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An Art Critic in Africa

Seeing culture on its own terms. Articles, commentary and pictures.

Aksum and Lalibela: Pilgrimage

Panoramas

EthiopiaThe city of Gondar was the imperial capital of Ethiopia in the 17th century and much of its palace architecture still survives.

EthiopiaThe city of Gondar was the imperial capital of Ethiopia in the 17th century and much of its palace architecture still survives, including this ceremonial pool and pavilion associated with the Emperor Fasilidas. It is the site of religious festivities at Epiphany.

EthiopiaMany of the small churches on the islands and peninsulas of Lake Tana are covered with paintings in traditional styles in brilliant, frequently freshened-up colors.

EthiopiaMany of the small churches on the islands and peninsulas of Lake Tana are covered with paintings in traditional styles in brilliant, frequently freshened-up colors. The drum stored in the church are use to accompany chanting in services.

EthiopiaThe Ethiopian Orthodox monasteries scattered across the islands and peninsulas of Lake Tana in the north of the country house a wealth of historical manuscripts.

EthiopiaThe Ethiopian Orthodox monasteries scattered across the islands and peninsulas of Lake Tana in the north of the country, near the city of Bahir Dar, house a wealth of historical manuscripts and liturgical objects in their treasuries.

EthiopiaThe church at Lalibela, dedicated to St. George, stands apart from the others.

EthiopiaThe church at Lalibela, dedicated to St. George, stands apart from the others. Set in a deep trench, it gives the clearest sense of how these buildings were carved directly from solid rock and how they function as monolithic walk-in sculptures.

Holland Cotter has been in love with the African cultures since he first encountered them in college in the 1960s. And for much of his life, he has longed in particular to see two holy cities in Ethiopia: Aksum, the country's center of Orthodox Christianity, and Lalibela, a town of extraordinary churches carved from volcanic rock in the 13th century. He finally made the trip, and experienced in both places-especially Lalibela-the awe and sense of wonder that define a successful pilgrimage.

— Holland Cotter

Lalibela was conceived as a paradise on earth. And its 11 churches, cut from living volcanic rock, are literally anchored in the earth. In scale, number, and variety of form there's no architecture or sculpture quite like them anywhere. 

It's the opposite of the face-the-altar focus of most Western Christian services, closer to the dynamic of masquerade dances in other parts of Africa, performances that effortlessly combine spiritual efficacy and spectacular entertainment. To be in the middle of this is discomfiting - What's my role? What do I do? - then a release. Just stand there. Time dissolves. There's no reason to leave. Isn't this what you came here for? 

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Yamoussoukro: A Shrine to Opulence

Damon Winter/The New York Times
The interior sanctuary at Our Lady of Peace Basilica in Yamoussoukro

You’ve been traveling north in Ivory Coast on bad roads, in blistering heat. Suddenly St. Peter’s Basilica appears on the horizon, as if airlifted from Rome. A mirage? No. The church, with Michelangelo’s dome, is there, or a variation on it is, rising from what was once a cocoa plantation on the outskirts of the city of Yamoussoukro.

The city itself is somewhat spectral. A Baule village not so long ago, it’s now an amalgam of European-style parks and dusty sub-Saharan markets. In a part of the country that some might consider the middle of nowhere, it was officially made the nation’s capital in 1983.

Yamoussoukro was the birthplace of Ivory Coast’s first president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny (pronounced fay-LEEKS oof-WET bwahn-YEE), who ruled from 1960 until his death, in 1993. Son of a rich Baule chief, educated in colonial schools, a convert to Roman Catholicism, he spent much of his adult life in France.

In the mid-1960s he began pouring money into developing Yamoussoukro. He built hotels, a military base, a university, an international airport and a presidential palace. In a final act of aggrandizement, of both himself and Africa, he commissioned one of the largest churches anywhere.

Formally called the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace at Yamoussoukro, it has certain features of St. Peter’s, including a colonnaded piazza, but an extravagance all its own.

Interior columns are equipped with elevators. There’s a baptismal font the size of a Jacuzzi and four times as much stained glass — all French-made — as Chartres Cathedral. Houphouët-Boigny himself, who is buried in the basilica, appears in a window, depicted as one of the three Magi kneeling before an adult Jesus, who gives him his undivided attention and a special blessing.

The basilica incorporates various “African” features: the offering boxes are in the form of village women with baskets on their heads, for instance. But its effect is universal: excess as an end in itself.

This extends to the papal villa standing nearby. Pope John Paul II stayed there briefly when he consecrated the basilica in 1990. No pontiff has visited since, though the air-conditioning has been kept running for 22 years in the hopes that one will.

