thought about a common assumption made that

a ‘business plan model’ can pave the way for artists to pursue

their artistic freedom whilst making a living, without expecting

support for the arts from governments and other public funders.

III-2 The Mysterious Forrest

According to his website, one of our artists has sold his artwork

to ‘Foundation Forrest’ and ‘George Arthur Forrest’. Seeing this

name, I knew I had heard it somewhere before. Was it during

earlier research on former Belgian Congo? I was intrigued and

went to look Forrest up in Google. Here he was, described as the

richest man in Congo, the Rockefeller of the DRC. Forrest was

born in Lumumbashi in the South of the country, in 1940. He

grew up in a family involved in mining, and later inherited the

business. Is he a cultured individual who spends his spare time

44

appreciating contemporary art? Does he buy the works of

Congolese contemporary artists to sell them on, for tax purposes,

or for pleasure? I am curious about someone who likes the

artwork of Vitshois, which we have already seen is challenging

and engaged. Unfortunately I have been unable to discover

whether Forrest likes art for art’s sake, since all the information I

can find on him comes from all the wrong sources.

I do now need to take care with what I say. George Arthur

Forrest is well-known for suing anyone who suggests he might

be doing anything improper in his business dealings. He has

already been accused of many things, including being involved

in manufacture of weapon parts, fraud in mining deals, and

illegal trading of minerals in war zones, including in the DRC.

In 2002, a UN Panel of Experts, reporting on pillage of DRC

mineral resources, named Forrest and his group of companies as

among those who had violated ethical guidelines in their

business deals. Indeed, the Panel of Experts recommended

imposing a travel ban on Forrest (UN Panel of Experts Report,

16 October 2002, para. 30). Before that, in 2000, the UN had

already investigated Forrest for allegedly collaborating with

UNITA guerrillas in Angola, and smuggling ‘conflict diamonds’

out of the country to sell on the international market. Global

Witness, the organisation that first exposed such corporate

misdoings in Angola in 1998, explained in their website: “In

2003, following several years of campaigning, and negotiations

between diamond producing and trading countries, industry and

civil society, the international diamond certification scheme

known as the Kimberley Process (KP) was established”.17

This

17

http://www.globalwitness.org/campaigns/conflict/conflict-diamonds (accessed 5 May

2014).

process was negotiated by de Beers, the South African diamond

giant. They were not the only parties accused of ‘blood diamond’

dealings, however.

One blogger said this about Forrest’s alleged arms dealings:

“Forrest will be mad as hell because you stated that his company

New Lachaussee is an ammunition company: he always claims

the company only supplies equipment which can also be used in

[an] ammunition company. Don't forget Forrest supplied the El

Doret (Kenya) ammunition factory with the necessary equipment

somewhere in the middle of the nineties. In 2005 he also tried to

export equipment to be used in an ammunition factory in

Mwanza (Tanzania). Although the Walloon government issued a

license, after the intervention of then minister of Foreign Affairs,

De Gucht, this same Walloon government cancelled the license”.

I am left wondering at the strangeness of markets in general -

why would George Arthur Forrest would buy art that is critical

of precisely the values of commercial exploitation and mining

that underpin the business in the Forrest group of companies.

Those who make millions from business often later sponsor

culture, the arts and humanitarian missions. Leopold considered

his mission to the Congo a humanitarian one. And the Carnegie

Fund provided the endowment to build the Peace Palace and run

its library in perpetuity. Perhaps there is no difference here?

