Financial Times Europe - 09.11.2019 - 10.11.2019

9 November/10 November 2019 ★ FT Weekend 17

R

omuald Hazoumè can create

a face with just two objects —

objects you might find on the

street, if you lived in Porto

Novo, Benin, as he does.

“Romanella” (2018) consists of an old-

fashioned handheld fan and the top of a

plastic petrol canister. Mounted on the

wall, the canister’s handle becomes a

long nose, its opening the O of a mouth,

and the fan a shock of hair, or a fancy

headdress — like a Roman centurion.

Hazoumè’s lively faces — each with a

different kind of petrol can — are the

first works you encounter in

Life Through Extraordinary

Mirrors, an exhibition at the

October Gallery in London,

which brings together seven

artists who live in Africa or

have African heritage. They

span several different media

and generations, from those

born in the 1950s to 1990s.

Though more often sur-

real than naturalistic, their

work is figurative, not

abstract. Itreflects the

material realities the artists

see around them, hence the

“mirrors” of the exhibition’s

title. They are all working

in, or speaking to, a tradi-

tion of African artists who

make work from the detri-

tus of everyday life —which

includes the majestic bottle-

top tapestries of El Anatsui,

frequently selling formore

than £1m at auction. Such

materials suggest both the

informal economies and

Korakrit

Arunanondchai

Korakrit

Arunanondchai,

born in 1986, was

once a rapper in his

native Thailand, but

quit the industry

when music execs insisted he lose the

bandmates. They were clearly on to

something in backing him as a soloact:

since swapping music for visual art, his

dizzyingly immoderate multimedia

works — films and installations shot

through with ghosts and gods — have

found fans among a very global cool

set. Arunanondchai has work at four

international biennales this year and

a just-opened exhibition at Secession

in Vienna.

Neil Beloufa

French-Algerian

artist Neil Beloufa,

34, makes

installations about

technology and

power, ideally both

at once: his 2018

show at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt

turned on soldiers’ use of social media.

Beloufa lso produces work thata

questions the stranglehold of the

gallery system. Still, he knows how to

play the game — a year ago he hitched

his wagon to prestigious dealer Kamel

Mennour, and was rewarded with a solo

show and a booth at Frieze London.

Jordan Casteel

Jordan Casteel

transforms the

inhabitants of black

neighbourhoods in

the US into

monumental

paintings that

challenge historic precedent for who

gets to be represented in portraiture —

it’s why she called last year’s major

museum show at the Denver Art

MuseumReturning the Gaze. Casteel,

born in 1989 and based in Harlem, has

the sort of momentum behind her that

would easily allow her to paint full time,

but she is also a tenure-track professor

at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Joy Labinjo

It was only last year

that Joy Labinjo,

born in Dagenham

outside London in

1994, was hosting

her first exhibition

at the community-

focused Morley Gallery.In October, with

new representation from Tiwani

Contemporary, she was one of Frieze

London’s success stories. Her brightly

patterned portraits — mostly inspired

by her British-Nigerian family’s old

photo albums — were all sold within

two hours of thefair’s VIP opening.

Labinjo’s first major show,Our Histories

Cling to Us, opened at the BalticCentre

for Contemporary Art the same month.

Christina

Quarles

The preternaturally

bendy women in

Christina Quarles’

paintings collapse

and collide with

each other, creating

figurative

abstractions that she labels “portraits

of inhabiting a body”. Quarles,34,

wants to convey the experience of

having multiple (often hidden)

identities: in her case, being mixed-race

but mistaken for white. The Los

Angeles-based artist is currently

keeping impeccable company at the

Hepworth Wakefield, where she has her

first European solo show alongside

David Hockney and Alan Davie.

Harriet Fitch Little

Material

realities

African and diaspora art| A cross-generational

exhibition brings together artists who are holding

a mirror to society. ByGriselda Murray Brown

Clockwise from top left:

‘Kubwa Macho Nne —

American Darts’ by Cyrus

Kabiru (2015);

‘Oubliez le passé et vous

perdez les deux yeux’ by Eddy

Kamuanga Ilunga (2016);

‘Romanella’ by Romuald

Hazoumè (2018); ‘Nkisi’

by Cosmo Whyte (2014)

Tony Meintjes; Annalisa Banello;

Jonathan Greet; Julie Yarbrough

global forces at play in the cities from

which these artists draw inspiration.

Hazoumè’s plastic canisters nod to the

men and women who ferry petrol ille-

gally between Nigeria and Benin, as well

as riffing on the “tribal” masks beloved

of 20th-century artistssuch as Picasso

and Braque.

