\u201cLhola Amira: Facing the Future\u201d is scheduled to open Dec. 17 at the de Young Museum, in the second-floor gallery that houses the African Art Collection, where it will be on view for a year. The new exhibition, the artist\u2019s first in the United States, will engage with the museum\u2019s permanent African art collection through the lens of Amira\u2019s South African Nguni spiritual practices, specifically exploring the power of ancestors.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause we have this incredible collection, we can really center it as a site of creativity, innovation, experimentation, interest and engagement,\u201d said Becker, the museums\u2019 inaugural curator of African art. \u201cIn the arc of my career, I\u2019ve become very interested in artists who were mining their own culture for wisdom, aesthetics, developing their own practices and evolving that culture. It\u2019s exciting to bring these two things, the historical collection with contemporary artists, together.\u201d<\/p>\n
Becker said she chose Amira \u2014 who uses they\/them pronouns, with all capital letters in their own writing \u2014 because of their art\u2019s grounding in indigenous South African traditions, their emphasis on healing through the earth, and turning everyday objects and spaces into realms of the spiritual. Through all these facets, Amira often seeks to address the ongoing wounds of colonialism.<\/p>\n
\u201cWithin the collection itself, OUR work is asking questions of how history is made, held and accounted for,\u201d Amira told The Chronicle in an email. \u201cIt asks what interventions need to be happening to free and emancipate the captured within the objects that have been forced into the labor of exhibition artworks; it asks those looking to attend to what they are looking at and why.\u201d<\/p>\n
Amira, 38, describes themselves as an ancestral presence \u201cco-existing in the body of curator and academic Khanyisile Mbongwa, therefore using the capitalized pronouns THEY\/THEM\/THEIR in THEIR work and in conversation about THEIR plural existence.\u201d<\/p>\n
They were born in Gugulethu, South Africa, and are currently based in Cape Town. Amira\u2019s practice includes photography, video and sculpture, which they term a \u201cconstellation.\u201d As Mbongwa, they will be curating the 2023 Liverpool Biennale. As Amira, their residencies include the Sk\u00f6vde Art Museum in Sweden in 2017, the Jiwar Creation and Society residency in Barcelona in 2015, as well as at the Vasl Artists\u2019 Collective in Islamabad in 2010.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe intention with Lhola Amira is to turn the entire gallery into a sacred space,\u201d Becker said. \u201cThe artist will have their constellations within the gallery, but we\u2019re also bringing into alignment artworks about the ways in which different African cultures created a sacred space in the past.\u201d<\/p>\n
Among the work featured is Amira\u2019s new \u201cPhilisa: Zinza Mphefumlo Wami \u2014 or portal for spiritual reflection and connection.\u201d The Philisa constellation will be shown in conversation with the permanent collection\u2019s ancestor sculptures. It consists of a hanging ring of beads that viewers enter (which is fully accessible to all), candlelight, water pitchers and ceremonial salt bowls for cleansing.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe work is a contemplation, and a gesture on and for bodies and spirits that are not allowed to rest, that are consistently being put to labor through sustained acts of dispossession and displacement,\u201d said Amira. \u201cIt is also an acknowledgment of Black people not being containers of colonial and slavery violence \u2014 that our beings feel and cry and weep and hurt and exist.\u201d<\/p>\n
Also on view will be the single-channel video projection \u201cIrmandade: The Shape of Water in Pindorama.\u201d Following Amira\u2019s journey through Bahia, Brazil, the film is a response to \u201cthe woundedness of water, land and generations of descendants of enslaved peoples throughout the diaspora,\u201d according to the museum. Included in \u201cIrmandade\u201d is a scene showing a foot-washing ceremony by Afro-Brazilian women, a sacred ritual that symbolizes aspects of healing through ancestral connection.<\/p>\n
Among the museums\u2019 permanent holdings, Becker said, \u201cwe will highlight some of our sculpture and works that have to do with ancestors, the spiritual world and healing or communicating with the divine.\u201d<\/p>\n
The new contemporary African art program is the latest series by the Fine Arts Museums to explore the relationships between artists working today and the existing collection and museum architecture. In 2016, curator Claudia Shmuckli launched a new contemporary art series at the museums that has included notable interventions at the Legion of Honor Museum, like Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu\u2019s \u201cI Am Speaking, Are You Listening?\u201d in 2021. The costume exhibition \u201cGuo Pei: Couture Fantasy,\u201d by curator Jill D\u2019Alessandro, is presently on view, partly in the permanent collection galleries of the Legion.<\/p>\n
Fine Arts Museums director and CEO Thomas P. Campbell called the program \u201ctimely and relevant in its approach\u201d in a press release from the museums, and said that the exhibition will allow visitors \u201cto trace the trajectory of ancestor veneration from the 19th- and 20th-century figures in our permanent collection galleries to the new artwork that Lhola Amira has created specifically for the space.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI joined the museum just under two years ago because I could see this alignment between what\u2019s happening in the contemporary program Claudia built with what I proposed to do,\u201d Becker said. \u201cI love the challenge of working with the collection and I also have these wonderful relationships with artists that I can engage to be collaborators in doing this kind of work.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco announced that South African artist Lhola Amira will be the first exhibition subject of their new contemporary African art program, led by curator Natasha Becker.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12963,"featured_media":19134,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,12],"tags":[7,30,14],"class_list":{"0":"post-19137","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture","8":"category-entertainment","9":"tag-apie-project","10":"tag-culture","11":"tag-entertainment"},"yoast_head":"\n