“I sense a weariness with some of the contemporary Western art,” says Beya Gille Gacha. “She appeals to an elite, no longer connects with the world”. The French-Cameroonian artist traveled to Dakar, Africa’s most important art biennial, with a counter-medicine from Paris. The 32-year-old says she feels a soul in the African art scene. Something that speaks directly from consciousness to consciousness. “Contemporary art in the West all too often remains in self-reference,” confirms the Belgian-Malian sculptor Thiemoko Diarra. And: “We’ll bring a little oxygen in there”. Diarra’s art makes this very clear: he “patches up” African statues that have been copied for European tourists and that have been damaged in transit with medical bandages or pierces them with test tubes. Gille Gacha, on the other hand, dusts off the traditional craft of beadwork. She covers her human body and body parts with a skin of thousands of pearls. Both Diarra and Gille Gacha stand for a young generation of African and Afrodiasporic artists who are rediscovering the sculpting traditions of the black continent. And put their mythologies in new contexts.
“L’autre Royaume”, “the other kingdom” is the title of Gille Gacha’s installation at this year’s Dak’art. A dreaming child with half-closed eyes stands there in a kind of traditional African mud round building, a maximum contrast to the surrounding concrete pillars of the old Dakar Palace of Justice. Plants and a woven blanket frame the figure, which shines from afar. A blue sheen thanks to a skin made up of thousands of tiny pearls. A princess, saint figure or even aliens?
Gille Gacha’s installation “The Other Kingdom”: A pearl figure surrounded by plants and a clay walkway.
(Photo: Mateo Piccioni)
Gille Gacha’s beaded figures have been unfolding their magic among art critics and the public for a good decade. And open the space for diverse, historical, ecological to theological associations. Some are reminiscent of beaded royal robes. Others remember the blue of ancient Egyptian statues or the indigo robes of the Tuareg. And doesn’t the color of the sky and the sea represent the divine for many African ethnic groups?
For those who want to know exactly, the dainty artist explains that the pearl skins come from a handicraft tradition of the Bamileke, her mother’s Cameroonian ethnic group. “With the pearls”, says Gille Gacha, “I have found my very own expression”. As a child of mixed origins and members of two cultures, she forges a process of self-discovery out of it. What connects the West with Africa? And what spiritual driving forces can we gain from both cultures? In terms of art history, she sees parallels with the gilding of the statues of the French King Louis XIV. Blue blood – that is a European expression, but even among the Bamileke, the sculptures and small furniture embroidered with blue pearls were reserved for the nobility for a long time – if only because of the enormous costs .
The pearl skin is also said to embody the intangible value of every human being
It all started with the 18-year-old traveling to Cameroon to attend the enthronement of her grandmother, a Bamileke queen. Gille Gacha attended the workshops of her aunt’s JF Gacha Foundation, an NGO that preserves this technique in western Cameroon. The beads came from the Czech Republic, so they also told something about trade relations between Africa and Europe, about the exchange of goods and knowledge. But Gille Gacha is about more than that: “I want to embody the immaterial wealth of every human being with the skin made of pearls”.
The Afro-French artist shares this spiritual grounding with many of her African and Afro-diasporic artist colleagues. As is the subject of ecological balance. It is not for nothing that the dreaming child stands on a floor made of cleansing activated carbon. The environmental theme runs like a red thread through many of the works of the Dakar Biennale: Fousseny Sene Sow’s papier-mâché model of a mysteriously extinct city, with wild animals strolling between the empty high-rise buildings, bus and tank skeletons. Or Emmanuel Tessore’s crucifixion scenario: an ensemble of iron posts with root stalks impaled on them protrudes from the sandy floor of a former courtroom. One might read it as an appeal against the catastrophic construction boom in the African megacities. Or the stumps as cultural roots. Then they correspond wonderfully with a gigantic mobile by the Nigerian Ngozi Ezema, in which hundreds of miniature clay cups hanging on nylon cords form the airy sculpture of a teapot and cup. A reminder of the hundreds of little rituals that structure everyday life in Africa – and the crafts that go with it.
