Piero Atchugarry Gallery presents Witness, the gallery’s first group exhibition exclusively featuring five contemporary African and African Diaspora artists navigating the saturation of globalization from a postcolonial perspective. Serving as a crucial platform for visibility in Miami, the exhibition includes works by Ângela Ferreira (b.1958), Lungiswa Gqunta (b.1990), DaàPò Réo (b. 1971), Tariku Shiferaw (b.1983), and Chris Soal (b.1994). The exhibition spans four generations, multiple disciplines and a profound understanding of the internationalism of contemporary African art.
Guided by the curatorial expertise of Natasha Becker, the newly appointed inaugural Curator of African art at The Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, Witness surveys the intersections of collective memory, materiality and narrative to engage each artist’s unique aesthetics in an attempt to uncover the veiled backgrounds and the subterranean depths that characterize being in the world. Their points of origin, however, are anything but uniform.
Currently residing in Lisbon, Mozambique-born artist Ângela Ferreira...engages in a research-based practice to address the perpetual impact of colonialism and postcolonialism on contemporary society, offering insights on the life’s work of anthropologists Jorge and Margot Dias in Adventures in Mozambique and the Portuguese Tendency to Forget. South African artist Lungiswa Gqunta’s multi-disciplinary work poetically engages in the complexities of the South African postcolonial cultural and political landscape, specifically informed by her upbringing in a shebeen household in the suburb of New Brighton, Port Elizabeth.
DaàPò Réo of Nigeria, currently based in Brooklyn, NY, weaves sociocultural, economic and political commentaries into his mixed-media flag textile-installations. Réo’s video piece for the exhibition, aptly titled, ReincarNATION, centers the artist as both the subject and object of naturalization. Also based in Brooklyn, and known for his practice of mark-making that explores the metaphysical ideas of painting and societal structures, Ethiopian-born Tariku Shiferaw presents a new body of work that references the hierarchy of systems through the dense layering of material(s). Living and working between Johannesburg and Cape Town, sculptor Chris Soal uses discarded materials such as toothpicks and bottle caps to examine the socio-political context of their making whilst highlighting the histories embedded in the found and disposable material.
Each of the works exhibited in Witness exudes the atmosphere of its particular place and moment, and at the same time, retraces a path towards an accessible but still distant African origin. Though these artists are distinct in their connection to Africa—either as a place of birth or a space of cultural significance—their creative visions are aligned in the unapologetic work of historical and cultural excavation and repair.
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Natasha Becker (b.1974 in Cape Town, South Africa) is the inaugural curator of African art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. With expertise in contemporary African art and her research, writing, and curatorial practice focuses on politically engaged art. She is one of the founding curators of Assembly Room, a curatorial platform dedicated to the professional empowerment of independent women curators. Becker holds a master’s degree in African history from the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa, and completed her PhD coursework in art history at Binghamton University, New York. She began her tenure at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco on December 1, 2020.
In December 2018, with a space established in Garzón, Uruguay, Piero Atchugarry expanded his program to North America with a second location near Miami’s renowned Design District neighborhood. Together with architects Diana Boytell and Leonardo Noguez, Piero Atchugarry renovated a 1955, 9,000-square foot warehouse into an exhibition space that deliberately merged the industrial interior with the natural world present outdoors. The Piero Atchugarry Gallery is committed to supporting and presenting the work of local and international artists with an institutional approach.
Entrada actualizada el el 08 nov de 2021
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