ROMUALD HAZOUM AT THE IRISH MUSEUM OF MODERN ART Romuald Hazoum, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Royal Hospital,

Military Road, Kilmainham, Dublin, 09 February - 15 May 2011

The exhibition by artist Romuald Hazoum, curated by Director of IMMA Enrique Juncosa and Sen Kissane, Head of Exhibitions, is the first solo show by an African artist presented by the Irish institution, following the museums program of inclusion of artists from the periphery. Romuald Hazoum lives in Cotonou and works in Porto-Novo, both cities in his native Benin. Winner in 2007 of the Arnold Bod Prize at documenta 12, he has gained increasing recognition both in his country and in Europe over the past fifteen years. His most famous works are his on-going series of masks made of found objects and discarded petrol canisters and the installation La Bouche du Roi (2005) -unfortunately not part of this exhibition-, which consists of three hundred and forty oil containers that replicate the English slave- ship Brookes. The first indication of his presence in Dublin is a large sphere made of cut petrol containers that stands in the middle of the museums courtyard. From afar, it looks like, well, nothing new. The containers have been arranged so that the different colours of the marks made into the rough black plastic are aligned, reminding of a football balloon, the world, overpopulation, solidarity, all in the one planet . Other visitors who approach Exit Ball (2009) also seem irresistibly tempted to touch it, perhaps because at first the only thing that makes this sculpture different from other conceptual sculptures is the fact that its materials bear the imprint of actual African soil. The walls of the first room of Hazoums exhibition display some of his masks made of found objects and jerry cans. The gaping spouts of the petrol cans suggest mouths, handles turn into noses and the curves into facial features. Wires, cloths, and different found objects add the details. Curled black wire turns a wide round jerry can into Citoyenne (Woman citizen -1997), an upsidedown watering can is an Autoportrait (1995). The titles -some French, some in English and some in what could be Fon or Yoruba - can be playful, like Bye Bye (2009), the title that accompanies a mask made of a toaster with a long old-fashioned black phone receiver for a nose, which the artist made at the time Bush stepped down from office and lost his red hotline phone. Seemingly simple, the masks look like portraits of contemporary African life, and manage to retain this illusion without turning into obvious tricks. They appear initially as straightforward, after all, we assume we are somehow familiar with African masks.

Romuald Hazoum, Citoyenne (1997) Mixed media, found objects, 40x40x30cm.

Before Picasso and Braque turned their attention to them, mask-making had long been a tradition of Yoruba people. Among the Yoruba - Hazoums ancestry- masks are sacred objects, and as such would have to be destroyed or hidden if having been used in an actual ritual. Genuine sacred or ritual masks could not be made for a commercial purpose, masks made expressly for sale to European collectors resembled the real ones, but these masks would never have been part of a ritual or been consecrated. As Gerard Houghton points out in one of the essays included in the fully- illustrated catalogue that accompanies this exhibition, Hazoums masks can be seen as a teasing commentary on the Western stereotype of the African mask, as recycled objects, as real-life portraits, or as an indication of the one thing it decidedly isnt - an African mask1. If they were, they could not be displayed in the non-sacred context of a museum or gallery as works of art. Hazoums masks are inmediate and at the same time complex. They quietly comment on the relationship between the west and contemporary Africa, where much of Europes junk enters their largely second-hand market as aid. In his own words, Hazoum makes new masks with the rubbish people send us from Europe, and I send them back to galleries with my culture inside them. Hazoums disrupts the cycle of business between the two continents by returning waste to where it came from changed into a commodity. The relationship with art is not left untouched, as
1 Gerard Houghton, A Language to Behold, Romuald Hazoum, p.32

