A Lebanese artist working across film, video, installation, and drawing, Cherri’s new multi-channel video installation takes as its subject the history of one of the largest hydroelectric dams in Africa, the Merowe Dam, a highly controversial construction on the Nile in northern Sudan that led to rampant social unrest.
“Somewhere by the banks of a great river, in the shadow of a gargantuan dam, a man stands waist-deep in mud,” a narrator intones as we watch a seasonal brickmaker spend his days in the heat performing the arduous, ancient task of shaping mud into bricks. The audience is seduced by the trance-like visions of a greenfield site where Black men work in unison. What could be regarded as images of toil and drudgery are here reframed as the new construction work after an imaginary deluge.
“Sovereignty,” Simone Leigh’s eagerly anticipated U.S. Pavilion, has a thatched roofing facade resembling a 1930s West African palace. The structure thus draws upon the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, which included the full-scale remodeling of the Khmer temple Angkor Wat as well as model villages and towns for the exhibition that normalized the “human zoo”: the display of cultures, lands, and people seized under colonial empire.
For Leigh, women are excavators and authors of their own history and knowledge, and she creates a new hybrid art that can at once serve as self-affirmation and reflect on African heritage and economies in the New World. The artist’s new body of large-scale sculptural works stretch the possibilities of clay, urging Black women, and other under-documented groups that nurture societies in silence, to, in her own words, “concern yourself with issues of scale.
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Source: ALNewsNetwork - 🏆 583. / 51 Read more »
Source: ladailynews - 🏆 332. / 59 Read more »
Source: ladailynews - 🏆 332. / 59 Read more »
Source: WEWS - 🏆 323. / 59 Read more »
Source: MsMagazine - 🏆 378. / 59 Read more »
Source: PennLive - 🏆 463. / 53 Read more »