This exhibition was selected as part of Turin Oomph / Rome Oomph, a roundup of the best shows in these towns during November 2022.
“Landscapes of Hidden Words” presents the work of three artists born in different African countries, Karla Nixon, LegakwanaLeo Makgekgenene and Renée Akitelek Mboya, whose research is connected to the reckoning of personal memories and images related to their native spaces and traditions. The three artists reinterpret hidden, oppressed and often misrepresented stories in different ways.
“This exhibition—writes Laura Burocco—combines together different media and materials, from video to photography and photomontage, to pictorial installations, through which the artists investigate the definition of a belonging territory and the construction of a unique and collective identity.”
Karla Nixon’s works is developed between abstraction and figuration. She uses paper, hand- cut, painted, glued. Cut paper is historically related to craftsmanship, it is sensitive subject in the African context, but Nixon wants the visitor to look beyond the material and the technique, losing in the intricate textures that she rhythmically overlaps and articulates. In the exhibition there are a series of recent works, such as Dune II and Flood light and rain fall, which, with their texture and intense color, evoke natural landscapes.
LegakwanaLeo Makgekgenene presents a series of photomontages with the intent of rewriting the collective dimension of a national memory based on a disguised identity, as in the case of Botswana’s public monuments. Her works can be ascribed to a virtual manipulation of folklore, a narrative between past, present and future, between real life, tradition and imagination, where images of monuments and national symbols intertwine. These works are part of a series presented in 2022 in the Botswana Pavilion, questioning the issue posed by the curatorship of the Venice Biennale about what it means a world where everyone can change, transform, become something or someone else.
at A PICK GALLERY, Turin
until January 14, 2023
