Two projects helping female Artists in Africa find their voices

By Todd Pitock
IN many African countries, where career paths for women can still be limited to practical fields like nursing and teaching, the decision to attempt a career in art is seen as unrealistic. Female artists face enormous cultural and financial resistance. But a Jo­hannesburg residency and an international art fair opening in Brooklyn next week aim to help some young women get a toehold on the ladder.
Stacey Gillian Abe’s installation at 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, which runs May 4 through 6 at Pioneer Works, the cultural center in the borough’s Red Hook neighborhood, would be provocative in any context, but given the patriarchal traditions of her native Uganda, its subject matter is all the more challenging: the objectification of women, and the sexual satisfactions of women. It consists of a profusion of vaginas, molded out of clay and painted red, exagger­atedly open and arranged randomly on the floor. An olufe — a wooden pole in Lugbara, her spoken language — used to mix millet, stands upright, set not in a traditional mor­tar but in a toilet.
The title, “Enya Sa, ” referring to millet bread, a dietary staple, leaves little doubt that she’s challenging assumptions. “The whole idea is looking at satisfaction: food and sex,” Ms. Abe, 27, said in a Skype conversation from Johannesburg earlier this month. “At what point is it right to ask for something? It’s taboo in Uganda for women to talk about sex.”
Alka Dass, a 25-year-old artist from Durban, South Africa, will take on related themes at the fair, with subtler imagery. Her piece, “Little Lolitas,” is an arrangement of film reels partly covered by knitted jerseys. The top and bottom of the reels are bare, like torsos with shoulders and midriffs exposed. It nods to the way that young girls — the nymphets in the Vladimir Nabokov work that inspired Ms. Dass’s title — are treated as passive objects of male desire. The theme is recurrent in Ms. Dass’s feminist work, rooted in South Africa’s Indian community.
“Women in my community are completely covered except in the midriff,” she said. “The sari exposes that, so it becomes the most sex­ualized part of the body.”
The determination of these women to be­come artists was considered nearly subver­sive by their families. Ms. Abe endured a tor­rent of recrimination from family members who thought she was throwing her life away. Ms. Dass’s family disowned her.
“They’re dealing with issues that take a lot of courage to address in Africa,” says Touria El Glaoui, who was a wealth management consultant before she established the 1-54 in 2013 in London, adding the New York edi­tion in 2015. “They’re life and death issues, and their work is very sensitive and speaks to insecurities, fears, expectations, and being in the world as a woman — which we of­ten think about as women but don’t express well.”
Neither woman could expect a warm wel­come in the art world they aspired to join. According to a 2010 research report by the National Arts Council of South Africa, an agency of the country’s Department of Arts & Culture, 88 percent of artists in South Africa who support themselves from their work are male, 12 percent female, and of that group only 3 percent are women of color. (In the eight years since that report, the gen­der imbalance has not changed much in the South African art scene, and there’s little data about other African countries.)
After visiting South Africa last year, Ms. El Glaoui, the daughter of the Moroccan painter Hassan El Glaoui, was especially impressed by The Project Space, a nonprof­it whose Young Female Residency Award had thrown Ms. Dass and Ms. Abe a lifeline, providing accommodation, studio space, sti­pends for materials and for travel, including a roundtrip ticket to France for a period of residency there.
Founded in 2016, it awards one South Af­rican and one continental African residency annually. Next year a third will be extended to a woman in the African diaspora.
It’s the brainchild of Benon Lutaaya, a ris­ing star on the South African art scene who remembers feeling appalled by the data from the arts report. “I thought, ‘Let me start a na­tional award in South Africa,’” Mr. Lutaaya said in an interview last month in his Johan­nesburg studio.
Source: New York Times