PRESS RELEASE
London-based 50 Golborne gallery is delighted to announce its presence for the second time at 1:54 New York |Contemporary African art Fair| 3rd - 7th May | Pioneer Works, 159 Pioneer Street, Brooklyn 11231.
We will be showing new works by four of our artists: Emo de Medeiros, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Malala Andrialavidrazana and Joana Choumali.
Born in Cotonu (Benin) and Paris and Cotonou-based, Emo de Medeiros is the only artist at 1:54 who has been selected to show at Dak’Art Biennale 2018 in Dakar (Senegal) which will also be opening on 3rd May and where he is presenting an ambitious Installation and performance entitled: ‘)u(‘.
Emo de Medeiros’ artistic work is characterized by a participatory, serial and rhythmic approach, and by a mix of traditional technological materials and media. He looks at exploring links between art and spirituality whilst using codes and languages borrowed from his African heritage and global contemporary popular culture.
At 1:54 we will be exhibiting two of his textile works: ‘White Phoenix’ and ‘Transatlantica (…for overseas prayers shall be heard)’, in which NFC chips are embedded in traditionally appliquéd textiles to create messages which can be read only by smart phones.
We are presenting a selection of recent drawings by Nigerian-American artist Wura-Natasha Ogunji which were debuted in her solo show, ‘Every Mask I Ever Loved’ at the ifa-Galerie in Berlin earlier this year.
Ogunji explores the relationship between the geographical, architectural and filmic spaces through performance, video and drawings. Combining delicately hand-stitched motifs with loose ink and pencil marks on architectural trace paper, the drawings allude to the sites of disjunctions epitomised by the city of Lagos - between past and future, the natural and the urban, the caring and the ruthless, Africa and America, grace and chaos, male and female.
Ogunji is busy right now preparing for the São Paulo Biennial (from September 2018), to which she was invited by Curator Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro to exhibit a large body of works and also to to curate an artistic dialogue between her and five other artists of her choice.
Madagascar-based Malala Andrialavidrazana is currently presenting a series of new digital collages that expand on her ongoing series “Figures” at Eva International Biennial, Limerick, Ireland, curated by Inti Guerrero. We are delighted to be unveiling two of these at 1:54.
Andrialavidrazana has been deconstructing representation of power from various original sources including old world atlases, stamps and bank notes, reconstructing her own imagery that is concerned by past and present phenomenon of globalisation.
In these new works Andrialavidrazana references Irish artist Seán Keating’s ‘Night’s Candles Are Burnt Out’,a 1927 painting which portrays the first hydroelectric dam built in post-independence Ireland, as a potent symbol of a post-colonial, independent and proud state. The artworks presented at 1:54 explore further how economic optimism and heroism expressed through the representation of civil engineering coexist with today’s often dystopian views of society.
The Abidjan (Cote d’Ivoire) -based Joana Choumali -who represented her country at the 2017 Venice Biennale- will be exhibiting ten new artworks at 1:54 from her acclaimed series ‘Ca Va Aller’.
This body of work derives from eighty photographs that the artist took of people in their daily life in the coastal town of Grand Bassam (Cote d’Ivoire)- a town that is very familiar to the artist- a week after a violent terrorist attack struck it in March 2016. Choumali printed the photographs on canvas of 20cm square, which since then have accompanied her everywhere and at all times, and on which she has been embroidering motifs, flowing through or adding to the lines of the images.
The twenty first canvas were exhibited at the Bamako Encounters, Afrotopia that ended at the beginning of this year. The motifs, colours and threads of the embroidery have changed fleetingly and progressively during the two years Choumali has been working on them.
Their choice reflects her state of mind at a precise moment- itself the consequence of her own life events- but cannot be detached from her feelings towards the images of the mostly solitary figures and their surroundings she is working on obliging her to reflect each time on issues of empathy, memory and healing.