Lawrie Shabibi's frst participation in 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair features a booth presentation of four artists: Nadia Kaabi-Linke (b.1978, Tunis), Mounir Fatmi (b.1971, Tangier), Driss Ouadahi (b. 1959, Casablanca) and Zak Ové (b. 1966, London) whose sculptural installation 'Black and Blue: The Invisible Men and the Masque of Darkness" in Somerset House Courtyard was one of the highlights of last year's fair and is now on permanent display in the African Galleries section in the British Museum.
Artists Exhibited
Nadia Kaabi-Linke is a Tunisian-Russian multi-media artist based in Berlin whose works are in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim, MoMA and Sharjah Art Foundation and has been shown at the Venice Biennale 54, Dallas Contemporary and Gulbenkian Museum amongst others. At 1:54 she presents two new works on canvas in addition to "Faces, 2014" a series of 32 photos of an archival image held at the KwaZulu-Natal Library that was staged for the Greater British Exhibition in London to create a fctitious Zulu family.
Mounir Fatmi is a Moroccan multi-media artist based in Paris. For 1:54 Fatmi presents "Maximum Sensation 52, 2010" (a skateboard whose surface is embellished with sections from Muslim prayer rugs) and "Forget, 2010" (a ceramic skull). Mounir has exhibited internationally including at the National Picasso Museum War & Peace, Le Parvis Contemporary Art Center, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, The Brooklyn Museum, New York, Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art and the Hayward Gallery in London.
Driss Ouadahi is an Algerian painter based in Dusseldorf who takes as his subject matter the built environment of urban alienation. For 1:54 he presents a new large-scale painting and a variety of works on paper that juxtapose historic sites in North Africa (such as the Great Mosque of Djenne and Taghit) with his typical geometric abstractions. Ouadahi has exhibited internationally including at the Biennale de l'Art Africain Contemporain, 11th Edition, Dakar, Senegal, 2014 (where he won the Grand Prix Léopold Sédar Senghor Prize) and Venice Biennale 54.
Zak Ové presents mixed-media sculptures inspired from his documentation of, and anthropological interest in, diasporic and African history, specifcally that which is explored through Trinidadian carnival. Zak Ové is based between London and Trinidad and works between sculpture, flm and photography seeking to reignite and reinterpret lost culture using new-world materials, whilst paying tribute to both spiritual and artistic African identity.
