CinemAfrica Sweden 2014 | 19 – 23 March

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19th – 23rd March 2014

CinemAfrica arranges the largest African film festival in Sweden. The festival is a unique opportunity for children, youth and adults to watch and discuss films from emerging African film industries. They show feature films, documentaries, short films and animations made by filmmakers of African descent and works to highlight the Africans own pictures and stories.

Kenyan artists/filmmakers Wangechi Mutu and Jim Chuchu both have work that is screening. Mutu’s first animated film The End of eating Everything will be screening and Chuchu’s work is also screening as part of the African Metropolis project which I previously featured here.

African metropolis

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There are also talks and special Q&A sessions throughout the festival. What part does contemporary art from Africa play across the global art world? Three artists who all use visual art as one of their mediums will be hosting a discussion, international Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu, producer/researcher/presenter Zina Saro-Wiwa and innovative filmmaker Frances Bodomo. In collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm. This event is free.

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Stuart Hall was one of the greatest and most influential thinkers, and has been a constant presence in the global public debate for over 50 years, a pioneer in everything from the British New Left to feminist cultural analysis and postcolonial studies. In this sensitive told documentary director John Akomfrah creates a beatiful portrait of Stuart Hall from archive images and audio fragments, and creates an equal political and personal dialogue about memory, identity and our age’s dramatic history.

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The history of black women in the American civil rights movement in the 60’s – and 70’s in a large-scale and ambitious documentary, a celebration of generations and a lesson to today’s feminists from the young, Nigeria-born filmmaker Nevline Nnaji. With a mixture of fresh interviews and archival material, we follow the emergence of a strong, international solidarity, black feminism, which is forced to fight against both sexist structures in the civil rights movement and racist structures in the women’s movement.

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Some would argue that no area within the film world has changed so fast and so spectacularly in recent years as the African music videos, today a giant industry that established links with many of the most exciting and experimental willing new filmmakers. Along with a panel of directors who all have been involved in various ways in the music video world, examples will be shown and there will be discussions about the production, aesthetics, the music industry and how today directors are approaching the history and future.  Teddy Goitom from Stocktown where music videos are prominently featured, will be on the panel.

Also screening are various films I have featured here including Afronauts  and Boneshaker by Frances Bodomo,

The Robots of Brixton and Jonah by Kibwe Tavares,

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Wangechi Mutu | Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami

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Wangechi Mutu, People in Glass Towers Should not Imagine Us, 2003

Opening Reception: April 17, 2014
On view: April 18 – July 6, 2014

The Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami will present Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey, a comprehensive survey of Wangechi Mutu, a Kenya-born, New York-based artist whose multi-faceted work captures 21st century global sensibility. This retrospective began at the Nasher Museum of Art and will made its way to the Brooklyn Museum from October 2013 to March 2014 and will be at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University in September 2014. The exhibition includes more than 50 works from the mid-1990s to the present, including a new site-specific mural and a black box theater projection of her newest video. Approximately 30 of the artist’s sketchbook drawings, dating from 1995 to the present, will also be on view, revealing fascinating insight into her creative process.

This exhibit is part of MOCA’s Knight Exhibition Series, which is made possible by a $5 million endowment allowing MOCA to fulfill its mission to present the best new and multimedia work by local and international emerging and experimental artists to a diverse audience.

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Wangechi Mutu, Yo Mama, 2003

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Wangechi Mutu, One Hundred Lavish Months, 2004

Since earning her M.F.A. from Yale University in 2000, Wangechi Mutu, who trained as both a sculptor and anthropologist, has come to be regarded as one of the most inventive and critically-engaged artists of her generation.  Combining materials and imagery from sources as diverse as African traditions, international politics, the high fashion industry and science fiction, Mutu creates works that depict fantastical worlds as places for profound exploration of race, gender and power. Her work is a critical investigation of issues ranging from colonialism to displacement, ritual, perceptions of Africa and the female form.

