The German-based Walther Collection is launching a three-part series of exhibitions in its New York project space focusing on emerging African photographers and video artists. The shows will run between 2015 and 2017.
The first show, Lay of the Land (10 September-16 January 2016), includes works by the Angolan photographer and Golden Lion winner Edson Chagas, the Côte d’Ivoire-based artist François-Xavier Gbré and Mame-Diarra Niang, who lives between Paris and Dakar. It will be the first time each artist has shown in New York.
The exhibition explores post-colonial architecture and how monumental civic buildings, incomplete apartment complexes or crumbling petrol stations represent the politics of urban life in Africa.
Several works are being made specifically for the exhibition, with a view to being permanently acquired by the collection. They include an installation by Gbré created from 63 photographs he shot in Israel, France, Benin, Mali, Senegal and Togo. The artist is also producing a site-specific wallpaper print. Chagas is showing three large pieces from his ongoing series, Found Not Taken, while Niang will show around 20 photographs, including several from her new series on architecture in Johannesburg.
“Some of the pieces will eventually be acquired by the collection, but the primary goal is to create new dialogues around an area of photography that is only now beginning to receive attention,” says Brendan Wattenberg, the director of exhibitions at the Walther Collection project space.
The second exhibition, due to open next year, will focus on social documentary photography and portraiture; while the third, in 2017, will examine performance and the body. The third show will also include video works—a medium growing in popularity among contemporary African artists. The programme will culminate in a large-scale exhibition at the Walther Collection museum in Neu-Ulm in Bavaria.
Artur Walther, a former partner at Goldman Sachs who is based in New York, has been collecting African photography for around 20 years, amassing what is considered the world’s largest collection in the field. He opened his museum in Germany in 2010 and the New York project space in 2011.
The collection previously hosted a series of exhibitions on African photography in its Neu-Ulm and New York spaces between 2010 and 2013. “This new programme really brings us up to the present, by creating a platform for young artists working in Africa and beyond,” Wattenberg says.
