The African Guernica faces Picasso’s original at the Reina Sofía

Madrid. South African artist Dumile Feni was an obsessive, self-taught cartoonist who grew up under the segregationist and fascist tyranny of the apartheidfrom which he was exiled after being arrested for “moral crimes” and having had sexual relations with people of a “different race.” Feni died in New York in 1991, one of the most important creators in black Africa, although due to the “structural racism of art history” he has been relegated and ignored.

One of his most important works, the African Guernica (1967), which portrayed the hidden violence of the regime, is exhibited for the first time in Madrid, at the Reina Sofía Museum, where it faces the Guernica by Pablo Picasso, in a meeting of two works that communicate not only through the barbarism they denounce, but also through their way of assuming that art can never be “mere propaganda.”

The work of Dumile Feni in the Madrid museum – along with five other pieces by the African artist – opens a cycle of exhibitions around the Guernica by Picasso, which over time has become one of the most powerful and present symbols of anti-warism.

The program History does not repeat itself, but it rhymesseeks a dialogue between the work of the Malaga artist and other pieces with historical and cultural parallels. It is the case of African Guernicawhich became one of the starkest and most forceful denunciations of the segregationist regime of the apartheidin force in South Africa until 1992, when the first elections were held in which not only the white minority voted.

Feni never had an artistic training, because under that system black people who had some artistic vocation were forced to make popular crafts and could not be part of the fine arts, a privilege for the white minority that ruled the country with an iron fist. Feni did not give up his vocation, which is why he had many problems with the system, which immediately singled him out and persecuted him until he was imprisoned for alleged “moral crimes.”

Zwelidumile Geelboi Mgxaji Mslaba Feni was born in Worcester, South Africa, in 1942. During his childhood he moved to Johannesburg to live with an uncle, where he began working at the age of 17 as an apprentice in a sculpture and ceramics foundry; There he developed his skills in both the field of drawing and sculpture, carving wood and soapstone, as well as modeling with clay. He also painted murals and worked with the sculptor Ephraim Ngatane. After suffering from tuberculosis, Feni frequented exhibitions and the Dorkay House, headquarters of the Union of South African Artists and a meeting point for black creators, where jazz musicians such as Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba performed.

Due to political restrictions and censorship of his work, he went into exile in 1968, first in London and later in the United States. During this period his work diversified into sculpture and poster design for the African National Congress, establishing himself as a reference for cultural resistance abroad. His death occurred suddenly in New York in 1991, shortly before his expected return to South Africa following the release of Nelson Mandela.

Beyond the Eurocentric narrative

The curator of the exhibition at the Reina Sofía Museum is one of the leading experts on her work, Professor Tamar Garb, who highlighted in the presentation that “although African Guernica It has been exhibited on numerous occasions in South Africa, it had never traveled abroad. And this first time he does it to establish a dialogue with the Guernicawhich, although it is a topic that has generated a considerable bibliography in South African art history for years, has barely been contemplated by art histories and Eurocentric narratives. In this way, the iconic Guernicapainted in 1937 as an anti-fascist and anti-war plea, literally confronts a South African drawing made 30 years later in the context of the apartheid”.

Feni’s piece is a monumental drawing of almost 3 square meters, executed with charcoal and pencil on two identical sheets of newspaper, glued horizontally. Made between 1966 and 1967, it was shown for the first time at Gallery 101 in Johannesburg in 1967, one of the few spaces in the South African city where black artists could exhibit. Due to its scale and ambition, the work represented a transgression that challenged the then widespread expectation that black artists should limit themselves to producing crafts or “native art” for the tourist market.

Manuel Segade, director of the Madrid art gallery, added that this cycle of exhibitions aims to question “the history of art itself, which has been built under racist parameters,” but it is also a way of explaining that “the European avant-garde needed to be born from African inventiveness” and, even more, “that the Guernica “Picasso would not be understood without African sculpture,” since one of the Spanish master’s sources of inspiration was precisely that artistic tradition.

The exhibition will remain until September 22.