Costing something like $300 million, the basilica caused an international scandal, and its upkeep proved to be beyond anything the Ivorian government could pay. So Houphouët-Boigny struck a deal: if the Vatican would maintain the church, he’d built a new hospital for his hometown. So far Rome has kept its part of the deal, but the hospital remains, all these years later, under construction.

— Holland Cotter

Djenné: An Otherworldly Mosque

Damon Winter/The New York Times
The interior of the Great Mosque in Djenné, Mali.

The mud-molded exterior of the Great Mosque at Djenné, in Mali, is one of the world’s more startling and enthralling architectural sights. With its three cone-shaped minarets crowned with ostrich eggs and its high walls spiked with palm-branch inserts, it looks like a vast space station descended to earth and rooted in place. As if absorbing Mali’s desert light, its walls change color throughout the day and under the moon and stars at night.

The interior projects a different, more intimate sense of mystery. The floors are covered with loose sand, as in a country mosque. The main prayer hall is a gray enclosure, a kind of walk-in ceramic sculpture, supported by foursquare earthen uprights that function more like partitions than columns. They break a monumental expanse into units of privacy.

Almost throughout, the walls are plain, without ornamental grace notes: no tiles, almost no calligraphy, just three shallow niches cut into the Mecca-facing wall, the qibla. And that wall is the mosque’s most intriguing feature.

The other side of this wall forms the front of the building, the grand facade facing the market, the one beneath the three minarets. But the facade has no door — the main entrance to the mosque is just next to it, on the side.

And from the inside, the facade wall feels oddly placed, abrupt, as if it were truncating rather than completing the prayer hall. The sense of architectural irresolution is so strong that your instinct is to look for a door in the wall to take you through to whatever lies beyond — a long, receding theatrical space, say, like the nave of a European cathedral.

But there is no door, no further interior, no theater. Beyond the plain mud wall is the world: the marketplace, the city, the continent and, thousands of miles away, Mecca, toward which Muslim prayers and hearts turn.

Once you grasp this, an architectural feature that feels awkward, illogical, even perverse, makes sense. When the whole world is a mosque, every wall is a marker, hiding nothing, containing nothing. Right direction is all.

In Africa, tradition and invention are interdependent, inseparable.

— Holland Cotter

Djenné: The Conservation Paradox

Panoramas

Djenné, MaliMost villages in Mali have modest-size mosques in mud-brick style. This one is in a walled Fulani village a short boat trip on the Bani River from Mopti.

Djenné, MaliMost villages in Mali have modest-size mosques in mud-brick style. This one is in a walled Fulani village a short boat trip on the Bani River from Mopti.

Djenné, MaliThe prayer hall inside the Great Mosque at Djenné is supported by a forest of foursquare earthen upright columns that resolve in arches and act as screen-like walls, giving the space a play of shadow and light.

Djenné, MaliThe prayer hall inside the Great Mosque at Djenné is supported by a forest of foursquare earthen upright columns that resolve in arches and act as screen-like walls, giving the space a play of shadow and light.

The Malian city of Djenné, with its majestic Great Mosque, has long been, with Timbuktu in the north, one of the great centers of Islamic learning and pilgrimage in West Africa. The city has both resisted and invited change, with mixed results.

The mosque itself is not ancient — the one we see today was built in 1907 on the site of the original mosque, dating from the 13th or 14th century — but it has a venerable history. And in one way it is always new: Year after year, the citizens of Djenné have held a festival to replaster and repair its damaged surface.

The mosque and its surrounding neighborhood were named a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1988. A few years ago the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, based in Geneva, extensively renovated the building, reinforcing it structurally but subtly altering its appearance and, at least temporarily, ending the communal replastering.

The tension between preservation and progress is also evident at the Manuscript Library associated with the mosque. Here a project is under way, supported by the British Library Endangered Archives program in London, to digitize handwritten manuscripts that survive in a city that once housed some of the great scriptoria of Islamic Africa. Religious authorities would prefer to see only Koranic manuscripts preserved; others want to have all historical material given equal attention.

These days in Mali, the present threatens the past in very inclusive ways. The takeover of the northern half of the country, including Timbuktu, by Tuareg rebels and Islamist forces potentially puts Djenné itself in jeopardy. Still, the manuscript conservation project continues, and the tradition of a communal replastering of the Great Mosque resumed this year, to everyone’s joy. — Holland Cotter

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Ivory Coast: In Villages, Traditions Renew Themselves

Damon Winter/The New York Times
Artisan weavers travel around the Ivory Coast.