Gille Gacha’s works also appeal to laypeople
What connects all these artists? A spiritual continuum. The circular argument between man and nature. And the reference to the sculpture world of the ancestors. Of course, Africans also make videos and conceptual art, such as Diarra and Gille Gacha immersing themselves in philosophical texts. But then their works also speak to laypeople, to people outside of a certain art-educated bourgeoisie. “Ordinary craftsmen in Dakar,” says Gille Gacha, “who helped set up my installation then brought their families to the exhibition. That nourished me!” This correspondence with an African audience characterizes contemporary African sculpture. Whether in Accra, Ouagadougou, Dakar or Lagos: Highly original symbols develop from existing handicraft traditions. These include the huge tapestries sewn from strips of damask fabric by the Malian Abdoulaye Konaté. Or the bottle cap curtains from El Anatsui. They are followed by young artists such as Ibrahim Bemba Kebe from Bamako with koredouga dancers made from plastic bag waste and wire. Or the Zimbabwean stonemason Terrence Musekiwa, whose traditional heads grow plastic cable hair. The materiality is the message here. The old already contains the future.
Contemporary art from Africa is booming
In 2009 Gille Gacha was invited to her first group exhibition, “Afrikanska Penslar” in Stockholm. After dropping out of her art history studies at the renowned Ecole de Louvre (“way too theory-heavy!”), the autodidact founded the collective “DES GOSSES” with two other Afro-French artists, an attempt to explore their own Afro-diasporic identity together. She begins to sculpt hands and heads as beaded objects. Or a “Venus Nigra” that “Africanizes” the torso of the classic Greek model with black pearls.
All this at a time when contemporary African art is beginning to boom. In which even the Venice Biennale and the documenta in Kassel put African artists in the limelight, and Western galleries are vying for contemporary art with a connection to Africa for the first time. Did Gille Gacha benefit from it? She says she never thought about it. And laughs. “Well, maybe it neutralized my fourfold handicap: as a self-taught woman, black and mother of two children, wanting to make it into the elite art scene in France.” In the meantime, renowned collections such as those of the World Bank or the Smithsonian Museum in Washington have acquired Gille Gacha’s works. She is regularly invited to biennials from Marrakech to Kampala to Ouagadougou. And she is also in demand in Paris: in the next few months, both the Musée du Quai Branly and the group exhibition “Forets” of the Maif Social Club will be showing her works.
In Gille Gacha’s “Orant” series, she assembles the children’s figures covered with pearls.
(Photo: Hannah Archambault)
In recent years, Gille Gacha has particularly impressed with her “Orant” series: installations centered around blue, pearl-skinned, African children’s figures. In Christianity, orant refers to a praying figure with outstretched arms. Gille Gacha says she was inspired by a Sumerian temple sculpture. Praying on behalf of someone else – that is the task of the children today because the parents have forgotten how to do it. “When children find themselves in difficult situations, they pray instinctively.” But she also processed Asian spiritual influences. Together with her Vietnamese-French half-siblings, she grew up in a world of manga comics. Anime characters fighting to save the world. In addition, he is a passionate reader of scientific reading. Whether history, philosophy, medicine, psychology or theology. “For me, a very special logic emerges from this chaos. It’s about metissage, exchange and mutual appropriation.”
Such metissages, cross-genre mixed forms, shape an entire generation of contemporary African and Afro-diasporic artists. Can one still ask the question of one’s own “African” identity? El Hadj Malick Ndiaye, art historian and artistic director of the last Dakar Biennial, is skeptical: the term “African” constructs deceptive categories. After all, artists are the ones who transcend their living conditions and absorb foreign ideas. On the one hand. On the other hand, one should not underestimate the influence of the environment. “Africans,” says Ndiaye, “have survived so many disasters since slavery. As a community, we have developed a physical and mental resilience that also reflects on the artists.” Gille Gacha finds herself in this statement – with all her fragility. For her, resilience is the connection with the forces of an immaterial, invisible world. That makes her “a difficult person” when it comes to selling her works. African masks, she says, received their charge through a ritual sacralization. Before they can be sold to art collectors, for example, they must first be desacralized. “I feel the same way with my figures. They are not primarily made for the art market. But you can pray with them.”