"Flash Afrique: Photography from West Africa"
2001-09-07 until 2001-11-11
Kunsthalle Wien, Museumsquartier
Wien, , AT Austria

Africa: Terra Incognita- Or the Heart of Darkness- Or maybe even the Chic Continent, as one proponent journal of the zeitgeist once put it-. The exhibition Flash Afrique of the Kunsthalle Vienna wants to tell one of many possible African stories on the basis of some examples of West-African photographic work. Or, to put it more precisely, to have it told by the artists themselves. Because, as the philosopher Homi K. Babha has noted the right to tell a story is more than just an act of linguistics.

This is a story, which deals with the tensions arising between a staged self-stylization and a de-limited everyday life. A story, which shows how surrealism entered into the professional photographic studios of Western Africa and held sway in the streets of Dakar and Abidjan.

In conjunction with a music program and a symposium, a dialogue scenario is to be opened, to generate materials that would discuss the complex relation between Europe and Africa within the framing conditions of the 21st century. Africa, says documenta-chief executive Okwui Enwezor, must stop being the subject of the origin of Europeans’ psycho-sexual daydreams and nightmares.

Participating artists: Philip Kwame Apagya, Dorris Haron Kasco, Seydou Keita, Bouna Medoune Seye, Malick Sidibé, Boubacar Touré Mandémory

Curators: Gerald Matt, Thomas Mießgang

IMAGE:
Philip Kwame Apagya,
Francis in Manhattan, 1996
copyright Philip Kwame Apagya

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