The Brooklyn Rail

Colonial frameworks have oriented most of us to think of African art as a set of artifacts defining ancient civilizations or, using the lens of ethnography, as ritual objects isolated from the larger human phenomenon of creative expression. In the Soloviev Foundation exhibition Between Distance and Desire: African Diasporic Perspectives, curator Tumelo Mosaka asks us to reconsider these structures so that we might know the vastness of African art in the current social, global, and political context.

Eight contemporary artists—Edson Chagas, Kim Dacres, vanessa german, Eblin Grueso, Emmanuel Massillon, Zizipho Poswa, Robert Pruitt, and Nyugen E. Smith—are juxtaposed alongside works by the Bamana, Baule, Dan, Djimini, Dogon, Ekoi, Fang, Guro, Kota, Lega, Luba, Songye, and We-Wobe peoples in the foundation’s collection, encouraging viewers to create new possibilities for interpretation, or as the exhibition essay states, treat Africa as “a subject rather than an object of modernity.”

The works in the show are all inspired by African art forms, particularly masks, and span portraiture, monumental sculpture, performance, and assemblage. An entire wall is devoted to the display of masks made across cultures on the continent. Notably, the curator avoids museological conventions for exhibiting traditional African sculptures; the masks are neither itemized nor include a scholarly didactic that explains their original uses definitively, giving them the possibility of different and contemporary uses. Similarly, in another subtle yet powerful gesture, some objects are displayed in their packing crates. African reliquary figures of the Kota people share space with the head and legs of Cycladic female figures and with masks from the Dan, Baule, and Vanuatu people. While the crates preserve or protect the objects in between their time on view, we must consider the historical audience for these objects. Removed from their original context and publicly displayed in storage containers—the performance, the people, the use, the craft, the creativity—the life of these objects is only a curiosity rather than a rich and storied creation.

Several of vanessa german’s assembled figures are on view; she has referred to them as “power figures,” which often serve as homages to or protective of people, places, concepts or ideas. These assemblages, reminiscent of the nkisi nkondi sculptures made by people of the Democratic Republic of Congo, act as conduits for healing and transformation, making discarded materials into spiritual objects. Emmanuel Massillon’s works also combine seemingly disparate materials with vernacular phrases and functional objects as social commentary. Often incorporating African masks, they explore common urban issues such as gentrification, food insecurity, and healthcare access to challenge anti-Black visual tropes. In Targeted (2023), glossy black oil sunflower seeds are the ground for a mask that sits at the center of a white X-shape akin to a crossroads. Sunflower seeds and their shells often litter the spaces where children gather in low-income Black and brown neighborhoods, from playground surfaces to school bus floors. The inexpensive yet nutritious snack—readily available at corner stores that stand in for supermarkets in low-income areas—is transformed here from a marker of poverty and frivolousness to earnestness and abundance.

Edson Chagas subverts retrograde ideas about Africa’s place in the contemporary world by examining the gatekeeping practices inherent in globalization. In his “Tipo Passe” series, named after a Portuguese phrase for passport photos, sitters don African masks that conceal their identities, their modern clothing asserting their inclusion in the present despite the presence of their traditional masks.

Kim Dacres transforms recycled tire rubber into signifiers of Black femininity. Using defunct car, bike, scooter, and motorcycle wheels, the artist layers the materials to create stunning figures through coiling, folding, wrapping, and plaiting. The rubber seemingly becomes delicate and flowing in Sheryl (2022), made to invoke a female head with draped bicycle chains standing in for adornment and tire rubber shaped and arranged to recall facial features and a braided hairstyle. Her manipulation of the rubber from a hard and rigid material to something soft and supple—attributes often denied to Black people and particularly Black women—affirm celebration of the feminine and communal reciprocity.

Performance offers another register for possibility. Eblin Grueso’s video El bato (2018) reenacts a traditional ritual from his hometown in Cauca, Colombia, in which the popular character El Bato (the fisherman) travels from house to house every January 6, collecting food to redistribute to the poor. A masked Grueso, wearing an outfit adorned with dried leaves, enthusiastically tosses a metal pot at people’s homes so they might toss out their offerings, even “reeling” them in, mimicking the gestures of a fisherman. Although this ritual still occurs, it is less common to see in Afro-Latino urban neighborhoods because of development; in Colombia, the expansion of the mining industry has notably impacted the practice. Grueso’s reenactment is yet another reminder of Africa’s enduring presence in contemporary Colombia.

Being part of a diaspora can cause feelings of nostalgia, a longing and wonder about an unknown emotion or understanding. Robbed of ancestral homes and cultural experiences, the artists in Between Distance and Desire offer thoughtful propositions for the arts and artistic practices of Africa. Together, they recognize and honor the traditions of the past while imagining what those traditions might mean today and for a future where the continent of Africa is more than an amorphous place, the sum of its resources and commodities, or even a site of utopian ideals.