The AAD, African Artists for Development, is another example

of how corporate business is taking on a key role in creating

networks for contemporary global artists, including in the

African continent in this case, and beyond. Perhaps surprisingly,

or perhaps not, the AAD has on its board of Advisors only

Europeans; here you find a Citicorps banker, a private banker,

45

and a doctor, for example. They are all no doubt to be

commended for their work with this foundation, which links

African artists with the practical health and development

problems of their continent and countries. In light of what we

saw about the alleged business activities of Forrest, however, I

am also led to wonder whether the advisors and AAD love art,

love development, or think that Africa may be a good place to do

charity, business, or both, in order to look good in Europe? I

wonder how their Advisory Board was selected, and why they

failed to make any connections with prominent and influential

Africans, whether in the continent or those living in Europe. I

certainly find it interesting that AAD’s network of partner

organisations are mostly small and/or struggling organisations,

which are financially very dependent. They include local HIV-

AIDS organisations in Africa, a theatre in Paris, and the United

Nations High Commission for Refugees, all causes that are

generally unpopular with funders. I therefore can only commend

AAD, since they fund issues of critical importance, which many

other donors avoid. Yet despite this, I am left wondering how

corporate sponsorship offers a way forward for contemporary

global artists.

The private sector’s role in the world of contemporary global art

and in fostering artists’ networks, including Africa, is growing

stronger. Arguably it has been this way for centuries in the

West. As with artists in the past, global contemporary artists on

the margins of the global art market, can hardly refuse to sell

their work to corporations and wealthy individuals, most of them

firmly located in the centres of the global art market. Opposing

commercialisation is not really an option for most contemporary

global artists. As Olu Oguibe notes, for those located at the

margins of the art world, if they object to doing business with

bankers, alleged arms dealers and Western critics, they will

simply be left out, and nobody except the artist would notice, as

“the object of the obliterative act now disappears together with

the evidence of its own excision, making erasure an act without

trace”, a scary prospect (Oguibe, 1999: 17). If artists refuse to

work within the potentially lucrative circuits and networks of the

global art market, they will cease to be noticed. As in Europe

already for centuries, now too in China, so too in Africa and on

the global contemporary art scene, it is a case of sauve qui peut.

III-3 Collage+: From Representation to Resistance

One of the profound problems with the whole idea of

decolonising art, or anything else for that matter, is that

implicitly, the focus remains on the colonial. This gives

attention, all over again, to the colonial, and perhaps more than it

deserves. The exhibitions and art work of all four global artists

chosen for this study, consists of complex fusions of elements,

combining collage with sound, music, smell, installations

involving sculpture, video, movement by the artist, projection

and text. Severed parts of a single, dynamic set of narratives are

brought together by the artists’ visions, by their unique view on

the universal. Rape, violence, love and beauty are all combined,

in one; their art is truly contemporary, and not place-bound.

As with the ‘decolonisation’- oriented work of Marlene Dumas,

sexual violence is exposed as an integral part of the exercise of

racial power and the exercise of pain over the body in the

African context. A lot of the artists’ images – in fact almost all of

them prior to 2012, have almost no background; images are

placed on a blank, or mono-coloured setting. I realised this when

46

looking at the early work of Bandoma, Mbikayi, Mwilambwe

Bondo and Mutu. One commentator says of Mutu’s work, for

example: “By situating her figures in nearly blank landscapes,

she creates an eerie connection between the deadened landscape

of war, the blank canvas of fashion shoots and the sterility of a

hospital operating room” (Heidi Kumso, Associate Professor,

Stamps School of Art and Design). I note this blankness and it

is indeed present in all four artists’ work. Up to a certain point in

time, the white background seems predominant. Images 32-35

show this clearly. The blank, empty backgrounds of the first

four images presented at the beginning of this study are also

strikingly empty of depth, line and context. Empty canvases are

strikingly characteristic of all four artists at a certain point. I

now want to interpret this puzzle, and will relate it to a literal

reading of the colonial, juxtaposing this with a look at more

recent work by the artists, which expresses some hope for

decolonisation. I realise, dear reader, that you may find it harder

to follow me into this argument than you have found it so far. I

therefore beg your indulge me a little while longer. Bear with

me, please whilst I explain this prevalence of white.

