African art exhibitions in February - in pictures

Queen Amina 2. from The Progress of Love at The Menil Collection in Texas until 17 March. The Progress of Love is a collaborative project between the CCA in Lagos; The Menil Collection in Houston and The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St Louis, exploring the changing modes and meanings of love. Numerous scholars have addressed the ways media, technology, and capitalism have affected western notions of love over the last few centuries. Little attention, however, has been paid to the impact of these forces on the conception of love in Africa, or even to the subject itself. The Progress of Love explores romantic love, self-love, friendship, familial affect, love of one’s country, and other bonds in and around Africa.
Photograph: Kelechi Amadi-Obi and The Menil Collection

Untitled, 2011. From Made in China: Photographs by Kan Si at Raw Material Company, Boulevard du Centenaire in Dakar, until 9 February. This exhibition looks at Chinese migration to Africa through the example of Dakar. In the last two decades, the continent’s Chinese migrant worker population has grown rapidly, up to an estimated one million people - and rising. Senegalese artist Kan Si has documented the life and business activity of Chinese traders in Dakar’s historical middle-class neighbourhood of Centenaire over a two-year period. This portfolio is of great importance for the study of urban transformation. It also brings to light the distance that the Chinese community keeps, where human interaction with the local community is reduced to commercial exchange and unregimented social and cultural interaction is almost nonexistent.
© Kan Si. Courtesy of the artist

Strip Test 3, 2012. From To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg until 16 February. The exhibition title, To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light, appropriated by Broomberg and Chanarin, is in fact the coded phrase used by Kodak to describe the capabilities of a new film stock developed in the early 80s to address the inability of their earlier films to accurately render dark skin. The radical notion that prejudice might be inherent in the medium of photography itself is interrogated by the artists Broomberg and Chanarin in this presentation of new works produced on salvaged polaroid ID-2 systems.
© Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, The Goodman Gallery

Rainbow Over Nkandla from the Made in China series 2012/2013 From The Loom of the Land, Stevenson, Johannesburg until 1 March. Loom of the Land is a group exhibition of South African landscapes curated by Anton Kannemeyer. While celebrating what to Kannemeyer too is a ‘most terrific’ subject, this exhibition reflects his curiosity about images of the South African landscape that in some way disrupt expectations – whether of landscape as a genre or a particular artist’s oeuvre. This is most evident in artists, like himself, who usually focus on other issues and subjects, and then also choose to depict landscape. Artists | Conrad Botes, Wim Botha, Peter Clarke, Paul Edmunds, David Goldblatt, Ian Grose, Pieter Hugo, Anton Kannemeyer, Mark Kannemeyer (Lorcan White), Jacques Loustal, Johann Louw, Mack Magagane, Titus Matiyane, Zanele Muholi, Brett Murray, John Murray, Daniel Naudé, Hylton Nel, Deborah Poynton, Jo Ractliffe, Claudette Schreuders, Ina van Zyl, Garth Walker.
© Brett Murray. Courtesy of the artist and Stevenson Johannesburg

Self-Portrait, 1953. From Wind Blowing on the Cape Flats at Iniva in London until 9 March. As South Africa prepares to celebrate 20 years since the election of Nelson Mandela as president, Iniva reflects on the nation’s social and political history through the work of internationally acclaimed artist and writer Peter Clarke. Wind Blowing on the Cape Flats honours Clarke’s life, work and contribution to art over 60 years, and tells the story of an artist whose sharp, poignant and aesthetically memorable work provides an extraordinary context for discussion of South Africa, apartheid and post-apartheid.
© Peter Clarke, courtesy of private collection

Untitled, 2012. From his solo exhibition, Quitte Le Pouvoir at the Jack Bell gallery in London until 16 February. The show presents a new series of paintings by Aboudia, noted for his large-scale, heavily layered, brutally energetic work that combines an innocence and spontaneity with the portrayal of a dark interior world. This new series, like in previous works, grapples with the hardships of life on the streets and the social inequalities of downtown Abidjan. Often claustrophobic and oppressive, Aboudia’s painting achieves a careful balance between pathos and aggression. While the vitality of his style recalls Basquiat, the darker undercurrents describe a battlefield straight out of Goya. Aboudia is also a master of multi-layered imagery as he mixes with great energy characters from his direct neighbourhood and fragments of found comic strips, advertising and the media. Enigmatic details come in and out of focus, often only revealing themselves after several viewings.
© Aboudia, Courtesy of the artist and Jack Bell Gallery

Possession, 1989. From Kendell Geers: 1988 - 2012 at Haus der Kunst in Munich until 12 May. The first comprehensive overview of Kendell Geers’s work, curated by Clive Kellner, spans a variety of media and genres including installation, sculpture, drawing, video, performance, and photography. It traces the development of the artist’s conceptual and aesthetic language, divided into two chronological but interlinked groupings: 1988 to 2000, when he was living in Johannesburg, South Africa, and 2000 until the present, covering his move and residence in Europe. Throughout his artistic practice Geers developed a visual vocabulary characterised by provocation, humor, and violence. The use of found objects such as barbed wire, neon lights, or glass shards indicates the crucial role the readymade plays in his work.
© Kendell Geers. Courtesy of Haus der Kunst

Matrix 00B, 2005. From The Project Room exhibition at French Institute Alliance Française in New York until 23 February. Drawing on his African roots and experiences as a New Yorker, Ouattara Watts creates mixed-media paintings that transcend geography to address the broader expanse of the cosmos. The Project Room is an exhibition of new large-scale mixed-media paintings by the artist who has exhibited at MoMA PS1, the Whitney Biennale, and the New Museum in New York. His work incorporates cryptic ideograms, religious symbols, and floating abstractions, inviting diverse social and historical readings. He says: “My vision is not based on any country or continent; it’s beyond geography or what can be seen on a map. Even though my pictorial elements can be located, so they can be better understood, this is about something much wider. My paintings refer to the Cosmos.”
© Outtara Watts

Untitled, 2012. From the series Brave Ones. Solo exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York until 23 February. A solo exhibition of Zwelethu Mthethwa’s photographs from three new series of work including The Brave Ones, Hope Chest and The End of An Era. Mthethwa, known for his large scale photographs, continues to engage the history of photographic portraiture with painterly composition, vibrant colour and subjects with a commanding gaze.
Photograph: Zwelethu Mthethwa. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

La Femme américaine liberée des annees 70, 1997. From Contemporary Reconfigurations, Distance and Desire Encounters with the African Archive Part II, at the The Walther Project Space in New York until 9 March. This is the second of a three-part series Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive, curated by Tamar Garb. The exhibition centres on photography and video by African and African American artists who engage critically with the archive through parody, appropriation, and reenactment. It features Carrie Mae Weems, Sammy Baloji, Candice Breitz, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Zanele Muholi, Samuel Fosso, Philip Kwame Apagya, Sabelo Mlangeni, Pieter Hugo, Berni Searle and Andrew Putter. For this group of artists, a stereotype or ethnographic vision in one era may provide material for quotation, irreverent reworking, or satirical performance in another, staging a dialogue between the distance of the past and the desiring gaze of the present.
Photograph: Samuel Fosso. Courtesy of the Walther Collection