metropolis m

The 14th century Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri is a poetic journey in afterlife. In a hundred ‘canti’, Dante traveled from hell via purgatory to paradise. I haven’t read the famous verses: what a shame Latin class in high school only covered the classical era. Maybe I should now start reading it after having encountered its 21st century artistic interpretation by fifty contemporary African artists, or as curator Simon Njami calls it: ‘appropriation’.

The exhibition Divine Comedy in Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt is conceived as a drama in three acts, following the original structure of the tale in which the only two non-Europeans were Averroes and Avicenna. They were soon to be assimilated by the West, as their westernized names testify. The questioning of power relations today and the aim of inclusiveness make this exhibition a highly political enterprise, like all of Njami’s projects.

This celebrated and controversial persona in the international art scene has a mission: for Africa to be ‘a force of proposition that can impose its own vision to the world’, which sounds like an anti-statement in times of abundantly late efforts by Western modern art museums to gain knowledge of ‘global art’ and build exchange with ethnographic museums.

In spite of the clear structure of the Divine Comedy, Njami’s symbolism confused me, just like his previous group exhibition of African artists, Africa Remix (2005). To what extent are the works attributable to hell, purgatory or paradise and the matching alchemist colors white, red or black as used in the museum spaces? Knowing that a number of works were commissioned some fitted better in their section than others. On top of this, respectively Kazimir Malevich, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Caravaggio were chosen to guide the artists in hell, purgatory or paradise, adding another layer in the catalogue that accompanies this exhibition.

Wandering through the polyphonic canti, I ended up taking the sections, colors, and guides for granted to give way to the notions of no-man’s land and personal journey. My reading was an exercise in balancing between the collectiveness proposed by the curator and the individuality of each artwork.

And although the diversity in shape and scale of the museum spaces in Frankfurt seems very imposing and awkward to engage with, Njami did a good job when it comes to the arrangement of the works. I am not sure if it is despite or thanks to this enforcing museum architecture by Hans Hollein that the show allows for an open reading.

All the works are concerned with life and death/afterlife. Njami challenged the artists to make the intangible tangible, to create access to an inaccessible world. Whereas Dante was embedded in his restrictive time of religious power play, the interpreters in this chorus create their art through ‘a sensitivity that relates to absolute freedom’, as Njami puts it. Still, artists like Majida Khattari (Houris rêve de martyrs) and Zoulikha Bouabdellah (Silence) act out against religious restrictions. Dimitri Fagbohoun (Réfrigérium) made a confessional installation about the absolution of his late father. Nabil Boutros reunited citations of the Qur’an, the Torah and the Bible. These works negotiate free space of expression, independent of a religious authority.

Human experience with trauma animates most of the imagery, whether the visitor finds himself in Heaven, Purgatory, or in Hell. Although claimed inaccessible, Heaven is materialized in Maurice Pefura’s installation The Silent Way, Hell in Moataz Nasr’s Dome and Errance by Dominique Zinkpè. Natural environments and phenomena pop up in all three sections, like Cheikh Niass rainbow paintings (La série Arc en ciel) and Guy Tillim’s photo series Second Nature. The desert represents infiniteness in human perception in Zineb Sedira’s Guiding Light and also Jellel Gasteli’s photo series Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.

Andrew Tshabangu (On sacred ground) and Ato Malinda (On fait ensemble) shift between religion and nature. Literature as a guiding motif is present in Jane Alexanders’ Frontier with Church, as in Othello’s Fate by Kiluanji Kia Henda.

Works driven by historic power conflicts are inescapably Kader Attia’s repaired mirrors, called Repair Analysis, a striking tautology of and between self, image and shared history. Kudzanai Chiurai presents Iyeza, a tableau vivant of cinematographic imagery of power, violence, and ritual. Present day hardship permeates the photographs of goldmines by Sammy Baloji (Kolwezi) and Convoi Royal, a most ironic title for a boat with eighty heads, by Jems Robert Koko Bi.

Other stories transcend the personal, like Myriam Mihindou (The dress flew off) who speaks of her struggle to overcome an imprisonment, and Youssef Nabil (You never left) about exile and return. This is where the personal becomes political.

According to the curator’s essay in the catalogue, ‘the concern here is not with the Divine Comedy or Dante. It is with something truly universal.’ Njami has found a cultural theme deeply rooted in the western collective subconscious that he has transported into the minds and works of some fifty African artists. It is up to these contemporary voices to drag European and American audiences into their pictorial languages based on the universal themes of life and death. A western cultural reference, an icon, is used as a vehicle to familiarize new audiences with artistic expression of the African continent.

This voyage was a great way for me to appropriate the Divine Comedy, as a collection of superimposed stories, the first by Dante, followed by all these artists and their worldwide references.

The Divine Comedy. Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists
MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst
Frankfurt am Main
21 March – 27 July

The exhibition will travel to Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington D.C.