Sampling at the Contemporary Arts Center

Be ready to spend a few hours at the Contemporary Arts Center to discover or rediscover twenty-four artists from far places like China, South Africa or closer to home Louisiana, gathered for Prospect.3: Notes for Now. The works were selected by Frank Sirmans, the Artistic Director of the biennial (now officially a triennial), due to their power to incite a reflection on "the everydayness and the strangeness of the world around us, to bridge fissures in the past-present and to imagine the possibilities of an interconnected future".
The three floors at the CAC are filled with paintings, videos, photographs, installations, and the visit can start or end anywhere. Each artist is assigned an area, with the exception of Analia Saban whose works are randomly dispersed throughout the exhibition. I started in the oval room where Yun-Fei Ji's wall paintings depict a modern tale of population displacement and urbanization on a backdrop of droughts, starvation, pollution and political corruption. On the second floor, two geometric abstract painters set across each other initiate a conversation. McArthur Binion's paintings are characterized by monotonous colors and labor intensive repetitive marks on the canvas. They represent erasure and rebirth through delicate compositions, legacies of the menial work.  Hayal Pozanti on the other hand, transforms the dullness of technology into a new language of organic shapes, bringing life and fantasy to a boring reality. Following these, Douglas Bourgeois's figurative paintings seem easy to interpret. Like a magician, he transports common souls into a perfect world of artificial happiness and transforms their dreary surroundings into fantastic landscapes. Next, Sophie Lvoff and Lisa Sigal are focusing on the local scene, respectively with photographs and through architectural adventures.
Tank, 2014, Glenn Kaino's installation is attracting visitors with corals in clear water glowing in a bluish light. A lengthy wall text describes the work and provides a cue to the title. The cumbersome technology required to keep the corals alive undermines the project which is focused on the oceans' pollution, especially by the military, a subject somewhat off the exhibition's theme. The show gets back on track with Joe Ray's work, a thought provoking juxtaposition of symbols followed by the images from Thomas Joshua Cooper, a photographer of light.
Among the four videos displayed (two on second and two on the third floor) Mohamed Bourouissa's Temps Morts, 2009, held my attention with its depiction of grey, fuzzy, pixelated Paris's outskirts, reflecting the malaise of marginalized populations. On the same floor, one can see Felliniesque photographs from Pieter Hugo, staged scenes by Pushpamala N., the Cyndy Sherman of India, or the installation from Manal Al Dowayan, a historical view of a culture born from the oil boom.
Leaving through the first floor, one cannot miss the installation from Lucia Koch, giving a new outlook on the street through colored glass. The works selected to represent Theaster Gates in the hall include Civil Tapestry-4, 2011, an accumulation of fire hoses previously used during civil unrest, and two monochrome paintings made with tar and rubber playing with the light reflections.
The number of works and artists make such exhibition challenging for the viewer. Political with Charles Gaines, poetic with Thomas Cooper, feminist with Pushpamala N., epic with Yun Fei-Ji..., but one realizes that the works have been selected carefully to fulfill the goals clearly stated by the curator.

photographs by the author:

"The Family Drone", 2014, Hayal Pozanti
"TC/0168.13 (Anthropophagst Wading in the Artibonite River", 2014, Firelei
"Mood Disorder", 2014, Lucia Koch

From South Africa, Uganda to Prospect.3

From South Africa to Uganda, two photographers and film makers at Prospect.3.

Pieter Hugo


Born in 1976 in Johannesburg, South Africa, Pieter Hugo is a self-taught photographer based in Cape Town. His interest in photography started at an early age when he received his first camera at 10 years old. He explains why he has chosen portraiture as his main practice:

"I am six foot tall. I have blond hair and blue eyes. I stick out like a sore thumb in the locations I visit. I quickly realized that the traditional photo-journalistic approach of capturing a fleeting moment wasn't going to work for me. Firstly, my reflexes are too slow and secondly I am not a fly on the wall, I have a presence."
 His is considered a leading photographer in Africa, known for his socially and politically charged works which include depictions of Albinism (2003-2006) to documentation of the aftermath of the massacres in Rwanda in 1994 (2004). His most famous series The Hyena and Other Men (2005-2007) is about
a group of itinerant animal handlers, peddlers and performers he followed during a two years period, living with them several weeks at a time to understand their culture and thinking.
Pieter Hugo professes skepticism toward the "power of photography": "I am of a generation that approaches photography with a keen awareness of the problems inherent in pointing a camera at anything."

Major museum solo exhibitions have taken place at The Hague Museum of Photography, Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Ludwig Museum in Budapest, Fotografiska in Stockholm,  MAXXI in Rome and the Institute of Modern Art Brisbane, among others. Hugo has participated in numerous group exhibitions at institutions including Tate Modern, the Folkwang Museum, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, and the São Paulo Bienal. His work is represented in prominent public and private collections, among them the Museum of Modern Art, V&A Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, J Paul Getty Museum, Walther Collection, Deutsche Börse Group, Folkwang Museum and Huis Marseille. Hugo received the Discovery Award at the Rencontres d’Arles Festival and the KLM Paul Huf Award in 2008, the Seydou Keita Award at the Rencontres de Bamako African Photography Biennial in 2011, and was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2012.

Zarina Bhimji


Zarina Bhimji was born in Mbarara, Uganda in 1963 to Indian parents and moved to Britain in 1974, two years after the expulsion of Uganda’s Asian community in the Idi Amin era. She is a photographer and film maker working in London and Berlin.
Zarina Bhimji was educated at Leicester Polytechnic (1982 – 1983), Goldsmith's College (1983 – 1986) and  Slade School of Fine Art, University College London (1987 – 1989).  Following a post-graduate program, she became an Artist in Residence at Darwin College in Cambridge.
In her works, she intermingles reflections on colonialism, global migration, diaspora, persecutions through images referring to cultural memory like dilapidated architectures, abandoned interior spaces and personal narrative. India and East Africa are her sources for inspirations and in Out of the Blue commissioned and produced by Documenta 11 in 2002, she returned to Uganda to film the ruins left by Idi Amin's reign of terror. Yellow Patch (2011) was inspired by trade and migration across the Indian Ocean and communicates the same aura of decay and abandonment. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2007 and was the subject of a mid-career retrospective tracing 25 years of her work at Whitechapel Gallery in 2012.