House of Reasoned Truths

Video Still from Djibril Dramé’s *Sabadola Zombies*

Technological advancement and interculturalism have transformed contemporary African art, introducing a broad range of new forms of expression along with new perspectives on culture and society to Africa’s thriving art scene. With particular attention to contemporary video art, House of Reasoned Truths taps into the vitality of this recent work, capturing its aesthetics and broad range of formal strategies, while focusing specifically on its capacity to address the challenges of modern life in an era of globalization. The artists in this show come from across the continent. They work reflexively, using the conventions on their respective social worlds to meditate on them and their contradictions. They speak to questions of community, social cohesion, feminism, diasporic subjectivity, geopolitics, environmental forces, performativity, and power – provoking reflection on Africa and the world today, beyond historically reductive classifications.

Curator’s Full Statement

Today’s technological advancement and interculturalism have completely transformed the philosophical interpretation of what is aesthetically pleasing or engaging, altered perspectives on culturalism as well as offer a wide range of media needed to express one’s ideas and thought processes. Subsequently, contemporary African artists derive impetus from these contemporary unlimited possibilities to invent multifaceted artistic formalisms.

Drawn from practices that are touched by video art and film, House of Reasoned Truths assembles works by African artists who consider community and social fabric, feminist histories, diasporic subjectivity, geopolitical and environmental forces, performativity, and power issues. Over the past three decades, video art has increasingly become an accepted genre of visual expression in the field of contemporary African art and also as a veritable form of visual culture. Representing the current energy, vitality, and range of expression in Africa's thriving arts scene, House of Reasoned Truths emphasizes societal discourses especially the challenges of modern existence, and offers a new kind of gaze on narratives and spectacles of globalism.

As the artifactuality and history of contemporary African art continue to unfold, the selected artists exploring different techniques use a varied vocabulary to convey their ideas that reflect the social and political concerns of today’s cultural context. Reffering to the American philosopher of art Arthur C. Danto, these artists use the socially constructed conventions of their own social world and produce work that speaks to such conventions and the tensions they cause. House of Reasoned Truths acts as a catalyst for an on-going process of open discussion and intellectual inquiry about Africa and the world today, beyond historically reductive classifications.

Kisito Assangni

ABOUT

The Curator

Kisito Assangni is a Togolese-French curator and consultant who studied museology at Ecole duLouvre in Paris. Currently living between London, Paris and Togo, his research interestsgravitate towards the cultural impact of globalisation, psychogeography, critical education, andarchival systems. He inherently aims at going beyond the usual relations between artist, curator,institution, audience, and artwork in order to engage audiences in encounters with art that areunexpected, transformative, and fun. Assangni is heavily involved in video, performance, andexperimental sound. His discursive public programs and exhibitions have been shown internationally, including the Venice Biennale, ZKM, Karlsruhe; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Centre of Contemporary Art, Glasgow; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Malmo Konsthall, Sweden; Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles; National Centre for Contemporary Arts, Moscow; HANGAR Centre of Contemporary Art, Lisbon among others. Assangni has participated in talks, seminars, and symposia at numerous institutions such as the British Museum, London; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Ben Uri Museum, London; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Kunsthall 3.14, Bergen; Sala Rekalde Foundation, Bilbao; Depart Foundation, Malibu; Cambridge School of Art, UK; Sint-Lukas University, Brussels; University of Plymouth, UK; University of Pretoria, South Africa; Motorenhalle Centre of Contemporary Art, Dresden. He is a contributing editor at ArtDependence Magazine and Arshake. Assangni is the founder of TIME is Love Screening (International video art program) and serves as curatorial advisor to Apexart in New York.

The Artists

Halida Boughriet (Algeria) graduated from the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Exchange Program of the SVA New York in cinematography. She explores a broad media range and does make performance a central issue to her artistic expression, through varied elements, references and tools. The omnipresence of human bodies is an essential aspect of her poetical/experimental work. Halida Boughriet has exhibited at several institutions such as the Documenta, Museum of Modern Art of Algiers; Hood Museum, Hanover, USA; Centre Pompidou, MAC/VAL Museum, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Dakar Biennale to name a few.

César Schofield Cardoso (Cape Verde) is a photographer, videographer, and software developer. His work engages with history, memory, politics, and everyday life, aiming to grasp the complex dynamics that characterize the conditions and possibilities of the place where he was born, Cabo Verde, at the heart of the Atlantic Ocean. Cardoso’s work has been showcased in a variety of contexts, including Venice, S.Tomé e Príncipe Biennales; Apexart, New York; Hangar Artistic Research Center, Lisbon; Es Baluard Museu d'Art Contemporani de Palma, Spain; La Base sous-marine, Bordeaux.