the artist cleverly re-appropriates

the African mask for his homeland. The gesture could be

interpreted as political, cynical or angry, yet it is not these emotions that the masks seem to be communicating. The masks, in fact, invite our responses and interpretations, but they themselves remain absolutely silent, as if they were utterly present in a dimension we cannot reach. On his essay Chaos and Metamorphosis2, written for the catalogue of Africa Remix, the curator and critic Simon Njami offers some insight into this silence. He asserts that in Africa voice is the privileged means of expression, but creativity does not speak. This he sees as creativitys possible refusal to expose itself and take part in self-comment, to play by rules devised for and by others. The west has long tried to decode African arts from and through its own point of view, building up academic literature on the subject from the nineteenth century on, cataloguing and labeling objects - while their creators still remained silent. Nowadays, according to Njami, some African artists have unlearned to remain silent but many remain so, in both cases caring about their work being seen but not about the labels attached to them. Even the ones that seem to have given in to the required discourse, intimately know that some things should be left unsaid and that no analysis can erase the meaning and origin of works. This silence is, for Njami, the best approach to African creativity. Everything starts and finishes with this silence3. When asked why he makes masks, Hazoums answer seems to confirm Njami: African artists, by definition, make masks, I am an African artist, therefore, I make masks4. Following a traditional west-African mural technique, earth pigments mixed with cow dung create a textured background in the four paintings in the second room. Over the background, a mix with modern acrylics draws flattened geometric shapes, fluid lines and the outline of an animal. If they belonged to the Suprematist or the abstract geometric tradition, we would have an idea of how to approach these paintings. It is striking the way the vibrational energy of these canvases communicates itself, yet it is hard to know how to read them and silence makes itself felt again. Hazoum himself does not even consider these canvases paintings in our sense of the term, nor does he consider himself an artist in the western sense. He sees himself as an ar. An ar in Yoruba culture is a traditional artist, but the concept includes characteristics that are not called forth by the word artist. Cultural exchange is part of the ars tasks, and he is expected to travel and settle among different peoples to enhance his skills and to transmit his own knowledge. He is a respected representative of Yoruba culture, seen to embody spiritual, social and symbolic knowledge.

2 Simon Njami (ed.),Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2005, pp.16,17 3 Ibid; p.17 4 Gerard Houghton, A Language to Behold, p.30

The signs in his canvases come from African languages and scripts on which Hazoum has long had an interest. To understand each of them would require a deep knowledge of languages and thought systems as varied as Zarma from Nigeria, Bamun script from Cameroon or Fante glyphs from Ghana. The Yoruba writing and the marks at the bottom of the canvases refer to different readings of the If. For Hazoum, the core meaning of all signs is comprised in the If system. The Yoruba If system, older and more complex than the better-known I-Ching, is the language through which gods communicate with men. The two hundred and fifty-six possible combinations of its sixteen main books and the countless proverbs and poems related to each possible outcome contain the complex Yoruba world-view. If, as well as a healing and divination system, is also a philosophical system that shapes Hazoums ideas about art and the meaning of creativity. He considers the canvases central to his creative practice, not strictly paintings but evocations of another reality. In a way, the canvases are a slice of the present, readings and interpretations of a current situation, yet they resonate with the ancestral past. This synthesis of present and history appears yet again in the photographs and videos in the next rooms, which document the smuggling of oil from neighbouring oil-rich Nigeria into Benin.

Romuald Hazoum, Humain Ba (2009) Acrylic, cow dung and earth pigment on canvas, 126 x 170 cm Lete-Meji 1993, 140x200cm

Benin, poor in oil deposits, depends heavily on imported oil from Nigeria. The legal supplies of it, however, are very unstable. The multinational companies exploiting Nigerian oil export it mainly to other continents, and Nigeria paradoxically depends on oil imported at worldmarket set prices for its internal consumption, a situation that benefits companies and local government officials. Unemployment in both countries is very high, and people find their own way of benefiting and covering local demand by tapping illegally into the international oil plants pipelines and smuggling the fuel. The videos La Roulette Bninoise (2004) and La Bouche du Roi (2005) show how this Nigerian oil is transported into Benin by boat, bicycle, scooters and trucks by men and children known in Benin as the Kpayo Army. The jerry cans used to carry denatured oil or kpayo are riskly heated to extend their capacity to their maximum, then tied in enormous bunches. Men can carry up to fifty of these jerry cans in their battered motorcycles, their arms and faces barely visible, as most of Hazoums large photographs show. The titles of the photographs are playfully ironic, as in Twin Airbags (2004), a back shoot of two kpayo men on their motorbikes. Only by a fragment of the back wheels and a foot on the red dusty road can we recognize these giant balls of petrol containers as transport. It becomes clear that oil containers in Hazoums work are not just rubbish, they are a strong symbol of modern-day slavery, on-going exploitation and neo-colonialism.

