A family look: from anti-colonialism to decolonial thought
“Owanto, Flowers II, The girl with the flower”, UV printing on aluminum, cold porcelain flower (2019).
© Owanto, 2021 - Courtesy of Owanto Studio.
Chapel of the Saint-Denis Art and History Museum.
Photo: Olivier Favier.
Text by: Olivier Favier Follow
4 min
The “headquarters” of the Africa2020 season were as many small temporary Pan-African cultural centers.
The “un.e air.e de famille” exhibition is the last of them, at the Paul Éluard Museum in Saint-Denis, to be seen until November 8, 2021.
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The title plays on the codes of inclusive writing, to remind us that the works of thirteen contemporary women artists enter into dialogue with works from the museum's collections, which have been almost exclusively produced by men.
This family resemblance, which was once found between the non-European arts and the artists who expressed a fascination with them, brings closer here the anticolonialism of the past and the decolonial thought of today.
The family area is of course this vast territory of the non-Westerner which in fact has built a common history, through colonial domination and resistance to this domination.
It is also, quite simply, to pose in another place the question of the universal and the great human family.
During the exhibition
The Truth about the Colonies
in the 19th arrondissement of Paris in 1931, we could read this sentence by Karl Marx: “
A people who oppress others cannot be free.
"
The anticolonialism of the past was often steeped in colonial imagination
"
What can the decolonization of a museum be
?"
»Asks Farah Clémentine Drimani-Issifou, curator of the exhibition, in particular in charge of contemporary artists.
This is the deep meaning of associating these with documents and works linked in particular to the Paul Éluard collection kept at the museum, which testifies to the vigorous anti-colonialism of the surrealist group.
Let us first recall that 1931 remains the year of the “Colonial Exhibition in Paris” which attracts no less than 8 million visitors.
The critical discourse, without a large audience, of surrealists and intellectuals who share their ideas, strikes us from a distance by its courage and virulence, but also, often, by its limits and the fantasies that it continues to convey.
So the very people who denounce the horrors of the Rif war in 1925 use formulas like “Negro art”, “Wild art”, “Primitive art”, return to a state of “nature”, which testify to Western prejudices and nonsense of exoticism. If the condemnation of imperialism is sincere, the meeting with "the other" has not yet taken place, and Farah Clémentine Drimani Issifou quotes the philosopher Philippe Sabot, speaking of "
the ambiguity constitutive of primitivism
".
For Anne Yanover, who directs the Paul Éluard museum, this exhibition is also an opportunity to "show
the common points of the collections and in particular the anti-colonial commitments
" that we indeed find with remarkable consistency in the satires of Honoré. Daumier in the middle of the 19th century as well as a century later in those of Jean Effel.
13 decolonial artists
The deconstruction of this imaginary of domination and death is therefore still in progress, as shown to us, for example, by the installation of the Chevalme sisters, artists at the origin of this desire for collective exhibition. In a bourgeois European living room, the photos on the wall replay some scenes of colonial humiliations and massacres, which have not entered collective memory in Europe. The wall of photographs produced by Nadia Kaabi-Linke, tiny delicately framed portraits of people brought in as “goods” to populate the attractions of the Colonial Exhibition, fixes the gaze of the public, who begin to detail each of these faces.
The same artist is present through a video installation where we hear the questions of the visa form imposed on Tunisian nationals wishing to travel to Europe, chanted as a "
judicial ritual of the medieval inquisition
". Like Yto Barrada, who photographs two silhouettes in front of an advertisement for maritime travel, Nadia Kaabi-Linke thus establishes a link between the colonial oppression of the past and the rejection of immigration today, as it is. also embodied in border control.
Katia Kameli's film around a postcard kiosk in Algiers questions what she calls
The Algerian novel
, haunted by the 132 years of French occupation. The same artist was present in the collective exhibition
Répare, a revival
presented in the spring at the Cité des arts in Paris, which also bore witness to the disorders of the world.
As for Owanto, it is the discovery of a collection of unbearable photographs in a family drawer, which led her to enlarge some of them, like the image of this excised young girl, eyes lowered on her mutilated penis. , which is covered by the artist with a cold porcelain flower. It is presented in the deconsecrated chapel adjoining the museum, which served as a local jurisdiction during the last century. The place still bears on its pediment an inscription which, in memory of the surrealists, could just as easily describe the exhibition as an objective coincidence:
Justice of the peace
.
►
On view until November 8, 2021, at the Paul Eluard Art and History Museum, Saint-Denis Porte de Paris metro, line 13.
The exhibition is accompanied by a rich program of guided tours.
From October 7 to 9, the museum is hosting a colloquium on colonial slavery in the collections of European museums: narratives and artists' views.
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