Djibril Dramé (Senegal) is visual artist based in Dakar after living in Los Angeles for years. His work strives to shed light on socially relevant and potentially controversial issues affecting our world today. It reflects the many aspects of Africa’s multifaceted history and innumerable intertwined cultures, offering an alternative African narrative. Dramé has had numerous exhibitions internationally including Fowler Museum, Los Angeles; Lincoln Film Center, New York; Somerset House, London; MACAM - Modern and Contemporary Art Museum, Byblos; Haus Der Jugend, Freiburg; Dakar Biennale.

Victor Mutelekesha (Zambia)'s work deals with subjects such as hybridity, diaspora identity, and the human condition, and has been featured in such international exhibitions as the Venice, Havana, Dakar Biennales. Mutelekesha has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Gallery Palazio Tito in Venice, Italy; the Henry Tayali Art Centre in Lusaka, Zambia; and the Interkulturelt Museum and Kunstnerforbundet Gallery for Contemporary Art in Oslo, Norway. He's the founder of Lusaka Contemporary Art Centre (LuCAC) in Zambia.

Nyancho NwaNri (Nigeria) holds a bachelor’s degree in Digital Animation and Production at the University of Greenwich - London. As a lens-based artist and documentary photographer, she explores African history, traditions, spirituality, ethnic and cultural identity, as well as social and environmental issues. Her work has been shown at various festivals and exhibitions locally and internationally, including Eyes On Main Street Festival, Wilson, North Carolina, USA; Hong-Gah Museum, Taiwan; VideoEX Festival, Zurich, Switzerland; Bamako Biennale, Mali; Nvidia Women’s Film Festival, Accra, Ghana; Art X Lagos. As a freelance press photographer, NwaNri’s work has been featured in online publications by Reuters, The Guardian, and The New York Times. NwaNri is also an educator and has conducted film and photography training in various countries across the African continent.

Harold Offeh (Ghana) studied Critical Fine Art Practice at the University of Brighton, MA Fine Art Photography at the Royal College of Art and completed a PhD by practice exploring the activation of Black Album covers through durational performance. Offeh is an artist working in a range of media including performance, video, photography, learning and social arts practice. He often employs humour as a means to confront the viewer with historical narratives and contemporary culture and is interested in the space created by the inhabiting or embodying of history.
He has exhibited widely, including Tate Britain and Modern, London; Studio Museum Harlem, New York; Miami Art Basel; Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco; MAC VAL Museum, Paris; Kulturhuset, Stockholm; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen.

Minnette Vári (South Africa) lives in Johannesburg. As Kendell Geers observes in a catalogue essay published in 2004 by Kunstmuseum Lucerne, “Minnette Vári has in her lifetime witnessed the fall of apartheid and all its structures, followed by the new democracy.” In response to this history, Vári has written a history of herself in relation to this trajectory, one that attempts to recover what is lost, to give shape and voice to forgotten or erased memories. Her work conflates self and history, examining how identity arises out of the traumatic past. In her videos and drawings, Vári frequently depicts her own body enduring a disfiguring metamorphosis – she merges with and emerges from nature as well as from the concrete architecture of modern cities. The female “protagonist” of her video works is sometimes archetypal and sometimes spectral, a persona who ingests and is ingested by time. Vári has exhibited her work since the early nineties, participating in such group exhibitions as Banquet, ZKM Karlsruhe; Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art, Museum for African Art, New York; the Venice Biennale (2001 and 2007); the 1oth Havana Biennale and The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Hell and Purgatory Revisited by Contemporary African Artists, MKK Frankfurt.

Haythem Zakaria (Tunisia) attended the Fine Arts School of Tunis. His visual creations, largely imbued with Sufi spirituality, use unconventional visual techniques (glitch, meta-image, cine process) that guide him and involve him in the experimentation with matrix and protocol devices. He is thus led to explore methods aimed at ‘over-producing’ the image through integration, grafting, and superimposition of visual or sound information. His works have been hosted by Fondation Hippocrène, Paris; Centre Wallonie Bruxelles, Paris; Halle 14, Leipzig; Japan Media Arts Festival, Tokyo; Kamel Lazzar Foundation, Tunis; Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg among others.

