By Alessia D’Introno

The artist does not necessarily work to construct new forms, but their ability often lies in the capacity to bring to the surface memories, bodies and knowledge that dominant paradigms have concealed, excluded or marginalised. Their intervention can open cracks within inherited narratives, bringing to light what has been silenced and restoring other ways of seeing to the present. The artist’s most radical work therefore lies in her ability to bequeath new perspectives by challenging the historicised past. These were some of the premises which, from the 1960s onwards in the West, shaped feminist thought and its entry into the art world: a response to an intolerant, male-dominated culture defined as the only possible trajectory. However, feminisms have never been a single movement nor a homogeneous experience. They emerged and evolved from different territories, bodies and historical contexts.

Second-wave feminist movements in the West introduced a radical critique of patriarchal culture both within and outside the art system, whilst in many African countries women’s demands were intertwined with processes of decolonisation and national independence. In different contexts, women have used their own bodies as a weapon and joined civil protests. The rules dictated by patriarchy produced, and continue to produce, the same pattern as that of colonialism: submission and silencing. It is precisely in this space that artistic practice takes on a fundamental role. Women artists deconstruct and disrupt the narratives that have shaped them, as well as the colonial and patriarchal imaginaries that have determined which bodies may be seen, and which stories may be told and legitimised. Art becomes a space of memory, resistance and transformation. Within this process, the role of the curator, years later, would also come to play a central part. Curatorship becomes a space for visibility and research, capable of forging connections and restoring temporal complexity.

This same need for reinterpretation also runs through various strands of feminism, which cannot be reduced to a single experience or a universal model. The African continent has its own feminist genealogies and practices, despite the long-held notion that Africa had no need for modern Western ideologies; yet the movement manifests itself where necessary, depending on the historical, social and cultural context in which it develops. It is a tool and, as such, adapts to the environment in which it operates. Much of the resistance led by African women predates the theoretical formulations of modern Western feminism. Although a flaw has been highlighted in modern Western feminism due to its white, middle-class exclusivity, the debate has been transformed by voices that have challenged this universalisation. From the 1980s onwards, many black women activists adopted the term coined by Alice Walker, ‘Womanism’, considering it more inclusive than the term ‘feminism’. This choice stems from the inability of white feminism to capture the complexity of black women’s experiences and lives. Angela Davis’s thinking is very much in line with this, demonstrating how gender is interconnected, meaning how it is intrinsically inseparable from the relationship between oppressions linked to race, class and sexual orientation, and other forms of oppression. This perspective was later defined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 through the concept of intersectionality.

Over the past year, the curator Koyo Kouoh has taken on an increasingly central role on the international art scene, partly thanks to her appointment as curator of the 61st Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition. As founder of the RAW Material Company, Koyo Kouoh’s curatorial practice has included a series of exhibitions that have challenged certain parameters through which African art was interpreted and assessed by an external gaze. Among these is the travelling exhibition Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body, presented at WIELS, Brussels, in 2015 and subsequently at 49 Nord 6 Est – Frac Lorraine, France, until 2016.

The work of the six African women artists featured in the exhibition does not define the continent, but traverses it through its contexts, histories and cultures. Feminisms, in fact, cannot be reduced to a single experience; rather, they take on multiple facets: Koyo Kouoh draws on the text by Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu, which recalls the 1929 Aba Women’s Riot, the protest by Igbo women in Aba, Nigeria. Having gathered to protest against the excessive taxation imposed by the British colonial administration’s fiscal policies, policies that were openly discriminatory towards women, they decided to forge an iconography of resistance, a representation of subaltern power, by baring their bodies. As the authors themselves point out, the protest helped to transform the naked African female body into a powerful symbol of resistance: a tool for criticising post-colonial power and for asserting women’s political and social agency.

Drawing on the political power of the ABA Women’s Riot and building on the lineage established by the Egyptian Feminist Union in 1923, Koyo Kouoh has curated an exhibition that takes its cue from various traditions of Black feminism. Black Feminist Art also fits into this perspective; since the 1990s, it has made the body a space for Black and diasporic resistance, for rewriting history and for self-determination free from boundaries.

Zoulikha Bouabdellah, Marcia Kure, Miriam Syowia Kyambi, Valérie Oka, Tracey Rose, Billie Zangewa: the six artists featured in the exhibition take possession of a personal and political space and, by reclaiming it, open up discussions and actions that re-signify through traditional and performative practices.

The artist Zoulikha Bouabdellah exhibits cut-outs from the series Nus [Nudes] (2014), exploring the construction of the image. By blending the Western tradition of the nude with Eastern ornamental motifs, she creates compositions of unexpected balance. The sculpture L’Araignée [The Spider] (2013) also stems from these same geographical encounters: eight arches drawn from different architectural traditions give shape to a figure reminiscent of Louise Bourgeois’s spider.

