COMMITTED TO collaborative shows that enable Africa-based organisations with a focus on photography to gain a physical footprint in London, Into The Fold is a new exhibition of forty works spanning four decades of innovative practice by eight women photographers and creative practitioners.
From Angèle Etoundi Essamba’s hand-crafted intimate black and white silver gelatin prints, to more recent digital collages by Puleng Mongale, and elaborately constructed portraits created through lockdown by the collective Umseme Uyakhuluma with women from South Africa and the Ivory Coast, Into The Fold presents responses to identity, the body, self-knowledge, womanhood, colonialism, culture and the land.
The exhibition is a curatorial collaboration by two women-led organisations: Doyle Wham, the UK’s only contemporary African photography gallery, and Latitudes, a leading online platform for contemporary African art based in Johannesburg.
The earliest body of work is Angèle Etoundi Essamba’s groundbreaking series of vintage silver gelatin prints, sharp contrast black and white images of non-professional female ‘models’, who range from family members to friends and acquaintances of the artist, and women she has met on the street.
Developed by the artist in her personal darkroom between 1986 and 2002, the 18 prints on show are among the last remaining in Essamba’s possession.
Depicting the beauty of lustrous bare skin, or accessorising her subjects with swaths of fabric, traditional headwear, jewellery or body paint, Essamba’s portraits challenge stereotypical presentations of Black women to foreground the female narrative, reflecting on the cultural identity of the modern African woman.
Essamba was born in Cameroon, grew up in Paris and now lives in Amsterdam. She has exhibited extensively internationally in museums, galleries, biennials and art fairs around the world, and her works are held in many major collections.
Like Essamba, Puleng Mongale confronts stereotypical depictions of Black womanhood, in surreal digital images constructed from multiple self-portraits collaged with familiar and distant worlds; African rural and urban landscapes, the sea or domestic interiors. Mongale’s work re-imagines her history, exploring her maternal heritage and ancestral relationships, as well as taking inspiration from the Black, working-class women she encounters in everyday life.
Mongale’s creative practice is an act of personal and political reclamation, by inserting herself into scenarios that counter historically limited photographic portrayals of Black women.
Deeply personal explorations of the artist’s relationship with spirituality emerge in Mongale’s Spirit series, begun during lockdown, and which pay tribute to the importance of acts of remembrance, both ancestral and godly.
Born in Orlando East, Soweto, Mongale originally trained as a copywriter, turning to photography in 2019. Based in Johannesburg, she has exhibited in South Africa, Nigeria and Germany.
One of the first collaborative projects of its kind on the African continent, Umseme Uyakhuluma: A Celestial Conversation draws on the representation of the Black African woman and African storytelling across the continent and diaspora, anchored around myth, African spirituality and magic realism.
The work is a collaborative experimental video, photography and sound work led by creative director Zana Masombuka (aka Ndebele Superhero), with Lafalaise Dion, Tsholofelo Maseko, Mapula Lehong,Boipelo Khunou and Bontle Juku,five leading women creatives whose practices span photography, video, performance, design, editing and production, based in South Africa and the Ivory Coast.
Presented for the first time as a series of large format colour ‘performance prints’, and a sound and image installation Umseme Uyakhuluma follows two women artists as they go on a journey of creation, reawakening and remembering in response to a calling that has been silenced for centuries.
Directly translated ‘umseme uyakhuluma’ means ‘the straw mat speaks’, referencing one of Africa’s most ancient ways of recording information using grass, an endlessly renewable material.
The work utilises other references significant in African culture, such as the spiritual properties of cowrie shells, and Bantu, one of Africa’s most sacred languages.
Doyle Wham was created as a response to the lack of collaborative international infrastructure and exhibition opportunities for emerging and established African women photographers and artists.
Into The Fold takes place in a new pop-up gallery space on Villiers Street in central London.
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