Placing centrality on the female form, Wangechi Mutu’s provocative body of work imagines hybrid creatures and surreal landscapes that comment on commercialism, globalization and cultural norms. We are thrilled to be presenting the first solo museum exhibition dedicated to her work.

– Alex Gartenfeld, MOCA Interim Director and Chief Curator

A new site-specific mixed media mural created for the MOCA presentation will welcome visitors into exhibition galleries, which will be transformed into a forest-like environment populated by the installation of large-scale felt trees. MOCA’s Pavilion Gallery will be transformed into a black box theater for the projection of the artist’s first-ever animated video The End of eating Everything, 2013, in which Mutu works with musician Santigold to bring her elaborate collages to life in a magical narrative set in the sky.

 

 

The exhibit incorporates all aspects of Mutu’s prolific practice which includes collage, drawing, installation, sculpture, performance and video. Within this setting, Mutu’s iconic collages will be prominently featured, including new commissions and rare early works. Two other videos are featured in the exhibition: Eat Cake, 2012, which addresses ritual and overindulgence and Amazing Grace, 2005, a meditation on the slave trade and displaced populations.

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Still from Eat Cake (2012) by Wangechi Mutu

Other features Ciné Kenya has done about Wangechi Mutu include her incredible work as the artistic director for a Pegasus Warning music video here.

Where: Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami

When: April 18 – July 6, 2014,   Monday – Friday: 9am – 6pm

Price: General Admission: $5.00   Students & Seniors: $3.00 for concessions prices go here.

 
 

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Wangechi Mutu | Brookyn Museum Oct 2013 – Mar 2014

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Artist Wangechi Mutu in her Brooklyn studio, 2012. Photo by Kathryn Parker Almanas.

October 11, 2013–March 9, 2014
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, 4th Floor

Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey is the first survey in the United States of this internationally renowned, Brooklyn-based artist and will be showing at the Brooklyn Museum until next March. This retrospective began at the Nasher Museum of Art and will make its way to the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami in April 2014 and the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University in September 2014. The exhibition in Brooklyn has been made possible by the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation.

Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Mutu scrutinizes globalization by combining found materials, magazine cutouts, sculpture, and painted imagery. Sampling such diverse sources as African traditions, international politics, the fashion industry, pornography, and science fiction, her work explores gender, race, war, colonialism, global consumption, and the exoticization of the black female body.

Mutu is best known for spectacular and provocative collages depicting female figures—part human, animal, plant, and machine—in fantastical landscapes that are simultaneously unnerving and alluring, defying easy categorization and identification. Bringing her interconnected ecosystems to life for this exhibition through sculptural installations and videos, Mutu encourages audiences to consider these mythical worlds as places for cultural, psychological, and socio-political exploration and transformation.

The exhibition also includes Mutu’s first animation in which she collaborated with musician Santigold. The 8-minute video, The End of eating Everything,marks the journey of a flying, planet-like creature navigating a bleak skyscape. Read more about the animation at Cine Kenya’s previous post here and view an interview with Mutu and Santigold (below), where they discuss the inspiration behind the animation film and how why they decided to work together.

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Kwani at 10 | Book and Art Party

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Kwani Trust are celebrating their 10 year anniversary with a programme of special events. On Friday 29th November, Kwani? present a lecture titled Contemporary African Writing in the context of 50 years by renowned author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie from 2.30pm – 4.00pm at the 844 Building, University of Nairobi (please note change of venue from Taifa Hall)
Free entry (by Pre-registration ONLY) Register here.

Also on Friday, there will be a joint launch of Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah at the Marshall’s Service Workshop/ Warehouse from 8.00pm.

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The Future Weird | Visions of Excess

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Friends over at Shadow and Act announced an intriguing event is taking this week, Wednesday, July 31, at Spectacle Theater, 124 S. 3rd Street, Brooklyn, New York 11211. THE FUTURE WEIRD is a new monthly series screening films which are set in imagined futures, made by African & global south directors. Presented by Derica Shields and Megan Eardley, the title is inspired by The State’s ongoing documentation of non-western futurisms.

