The movements of a naked man, which are depicted in individual images that merge into one another, appear dark and gripping, powerful and elemental. His light skin color contrasts with the dark heads that sit anatomically quite suddenly on his neck and threaten to be swallowed up by the black fabric background. “Human in Motion” is the name of Roméo Mivekannin’s first exhibition, which the Berlin gallery owner Barbara Thumm is holding for the West African artist in her project space.
Whether running, jumping or descending the stairs, the naked person in motion immediately brings to mind the photographic motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge. As the founder of chronophotography at the end of the 19th century, he was not only a pioneer for the development of cinematography, but also for the artist Marcel Duchamp, who created a key work of classical modernism with his “Nude Descending the Stairs” from 1912.
Carpenter, artist, author
The artist, who was born in 1986 in the Ivory Coast and trained as a cabinetmaker, also studied art history and architecture in Toulouse and wrote a novel, consciously draws on this tradition without denying his African origins. On the contrary: as a descendant of the last independent king of Dahomey, now Benin, who led the resistance against French colonization, he connects his own roots with Western art history – with his head held high, in an almost magical way.
He uses old bedsheets, tea towels and tablecloths as a base for his paintings, which have previously been soaked in elixir baths according to voodoo practices, the spiritual belief rooted in the Kingdom of Benin. Above all, his figures literally stand on the shoulders of a European-dominated art history with their heads. While the bodies are only modelled out of the beige base with black acrylic paint, the multiple heads appear as greyish foreign bodies in the uniform colour tone of the natural tones by adding white.
Pan-African perspectives
Mivekannin, who lives in France and Benin, uses this shift in identity to enable a change of perspective on the classical canon of art history, in which black people appear – if at all – as servants, slaves or exotic beauties. These are outstanding paintings by old masters and classical modernists, which he adapts according to all the rules of art in order to replace one of the faces with his own countenance.
This is also the case in his painting “Le modèl noir, après Felix Valloton”, which immediately catches the eye in the major overview exhibition of one hundred years of pan-African figurative painting at the Basel Art Museum. As the title suggests, he paraphrases Valloton’s “La Blanche et la Noir” from 1913, which in turn refers to Manet’s famous “Olympia”, by giving the black woman at the edge of the bed his facial features.
It is this kind of change of perspective and broadening of horizons that Barbara Thumm also promotes. In recent years she has included a whole series of pan-African artists in the gallery program, including María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Carrie Mae Weems, El Hadji Sy and Kaloki Nyamai, who have received great international recognition. They are all united by a post-colonial perspective that attempts to place the familiar and the foreign in a critical dialogue about discrimination, racism and otherness.
Mivekanni’s new group of works, “Human in Motion,” not only moves between European and African culture, but can also be understood as an overarching expression of a global migration movement. While Muybridge’s time was still about a process of mobilization and acceleration in which even the images learned to walk, today half of humanity seems to be in turmoil or on the run.