Works in the Show

Halida Boughriet, Feuille d'or (Gold leaf), 2022, 06:41 Fire eats the wood up, it moves fast, to Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, dedicated to George Bridgetower. Sounds of crepitation and enlivening violin strings open the scene in darkness. Life and death, a violin burns, like the memory of Bridgetower, in the half-light, blue red flames licking around it. A British Black virtuoso violinist, Bridgetower performed the piece “sight-reading with Beethoven at the 1803 première”. The artist lights a match upon ancient faces from Caravaggio to Valentin de Boulogne. A performance of a hand and a flame over an image. The flame flickers, hesitates, is hungry. Together, hand and flame graze the image, as though about to set it alight. Black women, North African women, women as ‘Other’, women as forsaken, orientalised, enslaved, objectified.

With her captivating voice, Halida Boughriet takes her viewer by the hand, reading poems by the Romantics - Baudelaire, de Vigny, Flaubert – whose crafted words entrap the Oriental muse, and unsettle a contemporary consciousness.

Senghor’s verses offer an alternative voice, accompanying archival photographs of North African women in native dress and jewels, on whom so much patriarchal erotic desire and violence has been thrust.

The colony, the empire, the archive, the vast collections of photographs of the disempowered, on the web, searchable and up for purchase. Has much changed since they were taken? The rhythm of the voice questions and seduces, the flame, briefly revealing a brutal history, connects us to the sticky web of primitivism that saturates Western culture, without ever touching the image. We float through in the partial light, trying to remember and re-member a different history, still trapped in the shadows of this time, our time. A brief moment, too short, is conceded to try to understand the consequences of Western civilisation, after which the match consumes itself, the flame withers and dies. (Martina Caruso, art historian)

Cesar Schofield Cardoso, Blue Womb, 2023, 08:00. This work proposes a re-imagination of the contested sea as a site of creation and not only of violence and trauma. Cabo Verde endures a complex relationship with its surrounding ocean, officially fourteen times greater than its land territory. Centuries of slavery, a history of grueling labor practices on whaling ships, forced migration, to the present scarcity of fish due to foreign industrial overfishing, and climate change deny us access to our oceanic citizenship. As such, how could we re-imagine life with the ocean? Or, stay with the trouble while reclaiming its immense creative reserve?

This work explores two concepts by American philosopher and biologist, Donna Haraway: String Figures, a proposed merging of frameworks-t from science, myth, or storytelling; and Staying With The Trouble, which envisions a collaboration between humans and non-humans for a new relationship with the earth and its inhabitants in a time of great social and environmental crisis. The visual narrative of the work proposes an alliance of the ocean’s trash with its myriad living forms, mimicking symbiosis between living and non-living matter.

Djibril Drame, Sabadola Zombies, 2021, 06:35. The images in this new series reveal a resistance, a resilience in the face of the troubles of our Africa, with a backdrop of an invitation to discover gold with him, even if all that glitters is not gold.

Victor Mutelekesha, The Center Still holds, 2017, 09:53 The point of departure for this project is Chinua Achebe’s novel titled Things Fall Apart; the center can not hold. This fictional tale (rooted in truth) is set around the time colonization started to take root in much of Africa. It is a vivid narration of the systematic decimation of society, its traditions, arts, and cultures...

In the essay Colonization and Identity, Chris Kortright writes, “Colonization is a technique used to subdue the native population... sacking of cultural patterns; these cultural values are stripped, crushed and emptied. In an attempt to control, reap economic benefits, and “civilize” the indigenous peoples, the colonialists dismantle the native cultures by imposing their own. By so doing, the very fibers of one heritage are rendered useless and hence dispensable to be replaced by another.

Chinua Achebe succeeded beyond measure to paint the picture of how it all happened. At its peak, all seemed to have been lost. At least that’s the picture Achebe’s book depressingly paints. There has been no letting down even in post-colonial Africa, with persistent waves of power, religious and capital interests continue to pound African cost because somehow, somewhere, someone still feels an insatiable need to do so.

In Things Fall Apart Achebe describes how the world around Okonkwo falls apart with the onset of colonization that decimates the Igbo culture and traditions, suddenly, evoking the ancestral spirit and possessing artifacts that embodies their spirits became overshadowed by Christianity and later Islam.

The Center Still Holds is a video audio montage mostly filmed in Togo, a former German Colony. In the first clip, I occupy what used to be the German radio transmission tower from its colonies to Berlin and back. From the spot I make symbolic smoke signals with vodoun (voodoo) as the constant soundtrack to the world, that what seemed to have been lost still flows through the veins of the descendants of the generations that first encountered first hand colonization and slavery. Minutes through the video two audios that represent Christianity and Islam, two religions I consider to be part of mental colonial disorder kick in, then later a second video almost overshadows everything representing the resilience of Vodoun (Voodoo) of old amidst a society whose outward look seems like a lost cause but it’s center still holds through those who carried on the traditions even when it was illegal or unpopular to do so.