I could of course simply have asked each artist why they left so

many of their backgrounds blank in the past. I felt I had

bothered them with enough questions, however, and now I need

to puzzle out for myself why a white background is so pervasive

in their images. One common thread throughout these artists’

work is dislocation, and the dislocation and dismemberment of

the self, the human body, which suffers displacement expressed

in removal of the surrounding environment. The bodies depicted

in these artists’ work are not really at home, not really anywhere

specific; in a kind of nowhere space. On reflection, and looking

more closely, we can see more. Some of these global artists say

they feel at home in their wider artistic networks, and that they

enjoy inhabiting the world of fellow artists, galleries, art

institutions, agents and contacts. They inhabit these global

spaces, both in their artistic imaginations as nomads, and in the

flesh, through visits, exchanges, education and markets. The

cultural foundations and supportive institutions of this (mostly

white) world and its networks and agents, media institutions and

funding, critics and art experts, all mediate their access to the

networks they need in order to be able to work as global

contemporary artists. For all but Wangechi, the mediation of

these white-dominated institutions is also the means to travel, to

be able to leave, travel and encounter others, before returning.

My own interpretation of the pervasive white of the backgrounds

of these artists’ earlier works, is literal, and perhaps a bit

Freudian, or Fanonian.18

It is definitely post-colonial. To me, the

whiteness literally re-presents the powerful, mostly white, people

and institutions that are in the background, ruling over the

success or failure of these global artists’ entire life projects,

sometimes without even being aware of their own influence.

Those mostly ‘white’ and Western institutions, from Cape Town

to Kinshasa and from New York to The Hague, oversee and

make possible the sale and purchase of contemporary works of

art, including for these four global artists (though Wangechi is

somewhat less dependent on European elites, more on US

galleries and social networks). Olu Oguide talks of the artist

from the periphery, recognising the powerful position of the

18

The work of Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist who left his job with the French army and

joined the liberation movement in Algeria, has been very influential in thinking about the

psychological impact of colonialism.

47

Western critic: “he recognises this terrain as an outpost, a

location on the peripheries of the principalities that the critic

represents – a border post at which [the critic] is the control

official”(Oguide, 1999: 18). Those who judge artworks, charge

their commissions on sales, nominate artists for grants, for prizes

and for sponsored internships and so on, are the border guards of

the contemporary art market. Their confidence, or lack of it, can

make or break, ensure or undermine these global contemporary

artists’ resilience, their prospects, even the materials they are

able to work with. The white background is this, in my view –

this pervasive white shadow, this ghost of the colonial past.

Those white spaces that seem to overshadow the human body

parts in some of the artists’ images, are thus not absences or

nothingness, but the palpable sense of a mainly white, Western

set of individuals and institutions that dominate the global art

market and mediate access for these artists to the global sites

they rely on for relief, stimulation and technical development of

their work, as well as for sales.

There is a kind of white shadow that fell on these artists’ work,

and perhaps over their lives, in the past. It represents their

international admirers, their Western supporters, their

collaborators, the Western media which either reports or fails to

mention their latest exhibition. On the other hand, the world is

changing rapidly, and as we look at Images 32 to 35 and then

compare these with Images 36 to 39, we see that there are some

changes, and some signs of hope. I will explain.

By moving from collage to Collage+, all four of these

contemporary artists have managed to obtain more artistic range

and credibility, and a degree of success and recognition. They

are finding it easier than in the past to sell their work, and as this

happens, we see that the ‘white shadows’ that dominated the

background of their visual artwork has notably diminished. It is

as if their work is being decolonised; as if the white shadow that

hung over their images in the past, is lifting. With great caution,

therefore, I am tentatively proposing to interpret that as these

artists become more and more integrated into global networks of

successful contemporary artists, that they feel less and less

vulnerable to the opinions and tastes, the gate-keeping factor of

white, Western art critics, buyers and funders. The point here is

that the art market networks that until quite recently were heavily

dominated by Westerners and by white people, are rapidly being

globalised too; there is a palpable shift East, and a more subtle

shift South. This may sound crazy to you, dear reader. I can

imagine you think I may be making a joke. But I really do think

that the rapidly disappearing white backgrounds of most of these

artists’ work is a sign of hope, somehow. The global art market

may never be completely decolonised; yet contemporary global

art may manage to decolonise itself.

