On Thursday morning, 1-54, the art fair devoted to contemporary African and African diasporic art, has returned to New York, this time at Harlem Parish on 118th Street. The decommissioned church, which is now an art and event space, presents a stunning new home for this tightly curated affair, which has numerous stunning works on view.
Below, a look at the best on offer at the 2022 edition of 1-54 New York.
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Bertina Lopes at Andrew Kreps
Ahead of a showing of her work next January at its Tribeca gallery, Andrew Kreps (in a booth the gallery is sharing with Richard Saltoun) is showing two works by the Mozambican artist Bertina Lopes, who died in 2012 at 87. “Against the odds, she harnessed her innermost energies to produce a singular oeuvre that contributes to our understanding of the emergence of modernism in Mozambique as a nationalist aspiration,” art historian Nancy Dantas wrote in an essay on the artist, who relocated to Rome in 1964, for the Museum of Modern Art.
Though Lopes is known more for her explicitly political works produced between the 1950s and 1975, the year the country achieved independence from Portugal, the two pieces on view here (dated 1975 and 1977) are abstract. This aesthetic turn represents the joyful exuberance of independence from colonial rule achieved after a long arduous fight. Pulsating orbs made up of spiraling lines in various hues endow these works with an ebullient beauty.
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Yoan Sorin at espace d’art contemporain 14N 61W
How do you translate the sonic to the pictorial? That’s one question that artist Yoan Sorin’s installation at 1-54 is taking up. To do this, he has created hybrid paintbrushes to which he has affixed various small musical instruments like bells and tambourines. With these hybrid brushes, he then applies vinyl paint to tambourines, and in doing so, the canvas becomes a document of Sorin’s performative practice, giving a musical understanding of painting. Part of a series titled “À deux pas du silence” (A Stone’s Throw from Silence), these intimately sized works, mostly abstract in nature, are incredibly vibrant and pulsating. As the artist puts it in an accompanying statement, “‘À deux pas du silence’ is an ode to devious practices, side effects and derivatives of actions. À deux pas du silence, we cry out loudly or we begin to be silent. À deux pas du silence, we turn to what we love.”
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Abi Salami at Montresso Art Foundation
The Marrakech-based artist residency Montresso Art Foundation has two stunning paintings on view by Dallas-based artist Abi Salami. They each depict a napping Black woman, and are part of Salami’s ongoing explorations into “who is allowed to or encouraged to rest,” as the artist puts it. “Are Black women encouraged to do so in the way that white men are?” She pointed out that if you were to do a Google Images search of “spa day” or “self-care,” you likely would not easily find images of Black women at the spa. With her work, she hopes to change that narrative. In one painting, the Black woman appears to be at afternoon tea, perhaps with an unseen friend, but her head is on the table and she is dozing. She is so exhausted from life to even enjoy a moment of self-care. Behind her is a painting of a nude white woman, reminiscent of Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1534) or Manet’s Olympia (1863). The works are part of a series titled “I Don’t Want to Hear That You’re Suffering,” which further drives home Salami’s point that Black women are often asked “to suffer in silence.”
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David Uzochukwu at Galerie Number 8
Mystifying photographs from the 23-year-old Berlin-based artist David Uzochukwu made Galerie Number 8’s booth one of the most engrossing ones at this fair. In these digitally altered composites of several shots, the Austrian Nigerian artist presents scenes of Black people in water as a way to allude to the African diaspora’s ties to the ocean, in particular because of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The people here, however, are not shown suffering. Rather, they are Black merfolk, as Uzochukwu put during the preview, adding that it’s “a fantastical mirroring of the entanglement between Blackness and water.” Uzochukwu began working in this vein in 2015–16, around the time when migrants and refugees from Africa arriving in great numbers to Europe were given significant media attention. Uzochukwu took some of these images in Senegal, Berlin, and Thailand, as a way to create “a digital equivalent of a new geography.”
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Micah Serraf at International Studio & Curatorial Program
For a project titled “Hope Is a Dry Colour,” the New York–based International Studio & Curatorial Program has organized a solo presentation of Zimbabwe-born, Cape Town–based artist Micah Serraf, who is showing photographs and textile works. It is his photographs that are especially poignant. They depict African landscapes that are now restricted spaces, like a military base or a nature preserve that only the descendants of some 100 colonial families have access to. For Serraf, whose mother is of the Indigenous Shona people, these are places that he feels intrinsically, and genetically, connected to—he imagines that they are areas his ancestors once walked. Serraf said that because of his proximity to whiteness, he has been able to gain access to these restricted landscapes. When there, he felt an instant connection to places, comparing it to when a smell triggers a memory; in this case, it’s a recollection across time. In one image a figure is obscured by a parachute that Serraf had sewed by hand, relating it to the materiality of the tapestries of abstract landscapes that are also on view.