ART
SOUTH AFRICA: Mary Sibande tells the story of post-apartheid South African society
Mary Sibande is a contemporary South African visual artist born in 1982 in Barberton in Mpumalanga, a province in South Africa. She currently lives and works in Johannesburg.Known in the fields of sculpture, photography, visual arts and collage, Mary Sibande explores the construction of identity in the post-apartheid context of South African society and the representations of women. Through her character “Sophie”, she explores, investigates, questions, expresses, denounces, recounts and stages segments of colonial, discriminatory and racialized life. Mary Sibande is a large-format artist who does not hesitate to shake society and its shortcomings. Through her work, she gives her share of the truth of this world that is going terribly wrong, immersed in a conservative historical context where she challenges her people: the South Africans as a whole, including a part of the population, Black, has long been dominated by another, white. For our portrait series, Ze-africanews focuses on this artist known worldwide for her fight for Africa and the black world.
His studies and works
Mary Sibande studied at the University of Johannesburg where she graduated in 2007. Endowed with a talent and a rather singular style, it is presented in many international events. She represented South Africa at the Venice Biennale in 2011. In addition to being the last recipient of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award, she has had a travelling exhibition in South Africa in 2013. His productions can be found in the Spencer Museum of Art collection at the University of Kansas and in many South African public collections such as the South Africa National Gallery and the Johannesburg Art Gallery.
Through “Sophie” she tells the post-colonial story of South Africa
In her sculptures, she uses her character, her alter ego “Sophie” dressed in a hybrid garment, a large blue Victorian dress surmounted by a white apron. With home accessories, she keeps her eyes closed as if to dream of a world far different from that of the traditional working class of post-Apartheid South Africa. It tells the story of South Africa.The lives of black domestic servants under the wing of their master. In his works, it is also the story of his grandmother whose masters had called “Elsie” by substitution for his African name which they could not pronounce. She wonders about the status of women in her own family, who were servants, when she managed to become an artist. She is free to have ideas, to express them. A freedom acquired that for generations was a non-existent notion in the lives of his relatives.
It is gaining notoriety thanks to the 2010 World Cup
At the Football World Cup hosted by South Africa in 2010, Sibande’s sculptures and photographs were visible in the streets of Johannesburg. Such an event that drains an immense crowd has greatly increased its notoriety in his country and in the world.
His solo exhibition “The purple shall govern” was presented at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown and major cities in South Africa as part of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award. The other peculiarity of the work of Mary Sibande is the use of the blue colour which recalls the period of apartheid which did much harm to the black community of South Africa where white presidents succeeded each other in power from 1961 to 1994 or thirty-three years before Nelson Mandela came to power, A leading figure in this dark period in the history of his country.
Her originality: she wants to understand the role of colour in South African history
“Succession of three ages”, a revolutionary work by Mary Sibande, depicts four gigantic horses harnessed to a deformed, sprawling and almost surreal silhouette. The visual artist alludes to her childhood in this artistic production, where she was surrounded by people who lived through the dark periods of a socially deformed society, economically and politically under racial segregation with a split between blacks and whites. The purple color used in this achievement, recalls the 1980s when the South African people lived a period of transition and struggle for the abolition of the Apartheid system which had created a real hierarchy in South African biracial society.During a demonstration, government forces spray a jet of water that contains purple ink on the crowd. The objective was to identify the protesters in order to arrest them afterwards. Inspired by this dramatic and historical history, Mary Sibande presents a tank that represents despotic and anonymous power and purple tentacles recall the figure of the jellyfish, one of the three gorgons of Greek mythology. The situation of social tension, the harnessed rocking horses, could evoke the impasse of the black South African people in the struggle in search of freedom for its effective emancipation.
The continuity of its fight against inequality
Anti-conformist, revolutionary, rigorous, contemporary visual artist, Mary Sibande represented red dogs, recurring patterns born from the Zulu expression «Ie ukwatile uphenduke inja ebomvu», which can be translated by “He’s angry, he turned into a red dog” in December 2019. It thus traces the indignation, the major feeling facing the persistence of glaring inequalities. Anger is something.
