ARTAFRICAin public space. Faith47’s murals have been seen on walls and billboards from Soweto to London
and, more recently, Brooklyn, where a piece intended to protest the recent jailing of an Iranian artist
was unexpectedly vandalised; its universalist symbolism regrettably tarnished by the Islamophobic
sentiment now sweeping across America (the mural depicted a veiled woman whose lips were absent,
signifying her censorship).
Beyond the powerful sense of urbanism invoked within a white cube space in Chelsea, it is always
interesting to witness how a street artist translates the somewhat improvisational nature of their work
into gallery contexts. As such, the most rewarding works in the exhibition may have been Faith47’s
mounted and framed collages, in which varied articles of printed matter are pressed flat into tight,
two-dimensional compositions – a stark contrast to the brimming installation at the back. Despite
the exhibition’s overall likeness to the play of the unconscious, works such as Reciprocal Altruism,
Merci Ste Mere and The World’s Last Mysteries are not as reminiscent of Dada and Surrealist collage, but
recall, instead, the post-war shift to flatbed pictorial space, as identified by Leo Steinberg in the art
of Robert Rauschenberg and later Pop artists. As Steinberg understood it, this impulse to reenact
the scattering of images over surfaces such as “tabletops, studio floors, charts, [and] bulletin boards”
was representative of “the most radical shift in the subject matter of art, the shift from nature to
culture.” Culture is, indeed, ever-present throughout ‘Aqua Regalia – Chapter II,’ owing to the artist’s
almost anthropological collecting of images and ephemera from around the world. But there is no
clear separation between the two, as Steinberg would have had it. Her installation connects and
overlays references to both human and natural worlds, paying homage to the physical and energetic
relationships between civilisation and its environments.
AQUA REGALIA – CHAPTER II / ALLISON K. YOUNG 3/4 ARTAFRICA
REVIEWSFaith47, Yearning, 2015.
Graphite, ink and oil on canvas, 122 x 91 cm.