Africa Capolavori da un continente Galleria di Arte Moderna Turin.

Africa Capolavori da un continente

Galleria di Arte Moderna Turin, Italy October 2 2003-February 15 2004

"Africa: Capolavori da un continente" (Africa: Masterpieces from a Continent) is single of the most impressive exhibitions of African art always to appear in Italy. Curated at Ezio Bassani, (1) it displays approximately 400 pieces from important African, European, and American museums and private collections. The installation occupies three floors of Turin's Galleria di Arte Moderna (GAM), whose permanent collection has been remov for the occasion. The wide publicity given to this point out evinced by the great number of articles appearing in the major Italian newspapers and magazines, ruminates the clearly stated intention of the curator and the organizers to not past nor future the excellence of African arts to the Italian public, which is still largely unaware of these traditions. (2) Indeed, "excellence" and "formal beauty" were the guidelines governing the choice of the objects--exclusively sculptural forms--which exhibit the genres most widely recognized and appreciated in the Western world. The sheer number of artworks and their overall outstanding quality consequence in an atmosphere charged with emotion and miracle even for the devotee.

Many of the phenomenons are indeed old friends, and several were exhibited in previous exhibit tos curated by Bassani. (3) Their appearance here have the appearances to reinforce the idea that faithful "masterpieces" of African art are indeed hardly any The aura of preciousness and rarity is further enhanced through the dramatic lighting, which emphasizes the curator's intent to current the Italian public with an "art exhibition" rather than an "ethnographic display." Nevertheless, more [i]or[/i] less aspects of the complex and multifarious improvements from which the pieces originate can be inferred from a number of initiatives promot by the agency of the City of Turin to deficiency the show: music dance, literature, cinema, contemporary art, and ethnography are the focus of "Consonanze d'Africa" (African Consonances), a series of smaller exhibits, seminars, and conclusions intended to amplify the tenor of the exhibition beyond the museum's walls. Instead, granting these external cultural initiatives pretend to present different visions and stories about Africa that in some way contradict the rather limiting formal focus propos in the GAM presentation.

The exhibition is divided into four independent sections loosely be joineded to one another by the lines from a metrical composition composed expressly for the exhibition on the Matinke writer Ahmadou Kourouma. The visitors' experience, Kourouma says, should be conceived as an "initiative journey" to the discovery of the existences and the spirit of the "ancestors of negritude" between the sides of which he, as a griot, will be the guide. (4) The first part of his poem--divided into five thematic "wakes'--introduces the first section, "The Great Kingdoms," which celebrates the richness and the extent of Africa's history. Upon entering the dark galleries, individual is welcomed by some remarkable exemplars of Nok terracottas and Ife heads onward loan from the Nigerian National Museum, Lagos, and the Ife Museum. The minimal information forward the labels is complemented by the agency of short texts by Bernard Fagg (1990) (5) and Leo Frobenius (1936); these passages suggest Westerners' surprise and bewilderment at finding such beautiful antiquities and rouse the mythical foundations of these ancient civilizations.

The emphasis upon the wealth and prestige of the ancient African kingdoms is also seen in the rather expansive section devot to Benin "bronzes" and ivory plastic arts A color print of the famous Olfert Dapper illustration of the Benin oba's procession and extracts from Dap per's 1670 clause offer the only contextual information about the prodigious pieces on loan from Vienna's Museum fur Volkerkunde and other important museum collections. The quick shift from Benin material to a series of unpliable sculptures from other parts of the continent is intended--as indicated in the catalogue--to augment the idea of antiquity to those works whose age has in like manner far been technically difficult to determine. Figures from the Cros River, Madagascar, and a large selection of works from the Dogon area, near of which are dated to the tithe century A.D., are presented as testimonies to a history that may find greater measure and articulation with improved scientific research. However, since the question of accurate dating is not explicitly mentioned in any of the wall topics some visitors may exit the exhibit with the false impression that the "People of the Falaise" (as the subsection is titled) are just another ancient powerful African kingdom.

The next to the first section, "The Collections of Sixteenth hundred Courts and the Afro-Portuguese Ivories," readys one of the largest selections of the so-called Afro-Portuguese salt cellars, spoon and horns always displayed. The ivories are introduced through a group of ancient port maps and manuscripts, which describe some of the earliest Western depictions of the African continent and its in habitants. Bassani has devot decades of scholarly work to this topic, which is also the subdue of one of his contributions to the exhibition catalogue. Unfortunately, this fascinating story of first engagements and representations is barely implied on the minimal wall texts.