Le Mode
Exhibition "The Iris of Lucy": the African woman in the spotlight
By Roxana Azimi
August 01, 2016
What is the most under-represented genre in contemporary art? The women. Which continent escapes the radar of the curators? Africa. It is on the strength of this observation that the departmental museum of contemporary art in Rochechouart has programmed “The Iris of Lucy”, an exhibition presenting some twenty female artists from the African continent and its diaspora.
The Lucy to which the title refers is an Australopithecus whose skeleton was discovered in 1974 by a team of anthropologists led by Donald Johanson and Tom Gray. Although exhumed in Hadar, Ethiopia, she was given a small name taken from a Beatles song that was heard on the air at the time.
Also the opening of the exhibition is placed under the seal of archeology and misunderstanding. Because the choice of Lucy's surname is indicative of a far too white prehistory written by Westerners.
Resurrect ancestor figures
For the Ethiopians, the one who was long considered the ancestor of humanity, is called Dinkenesh, that is to say the "special person" or "the beautiful". Photographer Aida Muluneh represents her as a hieratic and mysterious figure, with a whitewashed face, like a ghost who has survived from time immemorial. “ In a world where racial superiority has foreshadowed our human dignity, the echoes of its remains have become the testimony and validation of our similarities rather than our differences, ” she said.
Her Algerian colleague Amina Zoubir resuscitates another ancestor figure, the forgotten one of Kahena, Berber queen, of whom we do not know if she was Jewish or Christian. Both priestess and witch, she fought the expansion of the Umayads in North Africa in the 7th century.
Like Kahena, a feminist before the hour, the creators gathered here do not let themselves be fooled. If they sometimes use techniques supposedly reserved for women, they dynamise the “lady's work” dimension.
At the Egyptian Ghada Amer, embroidery is a Trojan horse that helps to convey the most seditious ideas on female pleasure. For Billie Zangewa no question of making wallpaper. Her silk weavings form the backdrop for a triumphant femininity, in a South African society where the male gaze sometimes sounds like a threat.
The artist admits it, wearing a skirt in certain streets of Johannesburg is a feat. It is not easier for a Tunisian to come to terms with her sexual desires, as a blood-red drawing by Zoulikha Bouabdellah suggests, an artist who poses as a " free thinker of sex, the one who knows how to claim and challenge the codes and the norms of his time and which is constantly in balance between being dominant and being dominated ”.
This balance, the Gabonese Myriam Mihindou explores in a magnificent video, the Complainte du Serpent mute , which, inspired by the raw and poetic novel by Mohamed Leftah, Demoiselle de Numidie , sublimates the soiled and injured bodies of prostitutes. South African photographer Sue Williamson explores another form of shame, that of AIDS, by capturing patients infected with the virus, whose lives oscillate between anonymity, shame and rejection.
For all these Amazons, the fight is not only waged on the rings of the patriarchy. It continues on the catwalks of art.
In the photo The Kiss , South African Tracey Rose extends the question of racial identity to its representation in Western art history. Black subjects have long been kept on the edge, treated as servants or foils, all too often portrayed in a grotesque manner. By revisiting Auguste Rodin's famous Kiss , Tracey Rose turns the central character into a black man, who, once is not customary, is at the heart of the device and no longer on the periphery.