Mauritania's memories in movement
It is clear that Africa is undergoing a process of effervescent modernisation and that, despite all the turbulence that is shaking the continent, new generations are emerging who are called upon to promote its development in all fields.
Art is part of this knowledge that incorporates Africa into avant-garde movements. Based on this reality, it is a milestone that eleven contemporary artists from Mauritania are coming together in Madrid for the first stop of the exhibition 'Memories in Movement, Contemporary Art from Mauritania'. Sponsored by Casa Árabe and Casa África, the exhibition hangs at Casa Árabe's headquarters in the Spanish capital, where it will remain until next May, before coming first to Cordoba and then to Las Palmas in September.
"I wish it could continue its itinerary through other European countries", the exhibition curator, Aicha Janeiro, herself a tenacious scholar of popular traditions in the poetics of contemporary Mauritanian art, as well as a famous singer-songwriter, tells me. Almost two metres tall, this slim and beautiful woman, who specialises in Arab and Hebrew cultures, was born in Bamako (Mali), of Portuguese and Mauritanian origin, and who completed her studies at the Complutense and Granada Universities. With her we contemplate selected works by Mamadou Anne, Oumar Ball, Zeinab Chiaa, Daouda Corera, Malika Diagana, Béchir Malum, Saleh Lo, El Moctar Sidi Mohamed "Mokhis", Amy Sow, Mohamed Sidi and Moussa Abdallah Sissako.
An exhibition that, as Aicha Janeiro explains, explores memories - personal, collective or cultural - and how they are manifested in the processes of creation in the contemporary artistic movement in Mauritania. These are works that refer to memories from the childhood or adolescence of their creators, to everyday life, to characters from Mauritania's collective memory or to different symbolic elements and the thinking that underlies them.
As Irene Lozano and José Segura, general directors of Casa Árabe and Casa África, respectively, point out in unison, for some years now we have been witnessing the revisionist and questioning spirit of the traditional canon that has been permeating art historiography. The story is now written in the plural, and windows have been opened onto geographies and cultural spheres hitherto located outside the North Atlantic space, which it will no longer be possible to close. The exhibition thus contributes to bringing the spectator, the passer-by or the curious person eager to learn about artistic practices that are not common in galleries, museums or art fairs in Europe.
Many of the artists included in the exhibition were born, trained or live in Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, founded on the eve of the country's independence from France in 1960. A very young capital, but one that already enjoys an intense cultural life, with spaces in which the works now exhibited in Madrid hang. Many of its artists have already crossed borders individually, and have shown their art in Senegal, Morocco, Tunisia, France and Spain itself. But this is the first time that they have done so collectively, showing in their very select collection an enlightening panorama of an art that has burst forth with the impetus and strength of the African continent itself.