Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.When Ayo Adeyinka, founder and director of London-based Tafeta gallery, visited the Venice Biennale last year, he was thrilled. Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa\u2019s exhibition Foreigners Everywhere promised to \u201cquestion the boundaries and definitions of modernism\u201d. \u201cI thought there would be a bit of a look-in for the global south,\u201d Adeyinka says. \u201cI counted between the Giardini and the Arsenale at least seven 20th-century African artists we have shown in the past.\u201d For all seven\u00a0\u2014 including the pioneering Nigerian sculptor and painter Ben Enwonwu; Uzo Egonu, a painter and printmaker who moved to Britain from Nigeria in 1945; and the seminal teacher, painter, sculptor and illustrator Uche Okeke \u2014 it was the first time their work had ever featured at the Biennale.African modernism\u2019s overdue recognition may have also\u00a0reached the art market. At the Tefaf fair in Maastricht, Tafeta\u2019s main presentation (in the company of the gallery\u2019s contemporary stars such as Yinka Shonibare and Nelson Makamo) is comprised of 20th-century African artists. Tefaf has always shown classical African art, alongside the Dutch old masters, Asian antiquities and European fine and decorative arts for which the fair is famous. But those artists who initiated the conversation between Africa\u2019s past and present, and between art movements prevalent in Europe and those indigenous to the African continent, in the context of nation-building and independence movements, have largely been missing. Adeyinka\u2019s presentation seeks to rectify that. He is showing mostly Nigerian artists, each of whom reflects very different encounters between Igbo, Hausa or Yoruba traditions and European modernist aesthetics, from Okeke, leader of the so-called Zaria rebels, who resisted the colonial art education of the 1950s, to the boldly expressive artist, bandleader and dancer Twins Seven Seven. There will also be prints by the Nigerian master Bruce Onobrakpeya \u2014 another Zaria rebel \u2014 and work by the Austrian-born artist (and Yoruban priestess) Susanne Wenger, whose hand-painted textile compositions, inspired by Yoruba cosmology, filled a room within the Arsenale last year. Adeyinka hopes to draw European collectors to the field. \u201cThere is a lot of demand for 20th-century African art from an African audience \u2014 in Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa and parts of north Africa,\u201d Adeyinka says. \u201cCollecting on the [African] continent never abandoned this market. We are just trying to make it more mainstream.\u201d\u00a0There is a lot of demand for 20th-century African art from an African audience \u2014 in Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa and parts of north AfricaAdeyinka acknowledges he is one small commercial spearhead riding on a global movement of growing scholarly and institutional acknowledgment. On March 19 the Centre Pompidou in Paris will open Paris Noir: Artistic Movements and Anticolonial Struggles, 1950-2000. October sees London\u2019s Tate Modern opening Nigerian Modernism, celebrating those artists \u201cworking before and after the decade of national independence from British colonial rule in 1960\u201d. Meanwhile, the auction market for these African artists of the modern era (hard to date or define for each different African country) is booming. Strauss & Co, which has long observed huge interest among Black South African collectors for African contemporary art, is now noting a focus \u201cmore and more on the generation or two before the contemporary artists\u201d, says the auction house\u2019s senior art specialist Alastair Meredith. Interest is particularly strong in artists such as Gerard Sokoto \u2014 whose brooding self-portrait in mustard yellow light (1947) will feature in the Pompidou show. Helene Love-Allotey of Bonhams\u2019 African department in London notes that internationally \u201cthe strength is in South African and Nigerian modernist artists\u201d, with Ladi Kwali, the Nigerian potter and ceramic artist, a particular favourite.\u00a0\u00a0Not everyone of course is thrilled by this burgeoning market. \u201cWe are not interested in marketing East African artists for sale,\u201d says Muhunyo Maina, a senior researcher at the Eastern African Museum of Art in Nairobi, who is steering a project, The Short Century, to document pioneers of the 20th century in the region. He notes that the first major retrospective in Nairobi of work from the 1960s and 1970s by Louis Mwaniki, in 2013, saw the exhibition bought wholesale and removed from the country.\u00a0Adeyinka is aware that public art institutions in Africa cannot compete with the growing buying power of African and, increasingly, international collectors. But he believes the artists he shows deserve greater exposure: \u201cIt is important to us. Art history is skewed to a western perspective and the timelines are off as well. Speaking for Nigeria, paper and canvas is a 20th-century idea, whereas paper came into Europe in the 12th century. By contrast, performance art, which is considered contemporary, is basically modified masquerade culture from ancient Africa.\u201d It is only by showing these works widely that false chronologies and hierarchies of value will be adjusted.It is not that these artists have not been acknowledged before. In 1956, Ben Enwonwu was commissioned by Queen Elizabeth II to create her statue. A second cast of his famous work\u00a0Anyanwu\u00a0(1954-5) was handed to the United Nations as a gift by the Nigerian government in 1966. But the different wars and upheavals of many countries on the continent during the 1980s and 1990s, and the lack of support for arts education, exhibition making and scholarship have scrubbed their achievements from the record.Adeyinka is not the only gallerist choosing Tefaf as a platform for renewed focus. New York\u2019s Aicon has historically specialised in artists from South Asia, but has begun showing the work of African and Middle Eastern modern artists. It will be bringing three works by the Martinique-born Serge H\u00e9l\u00e9non (born in 1934), who has lived and worked mostly in France and West Africa. H\u00e9l\u00e9non has developed a personal style, which he calls \u201cune figuration Autre\u201d: a form of abstraction in which detritus is mixed with paint and glue to create textured surfaces. The art of H\u00e9l\u00e9non, included in the Pompidou\u2019s show, gallery director Harry Hutchison suggests, \u201cis deeply rooted in postcolonial thought and diasporic identity, engaging with modernism while asserting a uniquely Caribbean and African diasporic perspective\u201d. He adds, more generally, this \u201cis a rich overlooked section of the market so there is plenty of room to grow. After the institutions show works and collect themselves the market will really come alive.\u201d \u00a0March 15-20, tefaf.comFind out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.When Ayo Adeyinka, founder and director of London-based Tafeta gallery, visited the Venice Biennale last year, he was thrilled. Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa\u2019s exhibition Foreigners Everywhere<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":232515,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-232514","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232514"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232514\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":232516,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232514\/revisions\/232516"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/232515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}