Whilst in 2008-9 or so, all four of these global contemporary

artists were working in remarkably similar styles, thereafter, with

Collage+, involving multi-media forms of artistic expression,

their respective styles have started to diversify. The backgrounds

too are now treated with more drama than before. Each artist

seems to have worked out new modes of combining techniques

through adding performance and projection, sculpture and new

styles of collage and painting. New colours and techniques have

emerged, despite noticeable continuities of content. Such shifts

in style did not happen overnight, of course, but gradually

48

IMAGES

Image 32: Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo Image 33: Steve Bandoma Image 34: Wangechi Mutu Image 35: Maurice Mbikayi

These images represent work from the artists from several years ago – between 2008 and 2011.

49

IMAGES

Image 36: Maurice Mbikayi Image 37: Steve Bandoma Image 38: Wangechi Mutu Image 39: Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo

To be compared with Images 32- 35 above, these images are more recent, dating from 2012-2014

50

IMAGES

Images 40 & 41: Kehinde Wiley

51

What has emerged in the more recent work of Images 36-39 has

much less of an absence in the form of the ‘white shadow’ that

dominated the works of 2008-2011 (Images 32-35). The work

somehow feels less alienated from its context, despite the subtle

changes involved. An assertion of presence is tangible. The

artists is no longer the ‘Other’, who is forced to say what the

critics want. Domination of Western expectations thus may have

less hold now over these artists, since in recent years they have

found some success in career terms, gaining recognition, awards,

visiting fellowships and commissions. Not only have they

gained confidence from their professional success, it does seem

that at the same time, the white shadow that dominated their

work before, is lifting somewhat. Although I consider it quite

possible that I am mistaken in this hunch, there are other critics

whose work suggests that I may be on to something. Oguibe

talks of African artists as ‘incarcerated’ in the “policed colonies

of Western desire” (Oguibe, 1999: 19). Harsh perhaps, but this

policing

Had I looked hard enough I could have found different images

by these same artists to tell a different story. So this is I agree

only one possible interpretation of the change in their work from

collage to Collage+. It is however my interpretation.

Similarly ‘flat’ backgrounds can be found also in the work of

some African American artists – think of Kara Walker’s use of

black figures against a white wall, and how colour projections

are used to complicate that duality (Image 10). Think also of the

decontextualized photos that Carrie May Weems chooses to

rephotograph (Image 9). When we look at the work of the

successful US artist Kehinde Wiley, here too we see a strong

sense that although the background is bursting with colour, the

bodies painted in the foreground are represented as out of place.

The people are depicted as disconnected from their immediate

environment, which lacks any sense of depth. It looks like

wallpaper, as can be seen in Images 40 and 41.

What Kehinde Wiley seems to have in common with the selected

global artists in this study, is a feeling of bodies and people out

of place. This notable sense of emotional detachment between

the human element and its surrounding environment is also

evident in Wangechi’s work and in the work of Vitshois,

Maurice and Steve. It is as if the bodies were plucked out of

space, and removed from the usual sense bodies have in

‘traditional’ paintings of somehow being ‘at home’. For artists

of African origin, human bodies that represent themselves are not

comfortable, that much is clear. Kehinde Wiley is now among

the first generation of African American artists to move from

West to East. Born in LA, Wiley now works in Beijing and New

York. His website shows Afro-Brazilians and Jamaicans, whom

he films and photographs for his paintings. He is quite self-

consciously a global artist, as well as pan-African, and he sees no

contradiction between all this.19

Like our four global artists,

Wiley places people of African origin squarely in the vacuum of

the global. They belong somewhere indefinable, everywhere on

earth, and they find themselves at home everywhere and

nowhere, floating against the white shadow, the wallpaper, as if

almost weightless, in outer space.

19

His website (under construction, at the time of writing) is:

http://www.kehindewiley.com/

52

Thus by 2012 or so, all but one of the four artists considered in

this study, had developed a way of placing figures within their

setting in a way that differed significantly from the earlier period

of 2008-2011, when the white shadow predominated. Now, the

backgrounds are either brought forward to become the frame, or

have taken on colour, shape and a certain vibrancy and life of

their own.

