Irapuru | Group Exhibition London

The title for the exhibition is taken from Laura Lima’s large-scale textile work – ‘Irapuru’ being a district in the state of São Paulo which endured more than its share of subjugation and upheaval during the 21-year ‘Ditadura Militar’, the military dictatorship of the Fifth Brazilian Republic from the mid-’60s to mid-’80s, the repercussions of which continue today. It is also the name of a indigenous ‘Musician Wren’, which is one of the country’s tiniest birds but with the widest repertoire of songs and complex harmonies of any creature in the Amazonian region, and has therefore been celebrated in folkloric music, poetry, artistic legend and popular orchestral pieces. This dual sense of something artistically adept, surprisingly beautiful, and aesthetically accomplished emerging from a place of upheaval and economic scarcity runs throughout the exhibition. 

The late Ghanaian painter Atta Kwami pursued in his theoretical writing, research and teaching the concept of ‘Kumasi Realism’. His abstract works proposed a schematic abstraction that drew specifically on the improvised street architecture, market kiosks, sign-painting, produce, and woven textiles from that city. Dwelling on both Ghanaian and international art histories and traditions, his compositions and forms were premised on real human existence and environs, and as Hans Ulrich Obrist puts it, reaching “beyond the colonialist separation from the environment to have a more holistic communication with [it]”.

Presented alongside Kwami’s paintings are a new series of drawings by William Kentridge related to his latest theatre production, ‘The Great Yes, the Great No’, which premiered at LUMA Arles in July. Dense images produced in indian ink on green paper, reveal the tangled and impenetrable vegetation of the Caribbean jungle, and are counterposed with a series of texts from Kentridge’s libretto and beyond. In the production, the artist has reimagined the history of clandestine escape for persecuted minorities from Marseilles to Martinique. Hidden in cargo ships, alongside anti-Fascists and refugees, were anti-colonial thinkers, artists, intellectuals and founders of the Negritude movement fleeing 1941 Vichy France, including Franz Fanon, Josephine Baker, Wilfredo Lam, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the Nardal sisters and Aimé Cezar. Created during the workshopping and rehearsals for the stage performances, the drawings are a vital part of the imagery for the ambitious performance project, one that draws historical and metaphysical parallels to present day migration from Africa to Europe.

Drawing on more recent events, Carrie Mae Weems’s ‘Painting the Town’, 2020, documented the shuttered shop fronts downtown in her home city of Portland in the wake of mass unrest following George Floyd’s murder. Here the civic authorities' responses to the global reckoning of the Black Lives Matter movement was to silence, and erase dissent hoping that repeated censorship would somehow cause it to dissipate. Weems’s carefully cropped and lit photographs of patches of painted-over graffiti and slogans, appear at first to resemble Twentieth Century Greenbergian Modernist paintings. When one realises their actual origins and thinks of the works of the mostly overlooked black American painters of the ’50s who had been associated with, but never truly benefited from, the New York School and Abstract Expressionism, they become even more adroitly layered. And as Weems herself puts it, “This invisibility, this erasure out of the complex history of our life and time, is the greatest source of my longing.”

Working in abstract language, Zimbabwean painter Misheck Masamvu’s work is informed strongly by his Shona culture, and a proactive decision to return from Germany to his troubled country and region. Painting outside, directly on the ground, his large scale oil paintings give voice to both political and private catastrophes, drawing on the concept of ‘Hata’ - a metaphor for carrying a burdensome load - to iterate thoughts, emotions and spiritual states of being. Layered compositions of brushwork, paint spray and oil stick balance precariously realms wherein an abstract mark might also reveal an element of figuration in the abyss. A cathartic process described by the artist as, ‘“collect[ing] moments of struggle, awareness or realisation”.

A shared quality of transformation and sublimation can also be found in the work of the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui. His acclaimed monumental installation of ‘Behind the Red Moon’, for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern last year, saw billowing sails of tapestries woven from discarded bottle tops animate the vast spaces of the turbine hall. In his latest work presented here at the gallery, the artist developed a palette of ice blue contrasted with ochre and red elements that evokes fire and ice. Seen through the mass of interwoven bottle caps, Anatsui’s shimmering ‘skins of scales’ created from apparent garbage -  the signature ‘alchemy’ of his practice - also point to the earth’s precarities, where rampant consumerism threatens all of our ecosystems’ ability to regenerate.