Blog | Peter Kalu

Ankeli’s paintings vary in size from A4 landscapes to metre x metre plus squares. They are predominantly acrylic on canvas, often incorporating lightweight ‘found objects’. The prices range from 150 pounds to just under two thousand pounds. The exhibition runs till 2 Dec 2018. Townships and streetscapes have become a standard of the African painting market. Where are Ankeli’s located? Architectural and street life tropes in his works suggest the setting is more likely Lagos than the north Nigeria of Ankeli’s birthplace. I have a variation on the street life painting view – a narrow painting of yellow buses in traffic, by the artist, Sokanu, on my wall. They are popular subjects. What appeals in them? I visited the district of Mushin in Lagos years ago. The roadside there is full of noise from a thousand sources, the air blows up with scents and smoke, there is a chaos of movement especially in rush hours. Painting mutes all audio and movement and allows the mind to home in and contemplate the visual. In Ankeli’s paintings, the housing assumes a more symmetrical aspect, boosting both the geometric patterns and the colour harmonies that you miss when in the thick of the scene. Ankeli’s ‘scapes have vibrancy and an upbeat symmetry. The colours: brightly lit old blue, strong orange, deep rust and traffic light yellow, all work in harmony; ultimately the painting feels like a panoramic vista that someone nostalgic for urban Nigeria might want to acquire. Another painting in the exhibition – and there are variations of this type on display – is the Couple painting. It is clearly mixed media: gauzes, ribbons, rope or string, tubing, threads, other small found materials applied to enhance, compliment or integrate with the basic acrylic paint marks. Found objects have a sympathy for lost people, the poor and downtrodden. Ankeli’s paintings of this type are not anarchic or full of revolutionary zeal – he does not depict politicians’ heads lopped off, there is no Basquiat sloganizing, no roughly framed, invocation of chaos. My thoughts drifted to Nigeria’s constitutional situation and history. The police, the army, the judiciary, the press, the role of president. You can tilt at a society with established institutions more easily than one whose institutions are fragile. And yet. If you take to Nigerian twitter, you can hear the healthy, democratic clamour of criticism and judgement of govenments and corporations alike. Ankeli’s intervention is more metaphysical or symbolic than political; his work suggests an essential dignity in all human beings no matter their status or circumstances. And you can read that line (and the art) how you wish. None of the powers that be in Nigeria would have their hackles raised by seeing Ankeli’s mixed media art work on their walls: its political content is sufficiently ambiguous or latent to elude official opprobrium. One aspect I loved to this work was the elusiveness of the human narrative. Step too close and you don’t see the figures within this painting. Step back three metres and they suddenly become apparent, two faces outlined using an African figurative/symbolic language: the narrow line for the nose, the small o for the mouth. Zoom to extreme close-up and you see what might be interpreted as scarifications, blisterings, markings, repairs; the Japanese kintsugi tradition (of broken pottery repaired by gold) came to my mind as I looked this way. There is an Africanity to the head shapes that reminds me in its silvery/bronze metallic sheen of female Ibo masks, of the wood masks of Kwele of Gabon, and the masks of the Guro of Ivory Coast. It got me thinking, as I looked, as to why my mind jumped to masks. The answer arrived that maybe painting is not an ancestral African art: to chance a sweeping statement, masks and sculpture are predominant historically in (West) African societies. From there I wondered how this Western form (painting) is adapted to African conditions, where it finds its home(s). Painting as far as I know is not used/adopted as part of ceremony or ritual nor has it become an aspect of court art, and it appears not to be present to any great extent as part of everyday life. My mind drifted back. I was in Nigeria visiting relatives last year and, as you do, glanced at their walls as I went around. Lots of framed photographs of their children( the older ones where fortune had smiled on them, in mortar board and graduation gowns), older frames holding the elders of the family, sometimes in the black and white prints of gone times. Going around Manchester, UK, visiting friends, I have a similar experience. Photos of family adorn mantlepieces. Perhaps a few prints in Ikea frames make it up – New York, a lush tree, some Rothko-inspired blocks of colour. Occasionally there is a rarer print on a feature wall; in Black British houses, it might be something showing positive, strong, elegant black women with a rootsy yet modern African feel; or if the home is that of a loved-up couple, then a black romantic pairing under the wing of a swan or some other such gentle, protective, image, symbolically holding love in the house while the occupants go out to their nine to five. You get the gist. In both locations, no original art work. Why? An original painting is expensive compared with a print. And...

