Goodman Gallery presents Unbind, an exhibition of key works by a selection of artists living in Angola and South Africa alongside diasporic artists with ancestral roots in Tanzania, Algeria and Morocco - bringing together a chorus of influential international voices all with significant ties to the African continent. Featured works provide a variety of perspectives on Africa’s inherited colonial past, with artists like Zineb Sedira drawing on powerful visual strategies, known as joyful resistance, for processing this past in the present and for unshackling from its bind.
Featured artists have prominent international moments happening around the world. Kapwani Kiwanga has just opened a major solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (16 Sept 2023 - 7 Jan 2024) and is soon to represent Canada at the forthcoming Venice Biennale; Zineb Sedira’s Dreams Have No Titles is currently on view on New York’s High Line and she has a survey exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 2024; Grada Kilomba co-curated the highly anticipated 2023 São Paulo Art Biennial (6 Sept -10 Dec); Kiluanji Kia Henda’s work is a centrepiece in the recently opened Tate exhibition A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography (until 14 January 2024); and Sue Williamson’s acclaimed joint exhibition with Lebohang Kganye took place at The Barnes Foundation in the US earlier this year.
The work comprises a series of colourful photomontages featuring archival media that highlights the Pan-African Festival and further encapsulates the inspiration of the Algerian nation at the spearhead of independence movements in Africa. This body of work expands on the artist’s career-long exploration of the archive as a device to expose, reconsider and challenge history.
The installation also shows part of Sedira's rich collection of protest songs on vinyl records. This collection of vinyls is taken from the jazz performance 'We Have Come Back' given by Archie Shepp during the first Pan-African Festival in Algiers in 1969. The selection reflects the militant movements that were opposed to colonialism and imperialism and campaigned for civil rights and gender equality. It also demonstrates the political engagement of musicians in the 60s and 70s.
Sedira’s work is brought into conversation with Sue Williamson’s iconic body of work, A Few South Africans, created in 1980s South Africa in an attempt to make visible the history of women who had made an impact on the struggle for liberation. The ‘Few’ in the title referred to the fact that the subjects of the portraits represented a small number of the many thousands of women who were involved in this struggle. During these turbulent years, news and photographs of these leaders never appeared in the white dominated press, so little was known about them. For this series, the artist took many of the portrait photos on which the photo-etchings are based and others were sourced from banned books in university libraries. Williamson placed her subject, who often gazes directly at the viewer, in the centre of the image, a centrality designed to give each woman the status of a heroine.
Yto Barrada’s single-channel video Hand-Me-Downs consists of pieces of clothing passed from one generation to the next. Like the clothing, Hand-Me-Downs passes on found film footage; blurry vintage amateur images from private family albums accompanied by (French) film music from 1927–1931 evoking a similar sense of nostalgia. As is implied by the unreliability of the narrator, not all is what it seems—images do not correspond with what is said and vice versa—and what is said becomes too incredible to be true. The 15 “handed-down” stories reconstruct biographical identity and fractures in a time of Morocco’s transition from colonialism to post-colonialism. Hand-Me-Downs is accompanied by a set of images from Barrada’s Casablanca series.
Artworks
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Kapwani Kiwanga’s Greenbook 1961 series is a suite of 52 framed works, of which a selection is included in the show. The source material comes from the 1961 issue of The Traveler’s Green Book; an annual state-by-state listing printed from 1936-1966. The publication served as a resource for African-American motorists travelling across the USA providing safe at which to stop whether they be lodgings, restaurants, or service stations. Kiwanga focuses on 1961,the year in which the Freedom Riders, a group of civil rights activists, rode public interstate buses from Washington D.C. into the south to challenge the unconstitutional standard of keeping public buses segregated. Kiwanga erases information from archival scans with the exception of the state name and address. The resulting prints generate a minimal topography of a particular space and time.