There is more colour, some space and room to breathe, and the

white shadows that dominated earlier work is almost gone –

except in the work of Steve Bandoma. In the recent work of

Maurice Mbikayi, Image 36 shows the face appear as if thrust up

against a windscreen, the frame composed by background

shadows. There is a sort of twilight semi-darkness glow in the

second work of Wangechi Mutu (Image 38). There is much

greater contact and engagement, even though it is quite subtle,

between the body depicted and its surroundings, than in the

earlier work (Image 34).

Vitshois was never as keen on white backgrounds as the others,

and indeed has used shades of red a great deal, well before 2011,

and including to dramatic effect in his exhibition at the

Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, as discussed earlier. Vitshois has

surrounded his bodies with colour, especially bright red, for

much longer that the others. Indeed, he was never keen on

white.

The work of Steve Bandoma is the exception to progressive

reduction of the white shadow in the work of these artists. In

Steve’s work, the image is still depicted outside of space and

time, and the white still predominates. This may be a deliberate

choice he makes to show the white shadow, or it may be that he

has remained with this style of collaging intact. A sense of

alienation has seemed to survived intact, in Steve’s work.

Although the white background may have some other meaning, it

does seem that for Bandoma, the white background serves a

similar purpose to the wallpaper flowers in Wiley’s work; it

alienates the figure from its setting. This may be appropriate

(Image 37) since from 2013-2014, he decides to depict the

fetishes of Western imperialism, in a way that self-consciously

mocks the ‘desire for the primitive’ among Western art-lovers. It

seems appropriate, therefore, that his backgrounds remains

predominantly white. In an earlier exhibition on Guantanamo,

Steve Bandoma used white paper to powerful effect, when paper

visibly distorted as wet ink and collage combined on its surface.

Distortion, decontextualisation, separation, alienation; these are

themes he wishes to engage with; and his ‘emptied out’

landscapes fit this well.

In the case of Maurice Mbikayi, his shift may not be as great as

the difference between Images 35 and 36 suggest. However,

there does seem a different, more immediate engagement with

the viewer in the second image. Mbikayi is not ‘filling up a white

space’ with various signs. Instead he combines simple elements

in a very graphic way to form both the image and its own frame.

The result is more direct than most of his earlier work; there is

less decoding required. The computer parts have become clearly

visible, and the image asserts an identity, rather than presenting a

playful ambiguity around aestheticism and critique, as with

Image 35.

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III-4 Endthoughts

Each of these four artists has been successful, creative and

remarkably resilient, and each in their own way. As well as

being forward-looking, and in spite of their worries, depressions,

and the traumas they may carry with them from the past, each is

actively engaged in pushing forward the boundaries of

contemporary art, not only in the African continent, or in North

America, but globally. From our communications, from their

websites, blogs, interviews and videos, they are all evidently

passionately attached to being known as multi-media artists.

Steve is perhaps the only one of the four who still appears to be

more grounded in collage as such than in a range of 2-D and 3-D

Collage+ work, which combines projection, film, collage,

painting and performance. Wangechi and Vitshois are both

moving into film, and in Vitshois’ case he is moving into

collaborative work that extends beyond his own visual art

visions.

Wangechi Mutu has become an artistic celebrity, and is now

working with other celebrities, including singers, fashion

designers and other well-known artists. Gender and sexuality

plays a critical role in her work, and I would have liked to have

more time to reflect on how gender, race and class inter-connect

in the work of all four artists. Wangechi can certainly be

distinguished from the three male artists, since her work is less

often ‘heroic’, and generally much more quirky than theirs. The

men’s work is more overtly political, in all three cases, but they

barely comment on sexuality, which for Wangechi is core, much

of her work being about female worlds.

Dear Reader, your patience has finally been rewarded, and the

study is coming to an end. Under the surface of this short history

of recent art works by some very talented, multi-faceted global

artists, lies the whole foul, seething and also creatively powerful

venture of colonialism. With its plethora of lies, its violence and

its unleashing of new technological capacities, fortunes,

millionaires and broken ideals, colonial history is the ground on

which the seeds of these artists’ work is still planted. Yet it is in

the future that these seeds will grow fruit, and that will taste

sweet.