In Africa, tradition and invention are interdependent, inseparable.

In Ivory Coast, as you drive several hours north of Abidjan in country dominated by the Baule ethnic group, you spot flimsy-looking looms tied to upright poles or live saplings by the side of the road. Such looms have been used in West Africa for centuries. Classic textiles have emerged from them; classics in the making still do.

The weavers, from nearby villages, are mostly young men, trained since childhood. These days many are students who had to drop out of university during the country’s 2011 civil war and became professional weavers by default. Mostly they recreate traditional Baule patterns, but every now and then they go freestyle. Pumping the treadles and throwing the shuttles to the beat of pop radio songs, they sample a range of old motifs and invent new ones. The results, if they catch on, can become new traditional styles.

In Tanoh Sakassou, a village farther along the highway, a family of female potters has been in operation for decades, with several generations currently on the job: a matriarch now in her 90s; her not young daughter; several of that daughter’s adult children; and children of those children all share a large thatched-roof workshop.

Like the weavers, but more systematically, they combine old and new: textbook-perfect Baule pots, but also designs culled from Western magazines and the Internet. The workshop has had regular clients among Western museum shops, and steady trade demands diversification. Long-time buyers want novelty, and the potters, like artists anywhere, make it their business to oblige, glad for a chance to innovate while staying grounded in the culture they treasure.

A superbly made pot is ornamented with mythical Baule beasts and Valentine hearts. The design of a suavely Modernist-looking doubled-lobed vase was inspired by the shape of a ram’s testicles. To the workshop’s amusement, the vase has been a best seller abroad.

A metalworkers’ village, N’Gatagolikro, used to be bustling, but looked half abandoned when I visited recently. During the civil war, it was caught in the crossfire between rebel and government forces and isolated for months, losing touch with buyers in Abidjan and elsewhere. Worse, soldiers walked off with the supply of copper used to make the miniature Baule masks for which the village was renowned.

Left with only a scant supply of scrap metal, including plumbing fixtures, the workers had to restrict themselves to making decorative beads in an antique style. The beads are modest things, but for anyone who values art as historical evidence, they’re of considerable interest. Cast in a traditional technique from nontraditional materials, they are both the real Baule thing and the reflections of a contemporary reality.

— Holland Cotter

Bamako: A Photography Biennale

Damon Winter/The New York Times
A selection of photographs by Malik Sedibe in the photography biennial at the National Museum in Mali.

The African Photography Biennial in Bamako, Mali, last fall and winter was an impressive achievement. Its subtitle, “For a Sustainable World,” promised yet another green-planet pitch, but the show encompassed a nuanced range of social, political and spiritual ecosystems.

Environmental ruin plagues Africa, with major catastrophes under way. Exploited by Western corporations and African politicians, the oil-rich Niger Delta looks like a Dantean circle of hell in pictures by Akintunde Akinleye and George Osodi.

Mr. Akinleye’s shot — of a man in a long, flowing tunic, with his hands up to his face as he’s washing (he could be weeping), while dark smoke billows around him — stopped me cold when I first saw it prominently displayed in The New York Times a couple of years ago. It did again in the show.

So did pictures by Pieter Hugo and Nyaba Leon Ouedraogo. They showed no-less-lethal e-waste dumps in Accra, Ghana, where children extract salable metals from trashed computers shipped from abroad, in the process exposing themselves to chemicals that can cripple and kill them.

Photographs of Africa as a disaster zone are common; they’re mostly what we get. What made the biennial interesting was how it complicated, without erasing, Afro-pessimist stereotypes. Daniel Naude ’s portraits of South African animals and Nii Obodai’s dream-hazed shots of rural Ghana provided counterweights to negativity as, in a different way, a large selection of photographs and videos from the Arab Spring in Egypt and Tunisia did.

Life was happening fast during those revolutionary days. The only way to give a sense of its pace was to present a lot of work in a small space, the static equivalent of a slide show, with pictures hitting us, bang, bang, bang. And that’s what we got.

There were views of a deeper past too. At the exhibition’s main location, the National Museum of Mali, photos of Bamako citizens from the 1940s through the 1970s — by Soungalo Malé, Abderramane Sakaly and Malike Sidibe — were interspersed among masks and sculptures in the permanent galleries, implying shared cultural histories, while glamour shots of Malian beauties from the 1930s turned the museum’s textile display into a salon of cross-generational chic.

