Not enough women taken seriously in arts yet

‘Africa is not a country: it’s a massive continent full of diverse cultures and practices.

It’s impossible to sum up something so huge in a few lines,’ says Frances Goodman, a feminist artist based in Johannesburg, when asked to describe contemporary African art. And I quickly understood why. ‘African art’ appears to be a reductive term, especially when artists from other continents are hardly ever tied so close to their geographical locations as African artists are to their homes.

However, the art world is becoming increasingly global and any oversimplification can be dangerous. According to Lungiswa Gqunta, an artist from Port Elizabeth who recently completed her Masters in Fine Art at UCT, ‘African art cannot be rounded up and summarised in a few words as it is diverse, rich and worldly in various ways. Let us, as artists, choose how to refer to our work, not be made to fit in already existing terms.’

Following that statement, Marlene Steyn, a painter and sculpture based in Cape Town, chooses to describe contemporary African art as ‘a cacophony loaded with histories: self-reflexive, sensitive, imaginative, confrontational, re-purposing, re-claiming, patterned, mythological, rubbery, woven with animals.’

Each woman uses their heritage, culture and history to create art that depicts a story of their African roots along with the struggles their ancestors fought against in the past and the ones they are still fighting today.

A wide range of media…

Unlike art movements such as Cubism or BioArt, using only specific techniques and tools, there’s no easy way to recognise one African style. To reach their audience, artists use different media. Audio, video, drawings, photographs, sculpture, paintings… the list goes on and offers a wide range of pieces.

Lungiswa, who underlines that ‘any medium can be loud, depending on the person using it,’ couples empty Black Label beer bottles, whose marketing strategy was, ironically, to represent ‘black masculinity,’ with softened fabric of used bedsheets, a symbol of the domestic female, to create a petrol bomb, a tool used historically against perceived oppression and injustice. This is one way in which she depicts black pain to a white audience in her solo exhibition Qokobe at the art gallery Whatiftheworld in Cape Town.

In her current exhibition Beneath Her at the art gallery Richard Taittinger in New York, Frances focuses on female identity and autonomy with sculptures made of false nails, paintings made from hand-stitched sequins and an installation formed with crocheted wool. She questions the way women present themselves to the world on the surface, and the attempt to maintain a perfect exterior, as well as focusing on what lies underneath, including the complexity of character and ‘the making of a woman.’

Despite choosing to speak through different media, it is clear many female artists are choosing to focus on similar subjects, such as the complex notions of beauty and the feminine body, including femininity, beauty, race, gender, submission, power, territory and tradition.Marlene also likes to mingle materials and unexpected objects like a fried egg, tapestries, toothpaste, fish tanks or braided ropes of hair to unsettle the viewer.

But she also refers to more common media: ‘I am at a point right now where the flat painted images and fat sculptures are extensions of each other (…) I think they speak at equal volumes; the sculptures in a more child-like language and the paintings in a babble that might be considered intellectual or a made-up language.’

…But a united message

Between artists of the same generation, and especially of the same country, there is a constant dialogue, whether it is through collaboration, conversation or appreciation. If every female artist possesses her own voice, there are ‘over-lapping themes and motifs’ in their work, affirms Frances.

‘Art for me is by its very nature political,’ she continues, ‘I am very concerned with women’s rights and equality and what it is to be a woman in a time where we are constantly bombarded with misinformation and false ideals. This is what I choose to explore and challenge in the work I make.’

Artists draw on what has come before them and the politics that inform them. Lungiswa Gqunta also chooses to make politics a standpoint of her work: ‘History and politics are not only woven in my works but they make up my life, my everyday existence whether I like it or not.’

Marlene also refers to psychoanalysis and psychiatry. In her exhibition Knot I : I Knot at the Smac Gallery in Johannesburg in 2017, she alludes to Jacques Lacan’s Borromean Knot, which represents the intersection between and interdependence of the three orders of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic, by creating loose, looping yoga pose-figures that threaten to come undone and break that intersection.

These installations depict the difficulties of living in a female body nowadays.Frances often works in the realms of sexuality and nudity.