Maurice, Steve and Vitshois are interested in the past, but it is

Wangechi who delves deepest into colonial and post-colonial

history. With her therefore I feel this common understanding

that never for a minute should the colonial past be forgotten, with

its cold dismemberment of human potential. Calculating cruelty

connects Leopold’s profitable rubber ventures in Congo, the gas

chambers of Auschwitz, the torture of Mau Mau and the killing

of Patrice Lumumba. In all these cases, there were also forces

working for justice, and for hope, and they will be rewarded in

the longer-term.

As Steve said in his answers to my questions, he is oriented

towards the future, indeed the science fiction future of robots.

Wangechi too has a futuristic vision, showing a ‘space age’

music video in her talk. Vitshois has been involved in making a

sci-fi series for Congolese TV, set decades into the future, where

desperate Europeans are trying to immigrate into Africa and are

being treated how Europe treats immigrants today. Maurice

looks forward to graduating, and recommencing his engagement

with the global art market. To a large extent, it is as if

54

acknowledging the past and envisioning the future go hand in

hand. Whether colonial or not, victim, victor or both, we are all

linked to one another, as surely as we are connected to the

galaxies. From a historical perspective, justice is slowly being

done for those whose lives were broken for profit and dominance

in the colonial past. These four artists taught me – as did my

teachers and fellow students at KABK - that to acknowledge the

past one has first to look forward. It is as if Walter Benjamin’s

Angel of History turned around to face the future and had

become the Angel of the Future. I felt obligated, as well as

strangely entitled, to do this study. And I am more convinced

than ever of the need to continue working to decolonise and open

up the contemporary art world.

Image 42: General China’s Trial (self) Image 43: Scotland, Congo (self)

55

References

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Badoui, Alain (2007) The Century, Polity Press: Cambridge-Malden MA.

Baricco, Alessandro (2013) The Barbarians: an Essay on the Mutation of Culture, translated by Stephen Sartarelli, Rizzoli: Rome-Kindle Books.

Bonita Oliva, Achille (2002) Art Tribes, (exhibition catalogue, Galleria Communale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome) Skira

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Freud, Sygmund (1929) Civilisation and its Discontents. Pdf available at:

http://www2.winchester.ac.uk/edstudies/courses/level%20two%20sem%20two/Freu d-Civil-Disc.pdf [accessed 2.3.2014].

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National Geographic (2013) Urban Pulse of the Congo: The miracle of Kinshasa is that amid the chaos of this capital city, artists survive and

thrive, October, at: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/09/kinshasa-congo/draper-text

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Arts), London.

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and Displacement, London-New York: Routledge.

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outlived its usefulness in international affairs?”, The Globalist, July 17, accessed at:

http://www.theglobalist.com/how-power-really-works-in-the-21st-century-beyond-soft-hard-smart/

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APPENDIX 1: A brief history of art in Congo

The two capital cities of Kinshasa and Brazzaville face one another across the Congo River; the countries are known as Congo-Kinshasa and Congo-

Brazzaville. In spite of promises by Leopold, the arrival of European ‘civilisation’ here did not end slavery. The school textbooks Congolese were later

allowed to read in school boasted of the great achievements of the Belgians and French respectively, bringing civilisation and Christianity to Africans who had

previously lived in ‘darkness’. In fact, it is estimated that under Leopold, almost half the estimated population of 20 million died from forced labour and

massacres of whole swathes of the interior in Leopold’s Congo, in just over two decades. The best source on this period is probably still Adam Hochschild’s,

Leopold’s Ghost (1999).

There are a few films about Congo, some books and there are quite a lot of UN troops stationed in the country, but there is still too little attention for the

creativity of the Congolese and the vibrancy of their cultural life. In spite of all their suffering under colonialism, since the start of the present war in 1997,

another ten million people have died in the DRC from war, disease and slavery-like poverty. Congolese seem to have been dying for the sake of the wealth of

the country for too long: gold, coltan and cassiterite are among the minerals mined there; and of course, diamonds, since Europeans first arrived looking for

ivory, and found rubber.

