Manchester’s connections to west Africa are woven into its history. They date back to the Atlantic slave trade, when the city was part of the unvirtuous circle of Manchester textiles being traded for African slaves, slaves sold to cotton producers in the Americas, and cotton, picked by slaves, sold to Manchester for the production of textiles.
There are still connections today, with the collections held by some of Manchester’s museums and galleries featuring textiles that were originally produced for the west African market. A fifth of the Whitworth Art Gallery’s textile collection comes from Africa, and the Manchester Museum has an important range of African artefacts.
Despite these many links, there was little awareness in the city of the contemporary cultural scene in west Africa. We Face Forward: Art from West Africa Today, part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, has dramatically changed this.
New direction
This summer-long season of contemporary art and music has invaded Manchester’s museums, galleries, parks and libraries. It’s impossible to miss: the bright yellow banner, bearing a starburst of the flags of all the west African nations and the Union Jack, hangs from every lamppost and the cacophonous sounds of people, vehicle horns, street music and hawkers from markets in Lagos are broadcast through Whitworth Park and Manchester Piccadilly bus station.
The title, We Face Forward, is a quote from Ghana’s former president Kwame Nkrumah. “We face neither east nor west: we face forward,” he said in 1960, stating his resistance to the domination of the cold war superpowers.
On show across the five venues taking part are works by 33 contemporary artists representing 11 west African countries, from Senegal to Nigeria. Works include painting, photography, textiles, sculpture, video and sound works.
Established and emerging artists are featured and, in addition to loans, two artists from Cameroon have been commissioned to create huge installations. One is Barthélémy Toguo’s work at Manchester Art Gallery, the other is a work by Pascale Marthine Tayou that can be seen at the Whitworth.
As well as Manchester’s contemporary galleries, We Face Forward has embraced less obvious venues such as the Gallery of Costume at Platt Hall and the National Football Museum, and it’s these that are particularly successful.
Haunting black and white studio and social portraits by three Malian photographers working in the 1950s and 1960s, a joint project with the National Museum of Mali, are at the Gallery of Costume.
The venue also showcases the vibrant dresses of British Nigerian designer Duro Olowu (a favourite of Michelle Obama, the wife of the US president) in the 18th-century splendour of the dining room at Platt Hall.
Metaphoric weight
Moving into Space: Football and Art in West Africa at the newly-opened National Football Museum drags the museum well outside its comfort zone of clubs and fans, with works that use football as a metaphor for addressing some of the issues challenging African society: the impact of globalisation, gender and age relationships, and the false promise of wealth and fame.
The last is memorably captured in Tayou’s Gold Nuggets, a goalpost groaning with old footballs dripping fake jewellery.
Football unites many in Africa, young and old, male and female, and Andrew Esiebo’s affectionate on- and off-field portraits of the Gogo Getters, a feisty team of footballing grandmothers from a South African township, captures that universal appeal.
There’s an infectious sense of humour and joy in many of the works, such as the bright yellow cocoa-pod coffin from Ghana, and the film of Mrs Grace Seth, a local resident, telling the tales of Anansi, the rascally spider, at the Manchester Museum.
At Manchester Art Gallery, Abdoulaye Armin Kane’s witty animated film The Event charts the calamitous impact of power cuts in Dakar, Senegal.
Other works are deliberately provocative and shocking. At Manchester Art Gallery, The Hell of Copper, a series of photographs by Nyaba Léon Ouedraogo, documents the electronic graveyard of the Aglobloshie dump in Accra, Ghana, where youths, with no protective garments, strip down old computers, thereby endangering their health through exposure to toxic chemicals.
At the Whitworth, Romuald Hazoumès film, La Roulette Beninoise, follows Benin’s illegal petrol smugglers, as they dangerously transport contraband petrol in inflated plastic bottles.
The art is accessible and firmly rooted in the everyday. Many of the artists use familiar materials – recycled clothes, bottle-tops, plastic bottles – to highlight the issues facing people in west Africa and our own society: the waste of natural resources, climate change, environmental sustainability, and drastic, unfettered urbanisation.
People are central, as images, as participants, even when they are not visible, as in Mohamed Camara’s The Curtains of Mohamed, a film shot through the translucent curtains of a doorway in Mali.
This ambitious season has succeeded in raising the profile of west African contemporary culture in a dynamic and accessible way, and, during a dismal summer, of bringing sunshine to this famously rainy city.
I hope a way will be found of making sure that the impact of the initiative lasts longer that just one summer. Perhaps, next year, the sounds of Manchester will be heard in Lagos?
Jane Weeks is museum consultant
There are still connections today, with the collections held by some of Manchester’s museums and galleries featuring textiles that were originally produced for the west African market. A fifth of the Whitworth Art Gallery’s textile collection comes from Africa, and the Manchester Museum has an important range of African artefacts.