The body remains the site of memory and history in the exhibition’s performative works. With Tracings (2015), Tracey Rose documents an almost meditative walk from WIELS, the venue for the exhibition, to the crypt of King Leopold II. Invoking figures such as Patrice Lumumba, leader of the Congolese independence movement, the performance confronts the violence of the colonial past, transforming the walk into a gesture of coming to terms with the past and of exorcism. This is complemented by the installation Die Wit Man (2015) (‘white man’ in Afrikaans), which brings together the objects used during the performance alongside a recording of a poem by the poet Reikanne Mofokeng, in which some of the still-open wounds of South African society emerge: abortion, indifference, racism and murder.

The reflection continues with Fracture (i) (2011–2015) by Miriam Syowia Kyambi. Wearing a sisal costume made using the traditional weaving technique employed to craft kiondos—the handcrafted bags of the Kikuyu and Kamba peoples of Kenya—the artist dramatises the conflict between social expectations and the desire for self-determination. Through the figure of Rose, a young woman who leaves the countryside to seek her fortune in the city.

In the tapestry The Rebirth of the Black Venus (2010), Billie Zangewa depicts the naked body of a Black woman who appears beautiful, self-assured and conscious of her own identity as she embraces the promises of an imaginary contemporary metropolis. Reinterpreting Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus from a female perspective, the artist removes the body from the male gaze and reimagines it as a space of self-determination.

With The Three Graces (2014), Marcia Kure brings to light the memory of the female warriors of the Kingdom of Dahomey and other female figures who have played a decisive political role in African history. Carpets, Afro wigs, and shields criss-crossed by black and white stripes, evoking the keloid scars etched onto the bodies of African women, alongside cut-out surfaces, evoke the memory of physical and collective suffering, from the past to the present, transformed into a beauty of resistance.

Valérie Oka’s work, on the other hand, tackles the stereotypes and prejudices through which the Black woman’s body continues to be represented in the colonial imagination. Tu crois vraiment que parce que je suis noire je baise mieux? [Do you really think that, just because I’m black, I’m better in bed?] (2015) greets the visitor with a provocative question, typical of her practice, whilst the screening of the performance En sa présence (2015) presents a collective discussion on how the Black woman has historically been constructed through the gaze of the white man. In Untitled (2015), by contrast, the artist’s body is confined within a large iron cage, the door of which remains deliberately open: how much of this colonial rhetoric are we still willing to accept? And, above all, are we ready to challenge the gaze through which our bodies continue to be interpreted?

---

Koyo Kouoh was the founding artistic director of RAW Material Company, a centre for art, knowledge and society in Dakar and the curator of FORUM, the Education Programme at 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London. She served as curatorial advisor for Documenta 12 (2007) and 13 (2012), co-curated the biennial Les Rencontres de la Photographie Africaine in Bamako in 2001 and 2003 as well as collaborated in different capacities with the Dakar Biennial from 2000 to 2004. Specializing in photography, video and art in the public space as well as process-based works, she has curated numerous exhibitions internationally and written on contemporary African art. Besides a sustained theoretical and exhibition programme at Raw Material Company, she maintains a dynamic international curatorial activity. Recent exhibitions include HOLLANDAISE: A Journey into an Iconic Fabric at Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (2012); Chronicle of a Revolt: Photographs of a Season of Protest at RAW Material Company and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2012). In collaboration with Anne-Marie Bouttiaux and David Adjaye, she curated the contemporary section of GEO-graphics: A Map of African Art Past and Present, an exhibition that celebrated 50 years of African independence at Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (2010); and Make Yourself at Home, an exhibition in co-curated with Charlotte Bagger-Brandt at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2010). Kouoh was associate curator of SUD, Salon Urbain de Douala, a triennial of art in the public space initiated by the contemporary art centre Doual’art in Douala, Cameroon (2013). There she worked with Belgian artist Philip Aguirre y Otegui and Algerian-born artist Kader Attia. In 2014, she was entrusted by the European Union Delegation in Senegal and the Senegalese Ministry of Culture with the development of a reform for the Dakar Biennial. She is a frequent lecturer on contemporary African art and institution building as a curatorial practice at different institutions including the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, ICI Curatorial Intensives and Korea University of Visual Arts, Seoul. Her recent projects and publications include Condition Report on Building Art Institutions in Africa, a collection of essays resulting from the eponymous symposium held in Dakar in January 2012, Word!Word?Word! Issa Samb and the Undecipherable Form (RAW Material Company, OCA and Sternberg Press, 2013), the first monograph dedicated to the work of seminal Senegalese artist Issa Samb.

–Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu, ‘The Body Politic: Differences, Gender, Sexuality’, in Contemporary African Art since 1980 

–Koyo Kouoh, Curatorial text, Body Talk: feminism, sexuality & the body, 2015

Translation by Luigina D’Introno