As the River Congo winds like a huge serpent from far West to South, passing via the North-East of DRC and through the Congolese Republic’s densely

forested interior, its course carries echoes of extreme cruelty and greed which resulted in the people of the Congo becoming beasts of burden, and being bullied

and worked to death, literally, by the very people who claimed to bring civilisation and the cross to light the way of that ‘darkness’. You will notice that the

word darkness has been used twice, in inverted commas. The Congolese were not treated as human beings, for the most part, although even a man as hard and

ruthless as Stanley admired the Congolese he met for their business sense, their interest in trade and their hard work. Hard work is also something apparent

among Congolese artists, who not only mix many different artistic media, but also tend to exhibit prodigiously once they manage to move beyond Kinshasa or

Brazzaville.

The Academie des Beaux Arts in Kinshasa was created by clergy in 1949, and in 1951 Pierre Lods, a French soldier, founded the Poto Poto School of Painting

in Brazzaville. The latter especially had influence well beyond the Congo, and its staff and students pioneered a renaissance in African painting during the

1950s and 1960s. In 2002, Poto Poto was awarded the Picasso medal by UNESCO (Congo site website). In 1956, the school of Poto Poto was already

studied by academics in France, and an article was published by Jean-Paul Lebeuf, in the journal Africa. Lebeuf claimed that borrowings from Western art

were not that evident in the work of Congolese artists at that time. He stressed the local religious practices and cultures were influential, although his argument

seems not that convincing, as I will now show. Already by the 1930s, Congolese people were converted en masse to Christianity, and were already aware of

currents in European art. In some ways, they were part of wider global ‘streams’ of art that could perhaps be described as tribal, but were not only tribal; there

was definite resonance in many of the paintings with the work of European painters at that time. In this short article, the author shows how shamanistic and

traditional religious ritual practices inspired many of the artists in the Brazzaville painting school. However, whereas Lebeuf suggests that the work of Francois

Thango and other Poto Poto artists was removed from the main currents of European and wider art, I would question if this was entirely valid. Perhaps Lebeuf

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did not sufficiently acknowledge the ‘animalistic’ or ‘shamanistic’ current that was emerging again in European art at that time. The work of Thango can thus

be compared with, for example, the work of Jean Dubuffet or Francois Leger (see images below).

One student from the Poto Poto School of Painting was Francis Thango. Thango’s images were mostly made in the 1960s, and his work has remained quite

famous and sought after ever since. He was born in Congo Brazzaville, and after being at the Poto Poto school of painting, moved to Congo Kinshasa. This

was shortly after he represented the academy at the Universal Exhibition at the Evoluon in Brussels. His work reminds me of a modernist hybrid of elements of

Braque, Leger and Dubuffet and the African traditional masks painted by Picasso some decades earlier.

At the start, this study asked about art tribes after the work of Achille Bonito Oliva and the exhibition of that name more than a decade ago (Bonita Oliva,

2002). For Congolese artists, the term ‘tribal’ could have been inappropriate, so whilst the art tribes idea influence my vision, it was not the right term to use.

The freedom of movement that tribal life should imply is not there, in reality of course. Border restrictions are a major stumbling block for new global and

tribal identities emerging and consolidating in contemporary art. Some artists cannot even get visas to their own exhibitions.

One of the best depictions for those who wish to understand the complex reasons that Congo-Kinshasa in particular, has been at war, and remains in such a

mess, in spite of elections taking place twice already, then this animated cartoon by one of the country’s foremost cartoonists is very telling:

http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/features/congo_for_launch/index.html This brilliant short film of 3-4 minutes is drawn by Anthony de Bibo, which may

be a pseudonym for one very popular Congolese cartoonist accompanied by a more serious report by Human Rights Watch, dating from 2008, but still relevant

some five to six years later. By now the opposition, including Bemba, are either in prison, dead or in Bemba’s case, locked in Scheveningen prison and

standing trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/features/congo_for_launch/resources/pdf/WeWillCrushYou.pdf Thus in The Hague, we cannot imagine Congo-Kinshasa

as far away. Not only is it the source of gold, diamonds, timber, cassiterite, coltan and many other minerals and products from its soils. It is also the bread and

butter of the City of Justice and Peace, with the first ICC conviction being of a relatively minor Congolese warlord, Thomas Lubanga Dyilo.

