“Ex Africa”, a living and political African art at Quai Branly


Chéri Samba, “What future for our art? », 1997. Visible at the Musée du Quai Branly, for the exhibition« Ex Africa ». – © Chéri Samba / © Patrick Gries

  • The museums reopen on May 19, the opportunity to admire and wonder about the works in the exhibition Ex Africa, at the Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac Museum.
  • Ex Africa wants to show that there are in Africa “artists who take charge of contemporary realities – migrants, spoliations, corruption, exploitation – and who speak to their contemporaries”, according to its commissioner Philippe Dagen.
  • The exhibition tackles a primitivist vision of African art, where masks and statuettes have become simple aesthetic forms disconnected from their deep meaning, before being transformed into objects of cultural consumption.

“There is always something new that comes from Africa”, said the Roman historian Pliny the Elder (“ Ex Africa semper aliquid novi “). This sentence, present in the exhibition Ex Africa, African presences in art today, at Quai Branly, sums up the essence of this very political collective work. Collective work, because if the journalist and curator Philippe Dagen united forces, many artists have produced new works for this occasion. One way of saying, no, African art is not outside of History, that it is far from the backward-looking and frozen representations that are given of it. That in short, he creates.

To dismantle these clichés, Philippe Dagen chose to tackle the first of the evils, the one with which the misunderstanding began: the idea of primitivism. This is how it was still seen in 1984, when MoMa, the museum of modern art in New York, exhibited works under the title “Primitivism”, defining African art as “a convenient purveyor of forms in which one draws without wondering how the objects arrived in Europe ”, as the curator summarizes it.

“In primitivism you have primitive”

“We wanted to show that, contrary to a certain way of seeing the history of art, the arts of Africa should no longer be considered exclusively in terms of what they brought to the Western arts,” explains Philippe Dagen. Which is the usual story, where we only speak of African art when we speak of cubism. African art is automatically indexed to a European history. Today it is no longer possible to continue to think in these terms. “

Picasso, Braque, and the artists of the early twentieth century were certainly the first artists to take a non-disqualifying, non-contemptuous look at the masks and statuettes brought back, without understanding them, by art dealers. “But they did not have the means to understand the religious, moral, political functions that these objects had in the cultures from which they came”, specifies to 20 minutes Philippe Dagen. Who adds: “In primitivism you have primitive, it is a kind of hierarchical judgment which is implied, there would be the primitives on one side and the moderns, the civilized on the other. We reproduce a sort of hierarchy between cultures that resembles what we called the hierarchy between races. “

Playful illusion

From the 1980s, artists will oppose this vision. Like AR Penck, Antoni Clavé and Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose Grillo full of colors, who wants to be a griot bearing the memory of slavery. In the 2000s, the criticism is even more frontal, mocking this Western recovery which markets sacred masks as one produces hamburgers. The room dedicated to the Chapman collection, by artists Dinos and Jake Chapman, is a laughing and tasty snub for visitors. Approaching the hieratic-looking totems and statues, we can see a fries in one hand, a sandwich instead of a head, and a Ronald firmly anchored on his base, scepter in hand … The illusion is playful, the message crystal clear.

Dinos and Jake Chapman, “The Chapman Family collection”, 2002. View of the exhibition “Ex Africa, African Presences in Art Today”. From February 9 to June 27, 2021. – © musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, photo Léo Delafontaine

Further on, this objectification is denounced in the form of totemized objects. A diving mask and an electric hedge trimmer titled Black and Decker serected on a plinth by Bertrand Lavier, figures as absurd as the pile of disembodied masks accumulated lifeless on the ground by Théo Mercier.

Théo Mercier, “Untitled”, 2020.
Théo Mercier, “Untitled”, 2020. – © musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, photo Léo Delafontaine

A spiral of migrant sandals

There are other ways, however, to bring these ancient forms to life than by plundering them and emptying them of their meaning, the exhibition suggests. This is what Philippe Dagen calls “activation”, which he opposes to “quotation”: “When a new visual language takes hold in total freedom of the forms proposed by the ancient arts. The journalist quotes the spiral No comeback by Romuald Hazoumé, drawn by the accumulation of plastic migrant sandals in all colors, washed out by salt water. Further on, a series of photos by Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou denounces the Code black – it is also the name of the work -, this set of legal texts establishing slavery, in a triptych where the morning poverty of greenery contrasts with the hopes brandished by an inhabitant, in the photo that we guess to be that of one of his ancestors.

“No Return” by Romuald Hazoumé.
“No Return” by Romuald Hazoumé. – © musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, photo Léo Delafontaine

If we had to sum up this exhibition in a single goal, a single objective, for Philippe Dagen, it would be the following: “To show that there are artists who take charge of contemporary realities – migrants, spoliations, corruption, exploitation – and who speak to their contemporaries ”not by plundering ancient art forms, but by“ connection, in connivance, in friendship ”with them. If the gaze on the arts of Africa is still far from being equal, with Ex Africa, he takes the path.

  • Ex Africa, until July 11, at the Quai Branly Museum. Garden Gallery. 37 quai Branly 75007 Paris.



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