The monumental works depicting the battle of Little Big Horn, exhibited on the Pont des Arts in Paris in 1999, made the Senegalese artist famous. The installation has just joined the fortress in the Hautes-Alpes for at least ten years.
Muscled warriors meld, horse bumping. Sounds of the fury of battle are heard. Under the impressive curvilinear wooden frame of the old Rochambeau barracks, at the fort of Mont-Dauphin (Hautes-Alpes), is played the battle of Little Big Horn, opposing, in 1876, a coalition of Cheyennes, Sioux and Arapaho to the soldiers of General Custer’s regiment.
In thirty-five monumental sculptures, visible from 6 July, the Senegalese sculptor Ousmane Sow (1935-2016) celebrates the resounding victory of the fragile over the powerful. Deposited in this fortified village for a period of ten years renewable by his widow, the director Béatrice Soulé, this epic installation is well known to the Parisians who discovered it amazed, one day in March 1999, on the Pont des Arts.
The exhibition has remained in the annals with its record attendance – at least 3 million visitors in three months. «An unexpected success», recalls art critic Emmanuel Daydé, then deputy mayor for cultural affairs. For the former physiotherapist born in 1935 in Dakar, who later became an artist, it is consecration. But also, surprisingly, a swan song.
At the moment when Ousmane Sow gains international fame, the art world turns its back on him. Although he was the first African artist recognized in France, none of his successors, to whom he had paved the way, claimed it.
Mayor’s daughter supports her cause
It had all started well. In 1993, the Senegalese sculptor, who two years earlier had been on the cover of Revue noire – a quarterly magazine that revealed a number of African talents – was invited to the major five-year exhibition at Documenta in Kassel, Germany. In 1995, here he is at the Venice Biennale, which is to contemporary art what the Cannes Film Festival is to cinema. The autodidact dreams of an event in Paris.
By chance, he met Hélène Tiberi, daughter of the mayor at the time, Jean Tiberi. Who supports his cause at the City Hall. The location is easy: it will be the Pont des Arts, between the Louvre and the Academy of Fine Arts. It will take diplomatic treasures to convince these two institutions, who have not seen with a good eye the proximity of massive silhouettes imagined by an African artist.Archives «World»: Ousmane Sow questions Bordeaux and politicians
The neighbouring National School of Fine Arts, where figurative art was then taboo, is also pinching its nose. Money is missing. The Havas group had initially promised to contribute to the addition of 5 million francs (the equivalent of 1 million euros today), but its new CEO, Jean-Marie Messier, is sneaking out. Béatrice Soulé moves heaven and earth, finds sponsors and is personally indebted to the tune of 1 million francs. More here
Source: Le Monde
“Every night in the world” was advertised on social media, with a beating drum. In fact, it piqued my curiosity. This Saturday, October 1, the show took place, at nine o’clock, at the Institut français in Abidjan. It has produced an excellent impression on the coming public in great numbers. We loved and applauded this living painting, this show of the slam poet Placide Konan and the director Alain Serge Agnessan.
If I spill my guts on this show, let’s first encourage the organizers. Apart from human imperfections of details, the show was well staged and artistically presented. It wasn’t just a play, it was better: music, choreography, slam, a game of actors that explodes, like firecrackers, at a great height and even better it told a moving story. And what a story!
Raising the curtain. A young man strapped like a bum appears. Disheveled, disordered and refreshed with alcohol, he progresses through the night and begins to exude: he begins a long speech punctuated with powerful accents. We dwell on his clothing disorder, which wearies with its complexity. It rains a light on him. The rest of the decor, vexed, is hidden in the night. He bears on his forehead the aftermath of a love that will not come again. His name is Ferdinand. Akissi, her lover, turns and dances around him, in the void. He does not see her. He calls her, she hears her; but, he cannot see her. How to fill this sudden gap between a dead and a living? How to join, to the perfection of the hereafter and here? How to dissolve two drowned of different densities? On either side of the shore, two beings challenge each other, without ever getting along, really, or really touching each other. The human being is only loneliness. Separated, detached, disjointed, he does not reach the world. Neither does the world reach him. While time has stopped running on one, it takes away the other. It draws them together without ever uniting them, without breaking the isolation. Everyone reaches out to a dream they can’t reach. Disorder of the self, panic attack in front of his impotence; a clinician could find there a new pathological vein.