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APPENDIX 2: PERFORMANCE ART BY ALL 4 CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS

1. VITSHOIS MWILAMBWE BONDO

Protest against neo-colonialism

In Kinshasa, Bondo drapes Western consumer goods over his body in an artistic performance that protests against the West plundering his country's natural

resources and local poverty. "I show how a people is monopolized, manipulated, incapacitated and robbed of its options," says the artist. Source:

http://www.dw.de/artists-question-the-un/g-16856305

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2. STEVE BANDOMA

Two performance pieces from Steve Bandoma (2007 and 2009). ENGLAND (right)

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3. WANGECHI MUTU

On the left Wangechi Mutu photographed by Annie Liebowitz for Vogue, with her installations The first-ever Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year award, which

aims ‘to promote young contemporary artists from all over the world’, was won by Wangechi Mutu (described as ‘African multi-media artist). Mutu was

selected by the Deutsche Bank Global Art Advisory Council consisting of big-time curators Okwui Enwezor, Udo Kittelmann, Hou Hanru and Nancy Spector.

On the right, a still from a film made and designed by Wangechi Mutu. She seems less interested in performance than in film, installation and multi-media

work. The text reads: “Kenyan-born visual artist Wangechi Mutu has collaborated with creative badass Santigold for her animated short film, The End of

Eating Everything, presented by Duke University and the Museum of Contemporary Art’s YouTube channel, MOCAtv. Last summer, Mutu was tapped as a

part of Afropunk Pictures’ Triptych short film series at the Brooklyn Museum, but this is the artist’s first foray into animation”.

http://www.okayplayer.com/news/santigold-awangechi-mutu-the-end-of-eating-everything-animated-short-film.html

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4. MAURICE MBIKAYI

The performance work of Maurice Mbikayi. Voices, 2010. South Africa. The artist says: Public performance (Grand Parade, City Hall, Cape Town/SA,in

collaboration with Dominique Jossie).I portray in this work my personal experience in a foreign country. In this work I explore elements of an existing

relationship between a new country and me. Things that are subjects of questionings and debates. I’m inspired in this performance living in a Cosmopolitan

society and experiencing a multifaceted reality (of cultures, tribes, languages and races). I therefore approach the question of Identity and differences. My

experience as a foreign black male living in a constant uncertainty; sometimes can make one defensive.

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MORE NOTES ABOUT THE CONTACT-MAKING PROCESS

i Wangechi Mutu talks about ‘My Dirty Little Heaven’, Penny W. Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series, Wangechi Mutu, Acts of Translation.

ii Hi there - this is the facebook where I keep my art stuff. I hope you will be willing to talk/write to me about your work. Thanks. Helen Hintjens 22 January 20:51

Cher Vitshois je fais une etude sur votre art, et les images de deux autres artistes d'origine congolais que vous conaissez - Steve Bondo et Maurice Mbikauyi - le dernier en

Afrique du Sud. Si jamais vous etes au Pays Bas, ce sera une honneur de faire un entretien avec vous. Avez-vous un e-mail pour que je puisse vous envoyer le sujet de mon

'these' (KABK, Den Haag part-time fine art). Merci beaucoup! Trans: Dear Vitshois I am doing a study on your art, and the images of two other artists of Congolese origin

whom you know – Steve Bondo and Maurice Mbikayi – the latter in South Africa. If ever you are in The Netherlands, it would be an honour to have an interview with you.

Do you have an e-mail where I could send you more about the subject of my study. He replied: “Hi, Helen thanks so much for thinking of me when doing your research I

come to Amsterdam every year, because I have a lot of friends in Amsterdam and Holland I will be in Holland around September, maybe even before September” [translated

from French].

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Collage by Maurice Mbikayi Collage/Projection Helen Hintjens Collage Projection: Helen Hintjens

June 2014

KABK, The Hague