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We Face Forward: Art from West Africa Today
various venues Manchester June to 16 September
The title for this sizeable exhibition by internationally active artists from West Africa quotes Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first president, articulating the need for his newly independent country's political unity on its independence in i960: 'We face neither East nor West. We face forward.' The show's Manchester location, part of the Cultural Olympiad's culminating London 2012 Festival, initiates much meditation on the historic roots of today's political instability in so much of West Africa without losing an upbeat mood about that future, despite the grim news emanating currently from MaH, Niger and Nigeria.
Sound plays a significant part in the show's appeal, and besides musical events tying in with it throughout the summer, Emeka Ogboh's lively lagos Soundscape, 2012, is constantly playing outside Manchester Art Gallery, oembining street traders' shouts and traffic noise to compete with the roar of Moseley Street's own traffic At the Whitworth Art Gallery, meanwhile, Romuald Hazoumè's Benin street trader's cart from ARIide 14, 2005, dominates one gallery, piled high with out-of-date western consumer goods including a cassette player broadcasting, at the time of my visit, Goldplay. Hazoumè is interested in the danger as well as the irony of all trade. His film, La Roulette Béninoise, 2004, highlights illegal petrol smuggling out of Nigeria while, at the Manchester Art Gallery, his series of 'African masks' are made of discarded plastic bottles masquerading as ritual objects. Trade underlines the history of West Africa's relationship with Manchester from slave-trade days to the industrial revolution, and the dt/ s galleries contain large collections of West African Textiles. Echoing this, and the importance of the Pan African Congress meeting in the city in 1948, is Victoria Udondian's Aso Me (1948), 2012, which was commissioned by the Whitworth and...