Addis Fine Art is excited to announce our collaboration with Steven Kasher Gallery, New York in Refraction: New Photography of Africa and its Diaspora. The exhibition presents a generation of photographic artists of African descent born in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s including Girma Berta and Eyerusalem Adugna Jirenga.
The artists in the exhibition portray Black bodies in acts of cultural mediation. They revive the traditional African rites of masking, costuming, quilting, body ornamentation and invocation of spirits. They refract those rituals through the lenses of contemporary art practices such as performative self portraiture, collage, montage and digital manipulation. They merge cultures past and present, looking towards a more inclusive, harmonious future.
Refraction is an ocular cleanse. The work of these artists bridges the gap between Black stereotypes and Black reality. The photographs in the exhibition navigate the complex relationship between innate identities and identities evolved from social, political and cultural influences. On a technical level, these artists are heralds of new dimensions in photography, bending, transmuting and pushing the medium. Some artists in the exhibition record this world and some invent new ones with an eye to the conceptual, even fantastical. Their work blends fact and allegory, the real and the imagined, the present and the future. Their language is a mixed vocabulary of photography, sculpture and performance. Ranging from Afro-futurism to Afro-documentary, these photographs reclaim and re-connect a multitude of Black histories and identities.
The exhibition is curated by Steven Kasher Gallery Director Cassandra Johnson and Niama Safia Sandy, Independent Curator and Cultural Anthropologist.
Steven Kasher Gallery
515 W. 26th St.,
New York, NY 10001.
19 April - 02 June 2018
Tuesday - Saturday
10AM - 6PM.
For more information about the exhibition, please contact Cassandra Johnson - cassandra@stevenkasher.com
http://www.stevenkasher.com/exhibitions/refraction-new-photography-of-africa-and-its-diaspora