Nigeria’s Uche Uzorka and eight other African artists will take part in an exclusive exhibition at the famous Iwalewahaus, Bayreuth University, Germany on May 30.
The Mashup exhibition, according to a statement from the Iwalewahaus press office, will feature products of a recent research project that will bring Iwalewahaus alive again, after an 18-month closure due to refurbishment.
Mashup is an exhibition of artworks by contemporary artists from Africa that have been generated during the research project ‘Mash up the Archive’ which took place at Iwalewahaus in Bayreuth over the last two years. The project has so far been accompanied by two “Mash up the Archive Festivals” in 2012 and 2013.
Arly Kosi of the Iwalewahaus press office said nine renowned artists from South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Angola, Ghana and Tanzania will be showcasing their artworks on this global platform.
“Uche Uzorka from Lagos (Nigeria) started with a position; that the openness of archive is deceptive and that it refuses more than it allows. The artist obsessively shredded archival documents during his residency and created artworks from the shredded material. Whereas his graphics formally take reference to artworks of the Nigerian Nsukka-School, those are part of the collection at Iwalewahaus,” she said.
Kosi explained that Kevo Stero and Otieno Gomba (Kenya) anchored their research on a specific object, the mask, building an immersive environment of film, installation and painting that re-imagines traditional notions of the mask.
While the Angolan-born Delio Jasse’s point of departure was a technique, using a specific form of analogue photomontage to develop unique ‘documents’, composing of fragments of information he found by scouring the immense Ulli Beier archive.
Then there is Thenjiwe Nki Nkosi and Pamela Sunstrum from Johannesburg (South Africa) took a form as their starting point, writing and developing an Anti-Opera, ‘Disrupters, this is Disrupter X’, to re-narrate and inscribe a new story on a studied selection of archival film, objects and artworks.
“Alongside the visual artist residencies, two musicians were also invited to respond to the music archive of Iwalewahaus. DJ Raph from Kenya and the Angolan-born Batida re-mixed and re-worked the traditional dance music of the archives. Their re-mixes will be played at the opening party on May 30,” she stated.
Explaining that at the core of the project are a series of four artist residencies in which six visual artists were invited to explore the diverse archive of African art at Iwalewahaus, she said the concept of the project was developed by the Kenyan curator, Sam Hopkins.
The artworks generated during the artist residencies also presents the artist book, An Archaeology of Loss, by Sam Hopkins and Simon Rittmeier (Germany). It explores the idea of an empty archive.
The exhibition will be accompanied by two roundtables – ‘Aura: The Object in Postcolonial Art collections’ and ‘Mashup as Defiance: Culture, Appropriation and Postcolonialism’.
