A few months ago I shared an interview with artist Karen Seneferu, who was then installing her latest work Techno-kisi, at the Skirball Museum in Los Angeles, California. Seneferu's piece got a lot of positive feedback, and was recently the subject of an interview for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's Open Space blog, which you can read here: http://blog.sfmoma.org/2010/02/techno-kisi-interview-with-artist-karen-seneferu/#more-9489
Check out some video of the installation here:
And here is the artist's statement on Techno-kisi
Karen Seneferu – Techno-kisi, 2009 http://anideacalledtomorrow.wordpress.com/category/karen-seneferu-and-kwahuumba/ Technology has become the primary vehicle to navigate multiple discourses. But to some cultures, a future embedded in technology alone is not possible without engaging multiple mediums of communication for a sustainable future. Thus, collaboration will be at the center of inclusive change.
The ancient force and form of the Nkisi is to protect. Out of the Congo Basin in Central Africa, the Nkisi literally means sacred medicine; the Nkisi takes a variety of forms from sculpture to container to a charm. Seneferu’s piece Techno-kisi is the first of its kind for the entire piece is made up of charms symbolic of individual community members in need of healing while multi-media, the center of the power force, protects the community.
The technology symbolizes the belly. In this case, the console created by Buglabs shows a slide presentation of people Kwahuumba and Seneferu interviewed on film, named after the exhibition: An Idea Called Tomorrow. In collaborating with Buglabs, Seneferu attempts to unhook the seat of power, by enclosing the images of those who are often times outside of it.
In a third element of the project, Kwahuumba and Seneferu recorded interviews of people from a broad cross-section of society to answer the questions “what is a sustainable future” and “who and how is it determined?” They were interested in looking at historically excluded communities who have been deterred from participating in the dialogue and the actions needed for change. They interviewed a wide range of activists both prominent to the world of the Green Movement, such as Majora Carter, an environmental justice advocate, who promotes green-collar jobs as a route out of poverty to Tyrone Stevenson, aka “Scraper Bike King,” a youth from East Oakland California who created a mobility craze that has gained worldwide fame by incorporating art and an eco-green philosophy to change his community. There are other diverse individuals who are just as relevant. What they all have in common is that they point out that in order for us to have a sustainable future, that “everyone on the planet must be seen as having a particular value that should be shared with the world.”
Techno-Kisi is on display as part of the exhibition An Idea Called Tomorrow until March 7th, 2010. http://www.skirball.org
A few months ago I shared an interview with artist Karen Seneferu, who was then installing her latest work Techno-kisi, at the Skirball Museum in Los Angeles, California. Seneferu's piece got a lot of positive feedback, and was recently the subject of an interview for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's Open Space blog, which you can read here: http://blog.sfmoma.org/2010/02/techno-kisi-interview-with-artist-karen-seneferu/#more-9489
Check out some video of the installation here:
And here is the artist's statement on Techno-kisi
Karen Seneferu – Techno-kisi, 2009 http://anideacalledtomorrow.wordpress.com/category/karen-seneferu-and-kwahuumba/ Technology has become the primary vehicle to navigate multiple discourses. But to some cultures, a future embedded in technology alone is not possible without engaging multiple mediums of communication for a sustainable future. Thus, collaboration will be at the center of inclusive change.
The ancient force and form of the Nkisi is to protect. Out of the Congo Basin in Central Africa, the Nkisi literally means sacred medicine; the Nkisi takes a variety of forms from sculpture to container to a charm. Seneferu’s piece Techno-kisi is the first of its kind for the entire piece is made up of charms symbolic of individual community members in need of healing while multi-media, the center of the power force, protects the community.
The technology symbolizes the belly. In this case, the console created by Buglabs shows a slide presentation of people Kwahuumba and Seneferu interviewed on film, named after the exhibition: An Idea Called Tomorrow. In collaborating with Buglabs, Seneferu attempts to unhook the seat of power, by enclosing the images of those who are often times outside of it.
In a third element of the project, Kwahuumba and Seneferu recorded interviews of people from a broad cross-section of society to answer the questions “what is a sustainable future” and “who and how is it determined?” They were interested in looking at historically excluded communities who have been deterred from participating in the dialogue and the actions needed for change. They interviewed a wide range of activists both prominent to the world of the Green Movement, such as Majora Carter, an environmental justice advocate, who promotes green-collar jobs as a route out of poverty to Tyrone Stevenson, aka “Scraper Bike King,” a youth from East Oakland California who created a mobility craze that has gained worldwide fame by incorporating art and an eco-green philosophy to change his community. There are other diverse individuals who are just as relevant. What they all have in common is that they point out that in order for us to have a sustainable future, that “everyone on the planet must be seen as having a particular value that should be shared with the world.”