Despite these many links, there was little awareness in the city of the contemporary cultural scene in west Africa. We Face Forward: Art from West Africa Today, part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, has dramatically changed this.
New direction
This summer-long season of contemporary art and music has invaded Manchester’s museums, galleries, parks and libraries. It’s impossible to miss: the bright yellow banner, bearing a starburst of the flags of all the west African nations and the Union Jack, hangs from every lamppost and the cacophonous sounds of people, vehicle horns, street music and hawkers from markets in Lagos are broadcast through Whitworth Park and Manchester Piccadilly bus station.
The title, We Face Forward, is a quote from Ghana’s former president Kwame Nkrumah. “We face neither east nor west: we face forward,” he said in 1960, stating his resistance to the domination of the cold war superpowers.
On show across the five venues taking part are works by 33 contemporary artists representing 11 west African countries, from Senegal to Nigeria. Works include painting, photography, textiles, sculpture, video and sound works.
Established and emerging artists are featured and, in addition to loans, two artists from Cameroon have been commissioned to create huge installations. One is Barthélémy Toguo’s work at Manchester Art Gallery, the other is a work by Pascale Marthine Tayou that can be seen at the Whitworth.
As well as Manchester’s contemporary galleries, We Face Forward has embraced less obvious venues such as the Gallery of Costume at Platt Hall and the National Football Museum, and it’s these that are particularly successful.
Haunting black and white studio and social portraits by three Malian photographers working in the 1950s and 1960s, a joint project with the National Museum of Mali, are at the Gallery of Costume.
The venue also showcases the vibrant dresses of British Nigerian designer Duro Olowu (a favourite of Michelle Obama, the wife of the US president) in the 18th-century splendour of the dining room at Platt Hall.
Metaphoric weight
Moving into Space: Football and Art in West Africa at the newly-opened National Football Museum drags the museum well outside its comfort zone of clubs and fans, with works that use football as a metaphor for addressing some of the issues challenging African society: the impact of globalisation, gender and age relationships, and the false promise of wealth and fame.
The last is memorably captured in Tayou’s Gold Nuggets, a goalpost groaning with old footballs dripping fake jewellery.
Football unites many in Africa, young and old, male and female, and Andrew Esiebo’s affectionate on- and off-field portraits of the Gogo Getters, a feisty team of footballing grandmothers from a South African township, captures that universal appeal.
There’s an infectious sense of humour and joy in many of the works, such as the bright yellow cocoa-pod coffin from Ghana, and the film of Mrs Grace Seth, a local resident, telling the tales of Anansi, the rascally spider, at the Manchester Museum.
At Manchester Art Gallery, Abdoulaye Armin Kane’s witty animated film The Event charts the calamitous impact of power cuts in Dakar, Senegal.
Other works are deliberately provocative and shocking. At Manchester Art Gallery, The Hell of Copper, a series of photographs by Nyaba Léon Ouedraogo, documents the electronic graveyard of the Aglobloshie dump in Accra, Ghana, where youths, with no protective garments, strip down old computers, thereby endangering their health through exposure to toxic chemicals.
At the Whitworth, Romuald Hazoumès film, La Roulette Beninoise, follows Benin’s illegal petrol smugglers, as they dangerously transport contraband petrol in inflated plastic bottles.
The art is accessible and firmly rooted in the everyday. Many of the artists use familiar materials – recycled clothes, bottle-tops, plastic bottles – to highlight the issues facing people in west Africa and our own society: the waste of natural resources, climate change, environmental sustainability, and drastic, unfettered urbanisation.
People are central, as images, as participants, even when they are not visible, as in Mohamed Camara’s The Curtains of Mohamed, a film shot through the translucent curtains of a doorway in Mali.
This ambitious season has succeeded in raising the profile of west African contemporary culture in a dynamic and accessible way, and, during a dismal summer, of bringing sunshine to this famously rainy city.
I hope a way will be found of making sure that the impact of the initiative lasts longer that just one summer. Perhaps, next year, the sounds of Manchester will be heard in Lagos?
Jane Weeks is museum consultant
Project data
- Total cost £450,000
- Main funders Manchester City Galleries; Whitworth Art Gallery, Zochonis Charitable Trust £60,000; Manchester Art Gallery Trust £150,000; Arts Council England £75,000; Paul Hamlyn Foundation £90,000; and support from Farrow & Ball and the Little Greene Paint Company
- Artistic director Maria Balshaw
- Curators Bryony Bond; Mary Griffiths; Natasha Howes
- Advisory panel Martin Barlow; Christine Eyene; Lubaina Himid; Koyo Kouoh; Alan Rice
- Festival identity, website, newspaper Creative Concern
- Catalogue design and print Axis Graphic Design
- Specialist lighting, installation and rigging DBN Lighting
- Structural advice Stockley
- Graphics printing and marketing Contact Photographic Services; Trafford Signs
- Shipping Momart
- Season ends 16 September