Placide, the mastodon n°1 of the slam. One of those monsters that Alain Tailly created in a few copies, plays the role of Ferdinand. He writes a poem to Akissi, a role brilliantly staged by the dancer and singer, Marcelle Kabran, his beloved whom he wants to bring back to life. Ah! This Akissi! Was she born on a Sunday or a Monday? What a ball of energy! Its use of space, the expressions of its body are worth verses. One understands the whirlwind of fire that eats its soul. Is it in order to extinguish this consuming fire that he drinks so much? He plans to put on paper a poem that will tear his beloved from the bowels of the afterlife. Vain quest for a man splendid isolated, like all poets and who begins the slow and inevitable shipwreck of the damned. In a dark setting where a dream piled up that slipped between her fingers. The excess, – and this is what makes the beauty of this spectacle -, is such that Akissi speaking to Ferdinand in a face-to-face no longer even knows that she is often unaware that she is an ethereal soul, that she is dead. His voice sounds like a sermon in a brothel. Ferdinand, I think, lies to himself. He doesn’t really want to bring Akissi back. He wants to save himself by writing. The scenography is in my mouth. I hear she generated by the same person who directed the show.
Article directed with Siaka Bambam Doh Ouattara
This Saturday, September 24, 2022, in the great hall of shows and concerts in Paris, Le Zèbre de Belleville, the famous Senegalese comedian of social networks Mame Balla Mbow comes out of the virtual. After proving himself in Senegal, he organizes a One Man Show in Paris, the event capital. You will cry with laughter. If not, you will be reimbursed.
Inimitable touch-to-all, Mame Balla Mbow is an actor, humorist, comedian,… with equal success with spectators and users. He has played in hit series like Infidels, Mother Thiaba Arrest. This young man is one of the most followed Senegalese actors on social networks. He alone has the secret of this success story. He is not at his first one-man show. After the show he gave in Senegal, he does not intend to stop in such a good way. He intends to raise the Parisian public as he demonstrated at Canal Olympia and Sorano.
Born in Yeumbeul in the department of Pikine in Senegal, Balla Mbow is about thirty years old. Adored by a Senegalese fringe, Balla Mbow is one of the people who can be called influencers. Yet the man remains modest; he defines himself as a columnist and blogger. However, from a young age, he had only dreamed of becoming an actor: “From a very young age, I loved comedy. Inspiration is in my blood. I followed the great actors of the world like Jamel Debbouze. That is why I do not identify with the way comedy is done in Senegal. She’s in disguise and we highlight the feminine beauty, the screaming, and clowning. I said to myself: why not make a comedy on social networks and reach thousands of people, in other words, a new way of doing comedy’. So far, he’s done it well. His very clear positions that he serves Internet users with a touch of humour have made him a key figure in the Senegalese media scene.
Yet nothing predestined this young man to be fired by humour. His school curriculum is one of the most perfect. Holder of a law degree, Mame Balla Mbow is more devoted to the cause of citizens than to earn money. After his baccalaureate in 2010 that he had his baccalaureate, he had at heart to do sociology, but the voices of destiny are unfathomable. He is oriented at the Faculty of Legal and Political Sciences of the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar.
When he landed in the world of humour, he succeeded in building a community very quickly. Thanks to his talent, he won the Pulse Awards in 2021 as «Facebook Influencer of the Year». All the big brands and companies are fighting for advertising campaigns like Orange, Dolima, the Ministry of Youth, Canal+, Tecno, Oumou Group, Jumia. His self-deprecating appearances pose him as a major player in the world of virtual media. This committed artist does not mince words when the opportunity to denounce a fact arises. His credibility comes from his constancy. At home, money comes in the background. Living on his job is not easy at all. He himself admits: “I am in front when I see something that is not normal. [Because] I do not carry the fights of others.
