"Insights," an exhibit featuring more than 30 artworks by nine contemporary African artists, opened last Friday at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art. The ensembles offer the viewer an insight (hence the name) into the continuity as well as the change in each artist's chosen subjects and materials.
The featured pieces include oil paintings, sculptures, photographs and short films. By grouping pieces by an individual artist rather than showing them in isolation, the exhibit reveals the range of an artist's body of work.
The pieces are linked by the themes of the resilience of the human spirit, pride in one's heritage, and the physical and psychological violence of political oppression, and therefore evoke a range of feelings in the viewer.
The first artist upon entering the gallery is Sue Williamson. Her sculpture, "The Last Supper Revisited," tells the story of the destruction of District Six, a multiracial community in Cape Town, South Africa.
Williamson invites viewers to share the Last Supper during the Muslim holiday of Eid al Fitr with the Ebrahim family, one of the last families to have its house leveled by bulldozers.
Williamson has set the table for this intimate feast with multiple resin blocks containing scraps of precious and mundane objects culled from the bulldozed site that document this doomed community.
The objects include multicolored fabric, a string of pearls, shattered pieces of a china cup and a tattered newspaper clipping. The memorabilia has a melancholy feel to it. The piece highlights the idea that a racial apartheid not only results in brute physical violence, but also a more subtle psychological violence.
Quotations by the artists alongside their respective works offer the viewer a glimpse of the creator's understanding of his or her product.
One such example sets the tone for the overall philosophy of art. "Art has several lives - it has one life when you are actually making it, and that process is important for the artist ... Then when that's finished, the art begins the second phase of its life, where people react to it in a gallery," Williamson writes about her craft.
The exhibit also features Zwelethu Mthethwa's work. As an artist who resides in Cape Town, he believes that his aim is to "show the pride of the people I photograph."
His photograph, "A Silent Letter to God," presents children as silent, helpless witnesses and victims of AIDS in South Africa.
The various images within the photograph, such as an empty carriage, a small palm turned upward as though in prayer and a thin, haunting shadow of a child, create a sense of loneliness and doom in the viewer.
The artist's choice of black and white immediately brings to mind photojournalism and documentary photography, and suggests a solemnity appropriate for the subject.
Other featured artists include Sokari Douglas Camp, William Kentridge, Jeremy Wafer, Georgia Papageorge, Ezrom Legar, Iba N'Diaya and Gavin Jantjes.