Her Vajazzling Series present photographs of women’s naked torso decorated by crystal ornaments and Dirty Candy presents several sequin sculptures of glossy, luscious lips refusing to hold their form, symbolising an iconic and ironic way to question the impact of the media industry. ‘As they are [sexuality and nudity] the tools used by many industries to seduce us into buying their products and ethos,’ she continues, ‘the only way to reclaim power is to own it yourself.’

To her, the message shouldn’t be an ‘easy, one-line.’ Interested in defying clear explanations, she wishes her artwork to be ‘open enough so that the viewer can allow her own experiences to alter the way she reads the work, simultaneously allowing the work to alter her own sense of self.’ Inside the multiple layers of paint and meaning, Marlene allows several interpretations but seems to address mostly one recipient: the woman.

Women in contemporary African art

If many, like Frances, believe that women are ‘under-represented and under-appreciated in most art scenes’ around the world, Marlene thinks the gender norms are more prevalent and the expectations more severe on the African continent.

To her, it explains why ‘female African artists frequently deconstruct and play with these various reductive views; re-performing their roles, using their bodies and applying domestic practices like weaving and braiding to subvert problematic views of the feminine.’

Many female creative artists lived and worked during the diaspora and now challenge these fictional and oppressive perceptions. Between strange limitations and preconceived ideas of the women or their work, the female artist in Africa is still secondary compared to her male counterparts.

However, things are getting better. ‘It’s an extremely exciting time for African art,’ affirms Marlene, ‘this beautiful continent is constantly reinvented…  and continues to produce some of the most interesting artistic voices and visions.’

The Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa

Zeitz MOCAA (Museum of Contemporary Art Africa) inaugurated last September in Cape Town, also opens a new exciting chapter for female African artists. African art, as well as the continent and its inhabitants, has often been ‘exorcised’ and ‘othered’ by Western art, according to Frances.

Marlene also recalls that when she was studying art, ‘there was always a massive emphasis on Western art in dusty handbooks. To her, the museum is ‘a bee-hive platform for the multiple African voices, inspiring complex and much-needed dialogues.’

Set to become Africa’s most important cultural attraction and biggest museum (this R500 million project began in 2013 and transformed a functioning grain silo into a brand new glass building designed by Heatherwick studio), the MOCAA houses 100 exhibition rooms, employs 65 staff members and 21 curators. 

Its main curator, Marc Coetzee describes the institution as such: ‘The Zeitz is very much about Africa and its diaspora (…) it is trying to look at Africa’s place in the world, Africa’s influence, and the dialogue about Africa.’

This 6,500 square metres and nine floors of programmable space houses the work of more than twenty female artists from all over the continent. One would be surprised to face so many female works when Western museums’ permanent collections are still mostly masculine.

Even if recent and upcoming international exhibitions shed more light on women such as Making Space at the MOMA in New York, Virginia Woolf at the Tate museum in London and Nalini Malani at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the inequality still remains tremendous.

What are the remaining challenges?‘A museum like Zeitz MOCAA offers many artists the opportunity to show ambitious works in an ambitious setting, whilst giving art viewers who don’t generally see a lot of contemporary art the chance to see and experience the work of prolific and important artists together in one space,’ asserts Frances.

Therefore, the MOCAA is a good springboard for many lucky artists but indubitably excludes others. ‘Museums generally only put forward a thin slice of what’s going on, taken from a specific standpoint,’ she concludes.

In the end, it seems that there are still many steps that need to be taken to enhance contemporary African art and many challenges for female artists to face: their under-appreciation and representation in galleries, collections and publications, the lower prices they receive for their work and the continuing othering of their sex and their practice. ‘

Not enough women are taken seriously in arts yet,’ concludes Lungiswa.

To defeat this masculine monotone and create more individual voices, Marlene believes in ‘continuing to investigate difficult themes such as objectification and motherhood and challenge gender norms.’

Their work is important, necessary and thought-provoking.

‘Of course, there is a lot that has been achieved and many battles won,’ confesses Frances, ‘but until the day that equality exists on all levels in all areas of life the challenges will outweigh the achievements.’