Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Michael Armitage

2022; UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center; Volume: 55; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/afar_r_00658

1937-2108

Leonie Chima Emeka, Stefan Eisenhofer,

Geographies of human-animal interactions

For the global art world Michael Armitage appears like a blazing rising star. Born in 1984 in Kenya and educated in London, England, he is now featured by major art institutions and events like the 58th Venice Biennale (2019), MoMA in New York in Projects 110 (2019) and the Whitechapel Gallery in London in Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium (2020). The exhibition Paradise Edict at Haus der Kunst in Munich is Armitage's first solo exhibition in a major European art museum (Fig. 1).Living and working in Nairobi as well as in London, Armitage praises each of the two cities as vital to his creative practice. He derives inspiration for his paintings from many different sources: from political events to personal memories and experiences, from mass media and pop culture to folklore, myths, and tales from East Africa and Europe (Fig. 2). These stories and histories or experiences of the two cities and regions are merged together into narratives that overcome the conceptual breach between Europe and Africa. Often starting with Kenyan local myth, Armitage develops narratives of universal political critique and rebellion that involve global demands on democracy, data protection, or ecological and human rights and reach far beyond the conceptual borders between “the West and the Rest,” between the human and the nonhuman, between the exploitation of life and its inviolable dignity. His work serves as a mirror for European fantasies: wild and untamed nature on the one side and violated, racialized bodies and political and ecological catastrophes on the other.At the Haus der Kunst gallery rooms, the high ceilings and huge windows allowed natural light to enter from above, emphasizing the qualities of the large-scale, colorful oil paintings and enabling visitors to take a closer look at Armitage's dreamscapes.The exhibition was structured in several parts. The first part showed about thirty of Armitage's oil paintings dating from 2014 to the present in four series: erotic tropical animals; Kenyan landscape and society; Kenyan and Greek antique mythology; and contemporary political investigations and statements.Presented in the second part was the so-called Kenyan Election Series, eight paintings about the controversial Kenyan parliamentary elections of 2017 and the accompanying riots. These works are guided by Armitage's personal encounters at an opposition rally in Nairobi (Fig. 2).Behind this gallery room, separated by walls and banisters, visitors were introduced to the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (NCAI), an art space Michael Armitage founded in 2020. The NCAI is a nonprofit visual art space with exhibitions, educational and public talk programs, and a library, dedicated to the preservation and promotion of contemporary art in East Africa. The show ended with a presentation of around seventy twentieth-century works from East African artists who served as sources of inspiration for Armitage's work.Paradise Edict greeted the visitor on the staircase that led to the gallery rooms on the first floor. Here one saw five oil paintings of tropical animals— seductive, sexual, alluring, and irritating—which attracted the gaze and lured the visitor into the exhibition. With a tropical background, floral, blurred and irritating, one could see several monkeys in erotic posture, inviting an examination of sexuality at the boundaries between nature and culture, animality and humanity, masculinity and femininity (Figs. 3–4). The oil painting Leopard Print Seducer (Fig. 3, center top) depicted a large ape in a lascivious posture reminiscent of a pin-up girl; the animal was dressed in leopard print lingerie and gently lifted its left hand to its collarbone. In a lecture Armitage remembered an online interview with a ritual specialist from the same society in Uganda that produces the Lubugo bark cloth canvas for his paintings. (Armitage uses Lugubo in lieu of regular canvas for his paintings.) The Ugandan ritual specialist, when putting people into trance, would accompany the person on their journey through the forest “because other animals, while they are in their trance, would come and try to take you off your path.” Like these animals, the bonobo dwarf chimpanzee seduced the viewer. Although the ape hardly met the normative standards of contemporary female beauty with its square shoulders and bowed legs—it was more reminiscent of an old man with a round beer belly, dressed in leopard print lingerie with something hanging down from its pants that bore a confusing similarity to a penis. The image was irresistible, seductive and, at the same time, irritating. Indeed the bonobo chimpanzee hovered between human and animal and, in its gender fluidity, it opened a space of confusing erotic tension and persistent questioning force.This opening series on the staircase hovered between the humorous and the amusing, but confronted the visitor again and again with the borders of their own comfort zone and introduced them to creatures that come from a world beyond. Some of the anthropomorphic creatures revealed a brutish sexuality. One monkey, for example, with shaggy brown fur and a slashing wound in the shape of a vulva where its mouth should have been, stared at the visitor, and the fear and panic in its eyes spoke of the mistreatment and the abuse it had suffered; it was scared, screaming, and