Romuald Hazoum, Twin Airbags, (2004) C-type digital print, 80 x 120 cm 5

This is everyday life in Benin, where an extremely dangerous occupation that frequently claims lives provides the fuel on which 90% of cars run, but Hazoums concern is neither shock nor didactic rhetoric. The Kpayo Army documentation remains at portrait level, and does not fall into grimly media stereotypes of misery and strife in Africa that would call for a sense of commiseration for these poor nations that do not know how to rule themselves. La Bouche du Roi starts with shots of the colourful convenience stalls where the containers are sold, interspersed with images of arms and ankles covered in equally colourful beaded jewellery. This is a place where aesthetic sense is part of the everyday, where art happens regardless of institutional sanctioning. He does not reproduce images of famine, violence or horror, here life retains its dignity and force. Oil containers may end up as rubbish bins or turned into an accidental mask when run over by a truck, but acting as footballs or percussion instruments may also be part of their life-cycle. Oil and its forms are central to most of Hazoums work, and he is fully aware that the Beninese situation is not exceptional but part of a global situation We need to understand that we have the same problems all over the world on different levels. If one characteristic had to be found to define a common identity for a continent as vast as Africa, a prominent one could be the common experience of colonialism. Hazoum points at how colonialism is not over, it has just taken new shape in the form of multinational companies and market forces. The oil market rules life all over, this is a form of slavery we can relate to, a sort of common ground the artist refers to in the title to the large panoramic of a goat market - Market Forces: Better to Sell Meat than Men. Perhaps it is this establishing of a common ground that prevents us from a full descent into white-man guilt when confronted with the pervasive question of slavery in the works. The question of slavery and the masks and documentary works seem to come full circle in the installation Made in Porto-Novo (2009), or MIP for short, a four-piece jazz band accompanied by a sound installation. Oil containers cut and stapled together create the tall shapes of a saxophone, a trumpet, twin drums and a double bass. The music coming from these instruments is not the jazz we are familiar with. To make the sound piece, Hazoum recorded the sounds of an entire day while following different members of the Kpayo Army. The resulting music is powerful, striking and unusual, unmistakably rhythmic and African. Sound becomes the privileged means of description. The creak of a door, petrol pouring in, engines starting and coughing, the aggressive sound of a welding-torch and the songs of birds create an intimate map of the lives of the Kpayo men. Initially impressing as light and playful, it is difficult to tell what makes this work increasingly disturbing the fact that the sounds convey so much that the photographs do not, materializing and bringing closer people we can not see, or the darkly implied commentary on slavery. 6

Porto-Novo, Hazoums birthplace, was once one of the biggest slave-loading ports in the kingdom of Dahomey, present-day Benin, where Africans prisoners of local wars were sold by tribal chiefs and kings to European slave traders. This is not information most of us have, but even without knowing this, it is hard not to make the connection with slavery. The numerous gaping mouths of the cans evoke a tradition of collective music, but for this joyful activity to become the music we know as jazz, musicians had first to make the crossing into America, a crossing they did as slaves. It is not uncommon for jerry cans to be marked for identification, but the marks on two of the containers used in MIP stand out, NN and KK. Jazz is nowadays considered a somehow intellectual and refined type of music, paradoxically it comes from one of the most brutal activities businessmen were and are capable of. The contemporary sounds this particular jazz orchestra is playing are the sounds of contemporary slavery. And again, as in passing, Hazoum reminds us that Africa has had and has strong artistic forms, however convenient it has always been for the west to regard their culture as primitive.

Romuald Hazoum, Made in Porto-Novo (MIP), 2009 Found objects and sound installation , 450x250x250 cm.

Bricolage and myth-making, post-colonial, and Homi Bhabhas hybridity are a few of the concepts that I would feel tempted to invoke, but the works resist them. If post-modern identity is not unified and stable, but continually negotiated and marked by fluidity and flexibility, this does not seem to be what concerns Hazoum. His works remain specifically located in history and geography - identity is stated as a fact, not as an exploration or negotiation of a conceptual category. The readings are multiple and open. It is perfectly possible to elaborate on the relationship of Hazoums works to, for example, hybridity, but I think what Hazoum ultimately demands from us western viewers is that we change our perspectives. Instead of filling them with our discourses and theories, a more adequate response to the works seems to be partaking in their silence, remembering that knowledge has many voices, but understanding is silent. On the way out, Exit Ball seems to have transformed and acquired a new charge, an extremely heavy one that sets it far from just another conceptual sculpture.

Source

all

images:

October

Gallery,

(http://www.octobergallery.co.uk/artists/hazoume/index.shtml).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Irish Museum of Modern Art, Romuald Hazoum, Ireland: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2011. McEvilley, Thomas, Fusion: West African Artists at the Venice Biennale, New York: The Museum for African Art, 1993. Njami, Simon (ed.), Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2005. October Gallery, Artists, Romuald Hazoum (http://www.octobergallery.co.uk/artists/hazoume/index.shtml), accessed 10/04/11. Spring, Chris, Angaza Africa: African Art Now, London: Laurence King Publishing, 2008. Steward, Sue, Romuald Hazoums Petrol-Fumed Art , The Arts Desk (http://images.theartsdesk.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=435:romualdhazoumes-petrol-fumed-art&Itemid=29), accessed 07/04/11. White, Michael, Carrying the past into the present: Romuald Hazoum , La Bouche du Roi, 1807 Commemorated (http://www.history.ac.uk/1807commemorated/exhibitions/art/labouche.html), accessed 07/04/11.