The art critic Simon Njami organized the textile section, and the Tunisian Michket Krifa and the Italian Laura Serani organized the biennial as whole. Working with dozens of African colleagues, they created an almost impossible thing: a graspable impression, far beyond the usual grim snapshot, of a continent of infinite moral extensions and no brandable center. — Holland Cotter

Mali: Age and Authenticity

Panorama

Songho, MaliIn the male circumcision camp at Songho, a Dogon village in Mali, a cliff face is covered with symbolic paintings.

Songho, MaliIn the male circumcision camp at Songho, a Dogon village in Mali, a cliff face is covered with symbolic paintings that are said to be centuries old but are repainted every three years during initiation ceremonies.

Africa throws value-laden Western binary thinking — about old versus new, traditional versus modern, real versus imitation — into healthy confusion. A masquerade performance on a cliff side in Dogon country is both distilled for tourists and created to ensure the survival of much larger dance performances still vital to Dogon ethnic identity and continuity. Malian blacksmiths retain their reputations as spiritually empowered creators even as they forge marketable items for everyday life. A museum textile display in Bamako blurs the line between weaving done centuries ago and things that can be bought in the city's markets today. In Africa, all art is real and, however old in origin, is happening now. — Holland Cotter

In the West we have a particular definition of authenticity and a mania for it as a standard for art, especially art that we envision as elemental, unmodern, unspoiled. We gauge genuineness in terms of age, rarity, uniqueness, history of use, motives for creation. But in Africa, as often as not, authentic is simply what works.  

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Bamako, Senegal, and Abidjan: Hardship and Hope

Panoramas

Abidjan, Ivory CoastThe sculptor Christian Lattier (1925-1978) was Ivory Coast's leading 20th century modernist. His largest work, “The Three Ages of Côte D'Ivoire,” was dismantled in 2000 and left to disintegrate outdoors on government property until recently.

Abidjan, Ivory CoastThe sculptor Christian Lattier (1925-1978) was Ivory Coast’s leading 20th century modernist. His largest work, “The Three Ages of Côte D'Ivoire,” made for Abidjan’s international airport, was dismantled in 2000 and left to disintegrate outdoors on government property until recently, when restoration was begun by the artist Salif Diabagaté.

Bamako, MaliThe ninth edition of “Bamako Encounters,” the African photography biennial, took place last fall and early winter in several different locations around Bamako, with the largest installation, seen here, at the National Museum of Mali.

Bamako, MaliThe ninth edition of “Bamako Encounters,” the African photography biennial, took place last fall and early winter in several different locations around Bamako, the capital of Mali, with the largest installation, seen here, at the National Museum of Mali. The show included more than 500 photographs and videos by artists from across the continent and in the African diaspora.

Bamako, MaliFor the photography biennial, historical photographs, many of them by Malian photographers of the mid-20th-century, were interspersed with traditional African objects in the permanent collection galleries of the National Museum of Mali.

Bamako, MaliFor the ninth edition of “Bamako Encounters,” the African photography biennial in Bamako, Mali, historical photographs, many of them by Malian photographers of the mid- 20th century, were interspersed with traditional African objects in the permanent collection galleries of the National Museum of Mali.

I’ve been writing about African art for years, and reading and thinking about Africa itself since I was a kid, without ever traveling farther south on the continent than Morocco. I knew this had to change, and recently it did when I spent time in four sub-Saharan countries: Ivory Coast, Mali and Senegal in West Africa and Ethiopia in East Africa.

I had reasons for choosing each country. Two of them held what I might call personal pilgrimage sites, specific places that had long been on my lifetime must-see list. The Great Mosque at Djenné in Mali was one, the complex of rock-cut churches at Lalibela in Ethiopia the other. I was right to put both on the list.

In Senegal, I hoped to pick up lingering vibes of the high cultural moment that came with the end of colonialism, and I did, though only just. Ivory Coast intrigued me for its parallel strands of new and old art, both under stress in the aftermath of a bludgeoning 2011 civil war.

With all my plans and expectations, what I didn’t fully understand was how little I knew Africa until I was actually there. To visit four countries there is to visit four Africas. As you move from one to another, from encounter to encounter, long-held concepts of “African culture” and “African art” splinter. Africa turns out to be unbrandable, unpackageable, an experience with no center, no peg, no hook, or maybe one with many centers. This has made it hard to write about, but ceaselessly absorbing to think about, live with, live in.

What follow here are fragments of that experience in words, and in photographs by my New York Times colleague Damon Winter. More of both will be posted in the days to come. The one thing I got right before my visit was anticipating that I would love Africa when I met it face to face. I did, and I do. — Holland Cotter

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