exposed in its unprotected and already violated defencelessness. The open flesh was simultaneously an open wound or a vulva as well as a gaping, screaming mouth. The abused monkey became an allegory of the physical and psychological wounds of traumas and the scream of pain that is so often kept silent.In his paintings the artist united conceptual complexity with aesthetic attraction. He masterfully merged complex storytelling and multiple references to art history and political events and myths into an image of harmonic composition that was at the same time alluring and complicated (Fig. 5).At Haus der Kunst, a space originally built to propagate German supremacist ideologies, Armitage's paintings evoked multidimensional interpretation. With a visual language that was almost floral and blurred like a psychedelic trip, the paintings created their own critique, which stood in contrast to the mathematical structure of the former national socialist building (Fig. 6).With Paradise Edict, curator Anna Schneider finalized one of the last major projects of the late Okwui Enwezor, former artistic director of the Haus der Kunst from 2011 to 2018. Throughout his career, Enwezor's great ambition was to expand the contemporary art scene beyond the Euro-American canon to artists from around the world. In his spirit, the last room of the exhibition was dedicated to key artists of East African modernism who have significantly influenced and shaped Michael Armitage's visual approach. Apparent inspirations and references in Armitage's paintings arise from artists like Meek Gichugu (b. 1968, Nairobi), whose surrealistic human figures, animals, and fruits or morphologies of the three sometimes obscure and sometimes highlight their sexual symbolism. Armitage's complex interplay with the erotic and the exotic, fantasies and ideologies, humanism and animalism were here lined up into a rich tradition of Eastern African painting. Another point of reference for Armitage's work is the dreamy paintings of animals, landscapes, and everyday scenes in the impressionist style of Uganda-born artist Jak Katarikawe (1938-2018) and of Tanzanian painter and sculptor George Lilanga (1934-2005). The anthropomorphic offbeat and puzzling figures of the latter are adaptations from sculptors of the Makonde region, whose figures represent mischievous spirits of the unseen world (Shetani) often with part-human and part-animal bodies.Further important influences on Armitage are Ugandan artists Peter Mulindwa (b. 1943, Bunyoro) and Theresa Musoke (b. 1944, Kampala). Mulindwa's political art and criticism of corrupt Ugandan leaders through African fable anecdotes provided inspiration as did Musoke's characteristically fluid, interdependent world of figures, animals, and their surroundings, in which the outline of one form often describes the beginning of another.Names like Edward Saidi Tingatinga (1932-1972), Sane Wadu (b. 1954, Nyathuna, Kenya), Asaph Ngethe Macua (b. 1930, Karura, Kenya), Elimo Njau (b. 1932, Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania), and Chelenge Van Rampelberg (b. ?, Kericho, Kenya) are also offered as reference points. Finally included in the exhibition is Magdalene Odundo (b. 1950, Nairobi, Kenya), one of the most esteemed international ceramic artists. Her view of the human body and its many possible contortions serves as an important guideline for Armitage's visual ideas.The exposition of the NCAI, which is the last part of the exhibition, not only gave precious insights into Armitage's art-historical, semiotic, and aesthetic ties with modern Eastern African artists, but also provided Munich with the rare opportunity of seeing many groundbreaking contributions from the canon of East African art. But this is precisely what might also be seen as problematic, as it bears the danger of exoticising Armitage. Further, the singular focus on African contexts and inspirations could be seen as a reduction of Armitage's vast and global approach to art. The iconographical and compositional references to painters like Titian, Francisco de Goya, Edouard Manet, Paul Gauguin, or Vincent Van Gogh were not mentioned in the exhibition, which might have left the impression that Armitage's influences reside in East Africa alone. This bears the danger of reducing the identity, education, and experience of this astonishingly global artist to the African continent, whereas it is exactly his universality, his masterful interplay of many traditions at once, that make Armitage such a challenging voice for our globalized world today. To exhibit a painter of African origin to a predominantly White spectatorship—especially in current times, when postcolonial critique has finally become an interest of a more general public—is always a demanding project. That the British-Kenyan artist becomes a predominantly Kenyan voice in a German museum means to Africanize a transgressive position within a European context. Regardless of the missing references to Europe, the exhibition invited engagement in the critical narratives of Michael Armitage's painting. Paradise Edict was a very worthy show in the tradition and legacy of Okwui Enwezor. It welcomed viewers with paintings of alluring and playful beauty that challenged some of our beliefs and ideologies.An exhibition catalogue is available: Anna Schneider (ed.), Michael Armitage: Paradise Edict (Cologne: Walther König 2020), with contributions by Elsbeth Court, Imraan Coovadia, Anna Schneider, and Dimona Stöckle, accompanied by an interview between Michael Armitage and Don Handa.A digital audio exhibition is available at https://hausderkunst.de/entdecken/audio/digitaler-audiorundgang-michael-armitage