Nyancho NwaNri, Here, 2022, 03:45. An exploration of the alchemy of self- a journey of self evaluation, cleansing, acceptance and assertion channeled through indigenous spiritual traditions centered around Ogun, the Yoruba god of Iron; a warrior who symbolizes, power, resilience and adaptability.

Here depicts the interconnectedness of self, memory and power. A deep dive into the multidimensionality of a single being, it portrays the human form as a shrine housing memories of personal and collective experiences as well as the multiple selves that are crystalized as a result of these experiences. The “alchemy of self” mentioned above refers to a transmutation of these often dark memories and experiences into power and triumph.

Here is a video piece that brings together performative visual storytelling through the use of traditional symbolism, with sounds created from a collection of field recordings including ironsmiths at work and chanting of Odu Ifa (Yoruba sacred spiritual text) during various propitiation rituals for Ogun.

Two Positions, Harold Offeh, 2016, 7:00. Commissioned for Kunst Vardo TV Two Positions is a performative response to a found image, a still taken from a performance of the Renga Moi, a play by the Ugandan playwright Robert Serumaga. The piece sees Offeh re-perform 2 out of 3 positions in different locations in Cambridge, UK. The original image was taken from a catalog of works presented at the 9th Festival of Arts Shiraz-Persepolis, Iran in 1975 that Offeh encountered at the Whitechapel Gallery. Initially unaware of the original narrative and context of the play, Offeh wanted to explore the potency of the images through this series of performed actions.

The image from Serumaga’s performance provides a starting point for a playful and embodied response. Offeh’s body re-contextualizes the positions from the original image as he places himself in relation to the architecture and landscape.

Quake. Minnette Vari, 2017, 6:23, is a reflection on contemporary geopolitics, in particular about the world existing in an apocalyptic mode. Besides the narratives of tumult handed on from ancient mythologies through to contemporary popular science fiction to the portrayals and posturings of global news, I wanted to retain the original sense of apocalypse as a ‘lifting of the veil’- a discourse of revelation. And for such a discourse to hold all the monumental contingencies of origination and decimation, it has to harbor some indefinable, incalculable excess - the potential to yield perilous spills of multiple, intersecting planes of meaning.

In Quake, three elements feed into, and out of each other. The restless, autophagic architecture of the city on the horizon seems to produce, yet also to compose itself out of, the vast granular field of corrosive energy, which in turn yields the figures, growing from minuscule foetal bundles that bud in the distance at random intervals. These fugitive envoys proceed from so far in the background that when they finally do approach us as distinct entities, the sense of it is that they’ve always been there. So they’re brand new and ancient at the same time, and they also seem, in their very rapid mutations, to carry some seed of what is happening behind them in that impossible metropolis that is simultaneously all cities and no city, and reads in a way as ‘all civilization’. Likewise, in that they each manifest a flicker of different faces and bodies, the figures seem with each passing frame of video to forget who they were before and assume a new identity, so they come to represent everyone and no-one at the same time – and in, that, all humanity.

The visual dynamics in Quake suggest that it is not possible to encompass the entire archive of human experience. As these cities rise and fall and the subterranean storms roil, the wandering figures leave the viewer behind, and we worry about what is forgotten. There’s that sense of longing in the work: that we are all nomads who can only grasp a handful of sand, with the knowledge and information that it contains, yet must accept that there can never be only one signal to this noise. It’s as though Quake, in evoking all moments at once and yet, in its seamless looping offers the very opposite of linear time, sits at the edge of a radical fissure in the very fabric of what can be known, remembered or experienced.

Haythem Zakaria, The Stone Opera, 2022, 15:00

Video made following the invitation of Siwa Plateforme for a collaboration in the framework of documenta fifteen.

How to look at the landscape and how to recount it? The Stone Opera attempts an answer in the continuity of the investigations of Interstices. This plural work is composed at the same time as a musical piece, a visual experiment, and a sound documentary in an attempt to totalize the genres, without, however, claiming to be exhaustive. Following a geopoetic approach, as Kenneth White understands it, the work welcomes the landscape, as much as it is welcomed by the latter, following a look that discovers, without desire of conquest, the surroundings of the town of Redeyef,starting from the top of its mountain massifs. The Stone Opera consists of three acts in which four people from Redeyef – Sakend, Taher, then Farouk, and Montassar – intervene as troubadours telling stories about the mountain, the myths of the region, and the treasure seekers. The testimonies, grafted onto the images of the landscape, function as temporal and auditory markers which, in the background, historicize the work and territorialize it; and from one story to another, we move from the immemorial history of nature to the present day. (Fatma Belhedi)