Techno-Kisi is on display as part of the exhibition An Idea Called Tomorrow until March 7th, 2010. http://www.skirball.org
Bear with me folks. I'm going to try really hard to describe what defies description. Artist Aisha Tandiwe Bell's performance at Brooklyn's Corridor Gallery was mesmerizing and soul-stirring. I've never seen anything like it. Aisha is a multimedia artist. She works in performance, sculpture, and painting, so I arrived at Corridor not knowing what to expect. I found a space that was alive with her installations of Black girls gracing the walls. When viewing Bell's visual works, I was struck by the skilled rendering of her figures. The Black girls were drawn with sullen expressions on their faces, and had hollow white ceramic faces attached to their heads. I loved the fact that the ceramic faces cast shadows onto the girls' heads. Other figures incorporated fabric and more of her beautiful sculptural pieces. The repetition of faces and forms, with some emerging out of bodies suggest connections to ancestry. And for people of African descent, ancestry can be fraught with pain and mysteries to unravel. Bell's characters appear to carry around ghostly weights. Aisha says her work "is about our individual burdens, insecurities, and self-prescribed traps, walls, armor, masks, stereotypes, that we wear/carry out of habit, comfort, fear, sloth, and shame. However, my work also explores our ability to transform, resist and escape these traps." In the center of the room was a tin tub filled with blue water and surrounded by rows of ceramic faces. When the performance began, she handed each member of the audience 2 faces and instructed us to bang them together in a particular rhythm. As we beat the faces together, Aisha donned a white skirt and top, and a belt with the ceramic faces hanging from it. She began to wind her waist in time to the beat, and the faces began to clatter and crash together. The sound it created was otherworldly. Bell danced until the faces broke in pieces and fell to the floor. When all the faces had broken and fallen off, Aisha got into the tin tub and began bathing herself in the blue water. By this time the energy in the room was so heightened that the rhythm the audience had started beating with the faces sped up to a feverish pace. The performance and installation were so powerful. It was the finale of Bell's month-long residency at Corridor Gallery, and what a finish it was! Aisha Tandiwe Bell is definitely an artist to watch. Expect to see much more of her here on Black Butterfly. For more on Bell and her work, check out her website: http://www.superhueman.com
And for more info. on the Corridor Gallery: http://www.corridorgallerybrooklyn.org
And check out this amazing video of one of Aisha's past performances:
Bear with me folks. I'm going to try really hard to describe what defies description. Artist Aisha Tandiwe Bell's performance at Brooklyn's Corridor Gallery was mesmerizing and soul-stirring. I've never seen anything like it. Aisha is a multimedia artist. She works in performance, sculpture, and painting, so I arrived at Corridor not knowing what to expect. I found a space that was alive with her installations of Black girls gracing the walls. When viewing Bell's visual works, I was struck by the skilled rendering of her figures. The Black girls were drawn with sullen expressions on their faces, and had hollow white ceramic faces attached to their heads. I loved the fact that the ceramic faces cast shadows onto the girls' heads. Other figures incorporated fabric and more of her beautiful sculptural pieces. The repetition of faces and forms, with some emerging out of bodies suggest connections to ancestry. And for people of African descent, ancestry can be fraught with pain and mysteries to unravel. Bell's characters appear to carry around ghostly weights. Aisha says her work "is about our individual burdens, insecurities, and self-prescribed traps, walls, armor, masks, stereotypes, that we wear/carry out of habit, comfort, fear, sloth, and shame. However, my work also explores our ability to transform, resist and escape these traps." In the center of the room was a tin tub filled with blue water and surrounded by rows of ceramic faces. When the performance began, she handed each member of the audience 2 faces and instructed us to bang them together in a particular rhythm. As we beat the faces together, Aisha donned a white skirt and top, and a belt with the ceramic faces hanging from it. She began to wind her waist in time to the beat, and the faces began to clatter and crash together. The sound it created was otherworldly. Bell danced until the faces broke in pieces and fell to the floor. When all the faces had broken and fallen off, Aisha got into the tin tub and began bathing herself in the blue water. By this time the energy in the room was so heightened that the rhythm the audience had started beating with the faces sped up to a feverish pace. The performance and installation were so powerful. It was the finale of Bell's month-long residency at Corridor Gallery, and what a finish it was! Aisha Tandiwe Bell is definitely an artist to watch. Expect to see much more of her here on Black Butterfly. For more on Bell and her work, check out her website: http://www.superhueman.com
And for more info. on the Corridor Gallery: http://www.corridorgallerybrooklyn.org
And check out this amazing video of one of Aisha's past performances:
