By Andrew Mulenga
This year’s unprecedented upsurge of
creativity on the Zambian art scene does not seem to be slowing down at all as
the inaugural Harvesting Workshop hosted
by the Mutale Kalinosi-led Munandi Art Studio (MAS) in Chongwe District, adds
wood to the fire.
Designed in the form of a one-month artist’s
residency, it was organized for the sole purpose of bringing artists together
to share collaborative conceptual ideas for future projects, an incubator for
creativity of sorts.
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| Visitors view drawings by Kalinosi at The Cave, a collaborative work that comprises a dug out anthill |
According to Kalinosi, the workshop,
that is pegged to be an annual event was scheduled to take place in October
last year but could not take off and was postponed twice because MAS was
waiting for a response from the National Arts Council of Zambia (NAC) concerning
a grant request that was eventually unfruitful. The artists finally had to dig deeper
into their own coffers to get the ball rolling and the event took place in the
month of April.
He says while the postponements may have
led to the low turnout and only 7 artists were in attendance instead of the 15
that were expected, artists still participated in a robust exchange of ideas
and unbridled creativity, exploring themes ranging from parliamentary politics
to colonialism, all expressed by means of conceptual art using mainly found
objects.
“Our main objective is to create a
culture of realizing and developing ideas together, and by changing the mind sets
of people in our communities. Move them away from this culture of selfishness
and working in isolations.
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| Artists at work during the workshop |
“A culture of developing ideas together
can bring sustainable developments in our communities. We are using art as a
source to spark off that idea. The
development of the world lies in the hands of the artists, also in Zambia,
working together is a taboo, so we are using Munandi Art Village as our lab for
experimenting with our ideas as artists,” explains the 43-year-old who has had
his fair share of international exposure having exhibited in France, Poland, South Africa, Sweden, India
and Brazil over the past 10 years.
Although it appears
MAS has not been too active, it was established in 2004 as a result of Kalinosi’s
completion of a two-year artist’s residency at the acclaimed Royal Academy of
Visual Arts popularly known as the Rijksacademie in Holland. The Munandi Art Village however, is an entirely new space in the Kanakantapa
area to be specific, Shyala Village that is expected to provide a two hectare
camp site where artists can “develop their ideas in a quite environment away
from the noise of the city”. In future MAS hopes to build some long-lasting structures
and thatched chalets.
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| Mr Speaker by Danny Lwando |
“From the experience I gained in Europe.
I thought of bringing a new independent platform conducive for artists to
create art, but also in Zambia artists are stuck with the 14th century type of
art, using brush and paint on canvas or chisel on wood or stone,” argues Kalinosi.
Of course he may sound slightly fanatical with that statement because brushes
and paint as a means of art production is still very much at the core of
art-making even in 2015. But then it should be understood that Kalinosi belongs
to a radical group of Zambian artists whom at the launch of their careers, with
European exposure, in the early 2000s produced some extremely unusual works that
were not entirely appreciated in Zambia.
“Yes, painting is
still accepted in the west, but the audience and the artists don’t treat it as
the only media someone can use in order to express oneself artistically. Unlike here where all the upcoming artists
are sculptors or painters, even the audience to accept you as artists, first of
all you need to be good in portrait painting. In fact painters in the west are
even finding it difficult to penetrate the art scenes, like Museums and
galleries,” he claims.
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| Stone installation by Chama Kabumbu |
He maintains the art
world is moving so fast such that painting has failed to catch up with the pace
at which it is moving and that realistic or representational painting is contesting
photography in a losing battle. He believes the camera has taken over painting
and most paintings end up in living rooms as decorations instead of being in
the archives.
“I’m one of the
very few conceptual artists in Zambia, because the culture we have developed in
this country is slow to change in everything not only the artists but a nation
as a whole. Someone saw my works and said in my face that, this is westerner’s
art, and I asked him to show me the Zambian art, he pointed to a painting on
canvas.
“But the westerners
have been painting on canvas since 14th centuries. So you see how we are slow
in changing. You change the subject on the canvas and you call it Zambian art
and other forms of art are not art? Stretching and painting using brush or palette
knife on canvas were used by artists like John Constable until the camera was invented,”
he says.
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| Rastaman by Francis Mubanga |
In 2004 Kalinosi
held a show entitled Konse Kubili
alongside Zambian-born Anawa
na Haloba who is currently based in Norway. Konse Kubili (which can loosely be
translated as “both sides” in the Bemba language of northern Zambia) was
misunderstood because of the radical nature of the work which can be classified
as conceptual art or conceptualism. To an audience that has for a long time
been accustomed to paintings, drawings and sculptures, art in which the
concepts took priority over conventional aesthetics was a non-starter. It can
be argued that the negative response from the audience and fellow artists
forced the two artists in to creative exile. Kalinosi would spend the next
decade showing in Europe whereas Anawana eventually decided to settle there, launching
a successful career having graduated from the Oslo National Academy of Fine Art
with a degree in 2006. She has enjoyed several important commissions in Norway
and in 2008 she featured in the 53rd Venice Biennale, the zenith of art
expositions, at the age of 29 and she remains the only Zambian to have featured
in this prestigious event considered the World Cup of the visual arts. Like
Kalinosi, much of Haloba’s work is performance-based video and sound
installations and occasionally using their own bodies as a medium.
“The Zambian
audience didn’t understand Konse Kubili
because in the first place they don’t even understand the word ‘conceptual’ or ‘contemporary’.
That’s why it was taken with mixed feelings, and a lot of them referred it to
the west, but conceptual art is not a new thing to Africa, it has been
practiced here before the Muzungu (European)
stepped foot on African soil, argues Kalinosi
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| Detail from Ship on Mediterranean, a collaboration by Mutale Kalinosi and Joseph Shakulipa |
“The type of
education we have is very wrong and needs to be revisited. In school look at
what they are teaching young ones, they don’t teach them about what we used to
do before instead they use colonial textbooks, where is the ministry of
education? If I have to ask a question
what is education? To my understanding education is to be cultured. We don’t
learn about how rock paintings were done, what media was used and how we could develop
from that base, we don’t.”
Nevertheless, it
turns out the participating artists at the just ended Harvesting Workshop went
flat out in the use of non-conventional media. Gallery nurtured artists such as
Danny Lwando, a painter and photographer left his comfort zones and came up
with a non-permanent work entitled Mr
Speaker using rocks, found wood and sand. Kalinosi and Joseph Shakulipa
produced Ship on the Mediterranean a conversation
piece that explores colonialism and modernity using everything from cut out newspapers
to discarded television sets.
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| Artists engaged in debate during the Harvesting workshop |
However, as much as
Kalinosi may have a point in the need for artists to embrace new media and
forms of creative expression, in an environment like Zambia where special
grants do not exist for the promotion of works in this medium, conceptual art
should remain something just for creative sparring and intellectual isometrics.
Let us be honest, works such as Mr
Speaker and Ship on The Mediterranean
will not put food on the table, not in Zambia where the production of art
remains pretty much an issue of the tummy.
Therefore,
paintings, drawings and sculptures will remain a very safe practice. Besides,
even in the west these forms of creative expression remain a favourite
particularly among investment art collectors whom it appears are continuously veering
towards the African continent.
Anyway, if a time
will come when brushes will be thrown away, it is certainly not soon. This is
the age of 3D cinema but people in the so-called west Kalinosi speaks of still
flock to the theatre to watch dramas as they did in Classical and Hellenistic
Greece over 2,000 years ago. It is the age of Auto-Tune and digitally enhanced
music but they have not thrown away their violins and they still flock to the orchestra
concert halls to listen to Vivaldi’s The
Four Seasons, even though it was composed 300 years ago. If anything the
Zambian public is still being force-fed “conventional art”, there is still time
to feed them conceptual art, spoon by spoon.
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