Exhibition 2015/16

PROJECT FOCUS: CULTURAL DIVERSITY

ARTISTIC EXHIBITION: African market women as driving forces for Africa’s progress

Through this exhibition, AFRIEUROTEXT is paying homage to these women who (not only in Africa, but also in Asia, Central and South America, etc.) face their daily challenges with heart, courage and, above all, intelligence. Secondly, AFRIEUROTEXT makes these subjects, who have been made structurally invisible, visible. AFRIEUROTEXT is convinced that art is also part of the intellectual and scientific discourse about our world. Among other things, it is not just about making these subjects visible discursively, but about taking concrete action instead of speculating about Africa.

This exhibition is the final event of the AFRIEUROTEXT-project “intercultural learning and raising awareness on global asymmetries” 2015.  The Vernissage took place on Wednesday, November 25, 2015 at 7:00 p.m. in the Concordia Press Club, Bankgasse 8, Vienna 1010. The Vernissage was musically accompanied by the frenetic sounds of the xylophone by Mamadou Diabaté, the xylophone expert known throughout Europe and Africa, who enhanced the vernissage with his breathtaking xylophone performance. All the guests dared to do some dance steps. At the same time, the exhibition took visitors on a journey into the diverse culinary world of Africa: baked plantains with spicy grilled freshwater fish were offered for enjoyment.

The exhibition objects or subjects are painted pictures of market women and marketplace scenes on white canvas with acrylic paints. Colours that enter into a synesthetic dialogue with each other on these canvases and make the power of the market women visible and tangible. The pictures have names that are reminiscent of places in Africa. They draw attention to people who are on the move and who are trying to organize a world beyond fatalism using their own resources. The pictures in the exhibition naturally raise questions: political, social and cultural questions, questions of local and global power relations.

 

“I see Assukuma selling her vegetables on bare ground in the marketplace in Benjang,

and using the proceeds to feed and care for a large family.

I can still hear the pleading voices of those young and adult women,

who braved the darkness of the stations in the tropical forest at midnight,

armed with a flashlight, chanting:

Bananas, bananas, bananas…

Peanuts, peanuts, peanuts…

Cassava, cassava, cassava, five pieces for 100 francs cfa…”

(Excerpt from the novel Sanaga by Daniel R. Bitouh, which is currently being written)

Nevertheless, these women make sust contribution to society. A contribution that – for structural reasons – is mostly made invisible and remains undocumented. “Market women” is an all-encompassing term for a heterogeneous and complex reality in rural and urban areas in African countries. The exhibition aims to counter the stereotypical representation of market women as unsightly “objects” with images that recognize the women in their role as everyday heroes. The artistic works do not respond by maintaining homogenizing representations of the market woman, but rather depict a web of girls, young and old women with their own stories: they are orphans, married and unmarried women, widows, single parents. They are women who, for various socio-psychological and socio-political reasons, did not attend school or only partially attended. And it is these women who feed their large families, send their children to school and thereby build roads of hope. This is only one dimension of their diverse contribution to the development of the country and to peace.

The statistics of the one-sided logic of the international financial bodies (IMF, OECD and banks) do not record the economic organizational forms that these market women represent. It is anachronistically repeated that the contribution of the African continent to the overall world economy is only 2% to 0%. Such statistics ignore the fact that only the value of gold, diamonds, nickel, copper, coffee, cocoa and bananas is quoted on the stock exchanges, but not the 7 kilometres that a market woman has to walk every day in a rural area under the scorching sun to get to her manioc field.

The exhibition African market women as driving forces for Africa’s progress is the result of a year-long work by Daniel Romuald Bitouh and Nicole Binder. The pictures in the exhibition are unique pieces that are available for purchase. (see Presseclub Concordia, Bankgasse 8, Vienna 1010. Tel. 0043 153385730)

The AFRI-EUROTEXT association would like to thank

– the PRESSECLUB CONCORDIA (main cooperation partner) and Dr. Astrid Zimmermann, Secretary General of the Press Club Concordia

– at MAG 7 Science and Research Funding

– at the Art Section of the Federal Chancellery

– at the Afro-Asian supermarket PROSI

– at the employees of the AFRI-EUROTEXT project organization

for their diverse support.

AFRI-EUROTEXT would also like to thank the numerous visitors for the lovely evening, which brought great joy to everyone involved.

The finissage at the end of January 2016 will be at least as great. The exact date will soon be announced on the website afrieurotext.at. Until then, the exhibition images can of course still be viewed in the premises of the Press Club Concordia.

NB: All projects, texts and images of the AFRI-EUROTEXT initiative are protected by copyright.