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Indepth Arts News:
"Museum of Contemporary African Art and More : Meschac Gaba"
2009-08-29 until 2009-09-15
Kunsthalle Fridericianum
Kassel, ,
DE Germany
Starting on 29 August 2009, Meschac Gaba and Latifa Echakhch will focus on global and cultural differences at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum. With the exhibition Museum of Contemporary African Art and More Meschac Gaba is taking up aspects of African culture and, through the presentation in a museum, at the same time referring to a Western-oriented commercial world of art and products. With Les sanglots longs Latifa Echakhch has created a formal but very sensual installation in which she critically investigates issues around globalization as well as national differences and cultural identity.
Meschac Gaba
The Museum of Contemporary African Art consists of museum rooms such as, for example, a library, a shop, a restaurant, a salon as well as a wedding- and a game room. After being presented individually worldwide, these 12 installations, which were created between 1997 and 2002, are now being shown together at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum. Further to the African Museum Gaba produced the work Lac de Sagesse. This piece consists of 12 gilded brains of so-called grandes maîtres, ranging from Jesus Christ to Harald Szeemann, supplemented by poster-sized banknotes with portraits of the curators who had previously exhibited the individual installations. Also on view is the work Sweetness, an around 50-square-metre fictive city model made of sugar.
The exhibition was initiated by the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in cooperation with Museum De Paviljoens, Almere. An extensive catalogue will appear at the end of 2009.
Latifa Echakhch
Les sanglots longs is an exhibition extending over several rooms that Latifa Echakhch conceived for the Kunsthalle Fridericianum which ˆ although designed very conceptually ˆ relies aesthetically on visual and acoustic experience. The thematic focus lies on time and its duration. A huge wall drawing displaying several hundred numbers referring to the Israel-Arabic conflict also forms the basis for a dodecaphonic piano composition which Echakhch commissioned specifically for this exhibition. In the first room large wedges made both of foam and of concrete grouped in several island landscapes form a counterpart to the auditory element; they seem to suck up the sound and refer to endlessness, another aspect of time and a main theme of the installation Les sanglots longs.
Side-programme and education
The varied side-programme starts in September with Bassam Tibi and Chris Dercon. Bassam Tibi, professor of political science and international relations at Göttingen, Cornell, and Yale universities, is holding a lecture on Wednesday, 16 September in which he will address the topic of culturally pluralistic societies as well as the cultural diversity of Islamic civilization. On Wednesday, 30 September, Chris Dercon and Rein Wolfs will discuss Meschac Gaba‚s art and their curatorial approach in working with Gabas art. Dercon is the director of Haus der Kunst in Munich and, like Rein Wolfs, has worked with Meschac Gaba before.
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