Born in 1962, Hazoumè is one of the

older and more established artists in the

show, and his ideas are picked up in

other pieces. Like the best group shows,

it’s a conversation: the connections

between the works unforced but un-

mistakable. On the opposite wall is

“Rumplesteelskin” (2017), a large piece

by Hazoumè’s contemporary Zak Ové

(b.1966), who lives in London and Trini-

dad. It’s another face, this time com-

posed of scrap metal: a Morris Minor

grille and bonnet to form a head, and a

pair of blue car doors from a VW Beetle

turned upside down like a pair of sun-

glasses. Like Hazoumè’s, it is instantly

recognisable as a face, and more than a

face: its materials, the scratched and

dented car parts, tell a story of use.

Here the everyday is transfigured but

not transformed: it is an art object, but

one that retains the memory of its

former life.

Eyes and faces loom large in the show;

so too does a sense of makeshift ingenu-

ity. It’s there in “Kubwa Macho Nne —

American Darts” (2015) by the Kenyan-

born Cyrus Kabiru (b.1984), a photo-

graph of the artist wearing a giant pair of

glasses —although in place of lenses

there’s an intricate structure of metal

wires, so that they resemble dartboards.

The show’s curation is light-touch;

there are no lengthy captions or wall

texts, leaving the viewer free to make

connections between the works. It’s a

dialogue between generations, materi-

als, places and faces. Next to Hazoumè,

opposite Ové and Kabiru, is perhaps the

show’s most naturalistic face: “Teireik”

(2019) by the French artist Alexis Pesk-

ine (b.1979). From a distance, this

portrait of a black man seems to be

rendered in a dark paint; closer up, hun-

dreds of gold-leafed nails reveal them-

selves. The ails are of different sizes,n

cance of ancient indigenous beliefs. A

man in a suit and bare feet stands on a

rock by the edge of the water; he is wear-

ing hundreds of colourful tiesthat cre-

ate a sculptural form on his chest, like a

Nkisi. The ties cover his eyes; his head is

bowed. It’s an arresting image — strange

and surreal — but hard to read. Has this

modern man been liberated or con-

sumed by the ancient spirit?

Whyte is one of the younger artists in

the show. The youngest is the Congolese

painter Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga

(b.1991), a fast-rising star of the African

scene who had a breakthrough solo

show at October Gallery last year. His

painting here, “Oubliez le passé et vous

perdez les deux yeux” (2016), depicts

one woman resting against another,

their heads downcast, a child attending

them. Its stylised pyramid composition

echoes Old Master paintings, each figure

swathed in cloth of a different primary

colour. The colours are flat, and the fig-

ures float against a grey background: a

melancholic moment frozen in time.

But they are from the present day: the

electronic circuitry inscribed on their

skin is a reference to the tantalum used

in electronics, which comes from coltan,

a metallic ore that is mined by hand in

the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Illunga invests so much in this

moment, centuries collapsed on the

smooth, flat surface of his canvas.

Illunga is the only painter in the

show, and this is one of the few

two-dimensional works on display.

But next to Hazoumè’s petrol cans, Ové’s

car parts and Peskine’s coffee grounds

and nails, Illunga’s concern with the

connection between natural resources

and globalised commodities comes to

the fore. Like the other artists here, his

work explores the connection between

the material reality of life, and the forces

that shape it.

To November 23, octobergallery.co.uk

Like the best group

shows, it’s a

conversation: the

connections between

works unforced but

unmistakable

hammered into the wooden board to

form the features of the face; the board

is stained with mud and coffee. “Teir-

eik” reads like avisual metaphor for

the coexistence of beauty and suffer-

ing. It speaks of the exploitation of

African bodies and natural

resources, past and present.

Peskine’s nails also reference

the Nkisi power figure of the Congo

basin, a spiritually invested object

thought to ward off evil. In her nail-

studded model boat hulls, the Irish-Ni-

gerian artist LR Vandy (b.1958), too,

evokes not only the transport of goods

and people but the Nkisi. Mounted on

the wall her little boats become masks,

animated with new meaning.

In his photograph “Nkisi” (2014), the

Jamaican artist Cosmo Whyte (b.1982)

plays with the contemporary signifi-

FIVE TO WATCH Rising stars in the visual arts

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NOVEMBER 9 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 11/20197/ - 17:08 User:andrew.higton Page Name:WKD17, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 17, 1