Discover Top Posts Tagged with #african objects

[Phd work 5 : collecting data]

Working on The Sacradness of the Mother and her Child give me joy !

#african objects #african design #african religion #african diaspora #african studies

Tête de Femme is one of the first that Edmonds made with a decorative African object, which he borrowed from the home of a family in Brooklyn. As in his Du-Rags series, Edmonds photographed these objects with young Black and queer-identifying people from his own creative community in New York. Edmonds says, “I was drawn to the objects because of how they were stylized and how that stylizing spoke to a wider view of an ‘African’ vernacular of Black homes in America.”

Like many of his works, this photograph is layered with art historical references that reimagine the reception of African art in Europe and the United States. The title Tête de Femme—French for “head of a woman”—has often been used in European art to describe portraits of women, and the pairing of a woman’s face with an African mask evokes American Surrealist artist Man Ray’s famous 1926 photograph Noire et blanche, which juxtaposes the face of white model Kiki (Alice Prin) with a Baule-style mask from Côte d’Ivoire.

Discover this work and more in the exhibition John Edmonds: A Sidelong Glance on view through September 26, 2021.

John Edmonds (American, born 1989). Tête de Femme, 2018. Archival pigment photograph. Courtesy the artist. UOVO Art

#john edmonds #a sidelong glance #photography #photographer #African objects #Brooklyn #portrait #art history #art historical #African mask #surrealist

#altar #african objects #nigeria #Benin city #benin kingdom #african studies #phd journey #african religion

Let us imagine !

...On a clear night in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, some wind, songs in the distance. In the courtyard of a Kuba house, a reception is being prepared. In a room opening onto a hibiscus garden, where red birds sometimes pass by, a woman is seated. Elegant, impressive, her hair tied into thousands of braids. She has just colored her skin for the festivities and is putting the powder back into her box. The night has not yet truly begun, but she is already drinking palm wine from her massive cup and smoking a few puffs of tobacco brought straight from the Americas.

#kuba objects #african objects #cosmetic box #african pipe #kuba cup #african studies #phd journey

Why Objects are Never Innocent ?

I recently came across the image of a particularly beautiful perfume bottle: Guili-Guili, created in 1926 by the French perfume house Vigny and designed by Michel de Brunhoff. The object is elegant, sculptural, almost solemn. Its form clearly evokes African statuary, recalling certain sculpted productions from Central Africa, particularly those associated with Lega peoples. At first glance, the bottle "guili-guili" appears to celebrate African aesthetics. But objects, especially those produced by luxury and cultural industries, always invite us to look beyond formal beauty. 1926 corresponds to the Art Deco period and to a moment when Europe showed a strong interest in what was then referred to as “Negro art” or “primitive art.” This fascination emerge in a colonial context shaped by colonial exhibitions, the collecting of extra-European objects, the circulation of ethnographic photography, and the transformation of living cultures into formal repertoires feeding Western imagination. While researching the history of the Vigny house, I discovered that in 1919 the brand had launched a perfume called Golliwog. The bottle and its visual imagery relied on a grotesque Black caricature: very dark skin, exaggerated eyes, thick lips, and unruly hair. Today, these representations are immediately recognized as racist. At the time, however, they were not only tolerated but appreciated by a European bourgeois public that consumed such objects without questioning them. This coexistence is essential to understand: the same period that aestheticized African forms also produced deeply dehumanizing images of Black people. Fashion houses, perfume industries, illustrated publications, and entertainment industries actively participated in spreading an exoticizing imaginaryWith the launch of La Revue Nègre in 1925, Josephine Baker were turned into icons of so-called “Black exoticism,” her image circulating across fashion, spectacle, and consumer culture. African, Asian, and Indigenous peoples were represented as figures of elsewhere, mirages of exoticism, objects of fascination or spectacle. Caricatures circulated freely in comics, advertising, decorative objects, toys, pastries, and luxury goods. In this context, Africa became both a source of formal inspiration and an object of colonial fantasy. Forms were extracted, stylized, and emptied of their meanings, while Black bodies were reduced to grotesque or decorative figures. This is precisely why objects are never innocent. They are products of their time. They reflect power relations, dominant imaginaries, and racial and cultural hierarchies. Every creation is situated. And sometimes, that memory forces us to confront what aesthetics have tried to conceal.

#phd research #african objects #primitif art #exotism #luxury #Josephine Baker #Belle Epoque #paris

Credit: Dafna Gazit, Israel Antiquities Authority

In the Negev desert, on the ancient site of Tel Malhata, part of the Byzantine provinve of Palestina, archeologist uncovered African-style figurines, carved over 1,500 years ago, during the 6th century CE, from precious ebony wood imported from India or Sri Lanka. These small objects were found buried beside a woman and a child in an ancient Christian cemetery. (The site is considered Christian because of the burial positions : bodies lying on their back, with heads facing west, a common Christian rite during the Romano-Byzantine period). The figurines are delicate pendants shaped like male and female faces, were worn close the body in life and carried to the grave in death. What do they telle us ? That an African aesthetic, an African memory was already travelling through trade, faith, migration and emotional or ancestral ties across continents. There were not just ovjects of commerce : they held stories, identities, belonging and maybe parayers. Their presence at Tel Malhata show us that early Christian communities in the region were not isolated and that Africa was never peripheral, even though historical narratives have often erased or minimized its role. Maybe the woman and child buried with these pendants were descendants of travelers, converts, or people who once came from the African continent. These figurines remind us that ancient african populations traveled, traded, shared culture, shaped global memory. That african objects carry deep memory, that ancient Africa was global and that fragments of its ancient world still lie hidden beaneth the dust of forgotten places.