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Included in the screening series is Cameroonian director Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s satirical sci-fi vampire film Les Saignantes (The Bleeders) alongside shorts by Wangechi Mutu and Kibwe Tavares plus weird and wonderful clips from forgotten corners of the colonial archive.

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Wangechi Mutu | MCA Exhibition 23 May – 14 August 2013

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Discover the diverse practice of Kenyan-born, Brooklyn–based artist Wangechi Mutu in this free major presentation at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney featuring collage, drawing, sculpture, installation and video. This will not only be the first time the Kenyan-born, Brooklyn-based artist’s works have been shown in Australia, but also the most comprehensive international survey of her work yet.

Messy splendour – a riot of colour and texture. It’s a combination of things that, on one hand are quite beautiful but on the other, quite abject, confronting and visceral. It’s an extraordinary and strongly bodily experience.
– Senior Curator Rachel Kent
Known primarily for her collages, Mutu examines representations of the black female body in popular media, looking at stereotyping, voyeurism, sexual desire and eroticism. Some collages are small and jewel-like, others are two-metre long sweeping expanses. Be drawn into contemplations on beauty, consumerism, colonialism, race, and gender through Mutu’s exquisite, provocative works. See how she combines drawn elements and image fragments from a variety of media including fashion magazines and ethnographic journals, as well as representations of the female body from pornography, in her collages. These images are then knitted together with rich surface ornamentation: watercolour paints, costume jewelry, fur, bits of plants and beads.
In addition to the collages, Mutu’s new “experiential” installation pieces – complete with elements of sound, light and scent – are to be displayed, transforming the gallery into a “dense sculptural environment”. This will the very first time they have been shown in a major exhibit. Perhaps the highlight of the exhibition will be ‘Exhuming Gluttony: Another Requiem’(2006), which features surfaces groaning with excess, a large banquet table onto which suspended red wine bottles drip their contents creating blood-like blooms. The effect is unsettling, even sinister.
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Exhuming Gluttony (Another Requiem), 2011.
Mixed media installation, Animal pelts, wood, bottles, wine, packing tape, and blankets, variable dimensions.
Installation view at Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, 2011.
Courtesy of the artist.

Mutu’s collaged bodies are frequently subjected to strange deformations or embellishments, combining elements of humour, pathos and sexuality in often surprising ways. Collage works featured at the MCA include the Bedroom Masks series, The Ark Collection (2006) of erotic collaged postcards, and the X Ray series (2008) of strangely morphed life forms which sit between human, animal and plant worlds. The single collage Intertwined (2003) extends this theme with its elegant depiction of two conjoined female figures with canine heads.

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The End of eating Everything

The End of eating Everything by Wangechi Mutu

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Animated video (color, sound)

8- minute loop,

edition of 6.

Courtesy of the artist. Commissioned by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University presents Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu’s first animated video, created in collaboration with recording artist Santigold and co-released by MOCAtv on YouTube.

The 8-minute video, The End of eating Everything,marks the journey of a flying, planet-like creature navigating a bleak skyscape. This “sick planet” creature is lost in a polluted atmosphere, without grounding or roots, led by hunger towards its own destruction. The animation’s audio, also created by Mutu, fuses industrial and organic sounds.

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Wangechi Mutu: A Fantasic Journey, Nasher Museum of Art

Artist Wangechi Mutu in her Brooklyn studio, 2012. Photo by Kathryn Parker Almanas.

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The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University has organized Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu’s first survey in the United States. The exhibition Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey runs from March 21st to July 21st 2013

Mutu’s work is internationally renowned for exploring sensitive issues like race, colourism, the eroticization of the black female body, colonialism, gender, war, consumerism and globalization. She creates ” mysterious figures pieced together with human, animal, machine and monster parts. She often combines found materials and magazine cutouts with sculpture and painted imagery, sampling from sources as diverse as African traditions, international politics, the fashion industry and science fiction.”

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At Home With Wangechi Mutu

At Home With Wangechi Mutu

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Mater Mea present a fascinating look into Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu’s home, routine and her approach to motherhood.

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