The Brick Moon
After-Futures & Empires
Etchings and Lithography series "Alice in Wonderland"
Anguezomo Mba Bikoro’s work conveys a feeling of both a joyfully arranged bouquet of visual and literal poetry as well as an intellectually stimulating piece of education of seismic and pungent quality.
Their use of existing narratives borrowed from Western adventure literature such as Lewis Caroll’s famous fairytale of “Through The Looking Glass” and highly symbolic imagery in combination with contemporary quotidian images from places around her home in Gabon in West Equatorial Africa seems to play with familiar stereotypes of the “exotic” while breaking them at the same time in an interesting and poignant way. On Mba Bikoro’s visual stage Alice is a little girl on their way on the myriad, obscure, sometimes slightly disturbing, at times amusing path through their world of child-like phantastical experience. They remain an observer, a witness who grows incessantly alongside scenes of post-colonial transformation. In psycho-therapeutical terms and according to Francis Bacon, Alice would become older and increasingly confronted with her own “idola tribus”, unauthentic experiential representations. A similar conflict overwhelms the characters of her journey, they seem to clash with questions and choices between their focus on origin or destination, given or constructed identities, passivity or activism and past or future.
The reified “other” that Africa and its peoples were forged into by a mythological construction and imposition of Western thinkers and artists in an age of scientific anthropometric obsessions is displayed again in Mba Bikoro’s series of much-celebrated afro-american and African political resistance campaigners whose famous faces are covered by African masks. Again Mba Bikoro uses prevailing stereotypes to pose the question of authenticity in the face of Western styled projections and fabrications of an African or Black identity. Her work goes far beyond the context of race and identity. And it surely does not intend to create yet another bi-polarization of “the West and the Rest” but furthermore attempts to portray the shared interconnectivity and dependencies in heritage and responsibility of societies both creolized and deeply divided.
Their use of existing narratives borrowed from Western adventure literature such as Lewis Caroll’s famous fairytale of “Through The Looking Glass” and highly symbolic imagery in combination with contemporary quotidian images from places around her home in Gabon in West Equatorial Africa seems to play with familiar stereotypes of the “exotic” while breaking them at the same time in an interesting and poignant way. On Mba Bikoro’s visual stage Alice is a little girl on their way on the myriad, obscure, sometimes slightly disturbing, at times amusing path through their world of child-like phantastical experience. They remain an observer, a witness who grows incessantly alongside scenes of post-colonial transformation. In psycho-therapeutical terms and according to Francis Bacon, Alice would become older and increasingly confronted with her own “idola tribus”, unauthentic experiential representations. A similar conflict overwhelms the characters of her journey, they seem to clash with questions and choices between their focus on origin or destination, given or constructed identities, passivity or activism and past or future.
The reified “other” that Africa and its peoples were forged into by a mythological construction and imposition of Western thinkers and artists in an age of scientific anthropometric obsessions is displayed again in Mba Bikoro’s series of much-celebrated afro-american and African political resistance campaigners whose famous faces are covered by African masks. Again Mba Bikoro uses prevailing stereotypes to pose the question of authenticity in the face of Western styled projections and fabrications of an African or Black identity. Her work goes far beyond the context of race and identity. And it surely does not intend to create yet another bi-polarization of “the West and the Rest” but furthermore attempts to portray the shared interconnectivity and dependencies in heritage and responsibility of societies both creolized and deeply divided.
Exhibitions
2017 Paris Art Fair
2015 Art15, London
2014 Own Cult | Cutlog New York
2014 Take This Hammer | Kalao Pan-African Gallerie | Bilbao, Spain
2013 The Brick Moon | Gallerie Fondation Blachere | Apt, France
2012 Middle Passage; Restaging Alice In Wonderland | Tiwani Contemporary | London UK
2012 10ieme Edition Dakar Biennale | Senegal
2012 The Yellow Crossing or The Peoples' Waltz | Maison d'Hôte, Saint Louis, Senegal
2011 Oxo Tower, London
2017 Paris Art Fair
2015 Art15, London
2014 Own Cult | Cutlog New York
2014 Take This Hammer | Kalao Pan-African Gallerie | Bilbao, Spain
2013 The Brick Moon | Gallerie Fondation Blachere | Apt, France
2012 Middle Passage; Restaging Alice In Wonderland | Tiwani Contemporary | London UK
2012 10ieme Edition Dakar Biennale | Senegal
2012 The Yellow Crossing or The Peoples' Waltz | Maison d'Hôte, Saint Louis, Senegal
2011 Oxo Tower, London