Death of a Salesman, RX, Manchester 2018: Review by Pete Kalu

Death of a Salesman Review by Pete Kalu (including a reflection on colour-blind casting) I saw Arthur Miller’s theatre play, Death of a Salesman on 2 November 2018 at Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester. Most of the cast were black in this version, including the main character, Willy Loman. Don Warrington is superb as Willy Loman. If one of Loman’s attributes is charm, then Warrington exudes this effortlessly. Really. I’d buy any used car off the guy when Don-as-Willy goes into charm mode. Flickers of Warrington’s debonair Rising Damp sit-com persona, Philip, come into my mind as I watch the early scenes. And this is what interested me, phenomenologically, about Death of a Salesman. Arthur Miller once said the play was originally going to be called The Inside of his Head, and the play’s remarkable in the way it shuffles time and shows the presence of the past – of memory – in present, intense consciousness. Which brings me to myself as a black member of the audience, watching this colour-blind casting: what goes on inside my head while watching Don Warrington play Willy Loman? First, the utter brilliance of Don Warrington. He delivers that mash of charm and bewilderment, of flattering, deluded hope, rage, tenderness, machismo, inarticulate love, the whole kaboodle of aching contradictions that make up Willy Loman. It’s delivered with aplomb, fabulously assisted by a talented cast – it’s no easy gig playing in RX’s theatre-in-the-round, and the RX team made it work, and some. But back to inside my head and colour-blind casting. What knocks around my skull when I watch Don play Willy? First the ‘doubling’ of the action. Here is a life lived as if racism did not occur in the America of the 50’s in which Death of a Salesman is set. It’s a huge what-if that smokes its way all through the performance, a form of alternative history or shadow play: what would it have been like if there had been no racism in America at the time? Could a black man have been able to get Willy Loman’s job, and have a family life as saccharine, as idyllic (at least in memory) as Willy Loman remembers his? Running alongside this stream of thought throughout, is its reverse: the thought that this play could only have been written by a white man. Only a white man would not comment upon the effect of race on a man’s prospects. I remember seeing Blues for Mr Charlie by James Baldwin in the same theatre. Baldwin would never have written Salesman. Which doesn’t make Salesman a lesser play. Not at all. But it brings to mind the meaning of white privilege: White Willy Loman could aspire to be the boss of the firm, whereas a black man knocking on that firm’s door would not even have got a foot on its lowest rung. And then mingling with these two cross-currents of thought comes the wider, existential tragedy at the deep end of the play. Willy Loman kills himself. Even with the benefit of the privilege of being white in a racialised society like America at a time when whiteness was the assumed universal, Willy still found life unbearable. It invites us to think of the absurdity of life, whoever we are, wherever we are. What Albert Camus in L’Etranger called ‘the benign indifference of the universe’ smacks Willy Loman in the face. Smacks us all. Remorseless, indifferent Time finishes us all off sooner or later. It’s this last point that makes the play talk to anyone, everyone. So much for the big thoughts. Sticking with the phenomenological approach, another less abstract yet still parallel stream of thought I experienced while watching the play runs: how much are they paying this genius of an actor? Fame and fortune are arbitrary. Don Warrington was unsurpassable as Philip in Rising Damp. Here in Salesman, he shows that was no fluke. His talent endures. I have no idea if the man is loaded or broke – whether this gig he’s doing is a hobby or a financial necessity. Such is the life of an artist. Then a more social stream of thought runs through here somewhere too. It goes: there are relatively few black people in the audience – why? When I go into a theatre or any other large space, I always scan for how many black people are around. Very few tonight. Theatre has always been claimed by a discourse that separates high art from low art. The arts council of Britain was set up in 1946 to foster ‘theatre, music and painting’. The sociologist Bourdieu famously expounded on how class markers are expressed through ‘taste’; knowledge of and attendance at the theatre is one of those markers. It amused me that on the night I went to see Death of a Salesman, there was a large sign in the theatre foyer, saying ‘Manchester Wine School’. You can’t get a better signifier of aspiring middle-classness than that! I laughed. Almost out loud. A theatre across town called Contact, tackled the problem of theatre’s class-based, virtue-signalling associations head-on by abolishing the word theatre from their title. It’s not Contact theatre they tell you, it’s Contact. All this is not to say I don’t like theatre or other forms of ‘high art’. I attended a ballet only last week (La Fille Mal Gardee at The Lowry since you ask). There...

Rhythm: Exhibition of visual art works by Akinyemi Oludele. Review by Pete Kalu

Rhythm: An exhibition of Akinyemi Oludele’s work is taking place at The Horsfall, Great Anocats Street, Manchester city centre, and runs until 22nd September 2018. There are three floors of works, approximately eighty exhibits in all. The work divides roughly into three types. One: Musicians On the first floor are drawing of scenes featuring musicians, set in bars, clubs and music events. If Degas worked often behind scenes, painting ballet dancers and circus artistes as they warmed up, Akin works in front of the scene, the angle of perspective suggesting he is right there among the crowd, in front of the band. The predominant medium is charcoal on paper, and the works capture the musical movement, the rhythm and flow before him. In these charcoal drawings, the distance in time and space between painter and the subject reduced close to zero, the artwork becoming a vibe translated in real time, and surviving long after the music stops. We don’t have the music when we view the pictures, but we feel it. Oludele eschews here any attempt at capturing likenesses. This is not portraiture. While the figures are not anonymized, neither are they highly personified. This is the artist as a channelling medium, a shaman, working while under a form of possession, being carried away by the music or by the spirit that underscores the music. One effect of the choice of charcoal markings for these works is a substantial erasure of distinction between black and white bodies, a suggestion of the coming together of the entire population of Manchester under the groove of the musicians – all is synchronised silhouette. If the typical 18th century painting scene might suggest by the richnesss of costume and the iconic presence of a globe and perhaps a horse or early piano that the subject is saying, this is who I am – see my wealth, my dominions, my power – then Oludele’s chiaroscuro-like charcoal drawings work in a similar manner: they say, this is what Manchester is, this is what we are about. We aspire, not to wealth and adornment, but to creative collaboration on an equal footing. The work also suggests a sense of art as a communal act – the artist not separated from the people but among them, one of them. Two: Expressionist works On the ground floor of the Horsfall are predominantly Expressionist works. If the Expressionist school was concerned with externalizing the mood and emotion within the artist, then it is necessarily a more intense and individual experience. Most of these works are on artboard. Some are small board works placed together in fours or threes: clusters of oblong panels, giving a feel of the panelling of church reredos or the triptychs around altar screens, or, in the metaphor of music, chords – different notes coming together to create a single effect. These expressionist works are highly energised. The oil, acrylic, pastel and ink marks are applied and modified by scratchings, etchings, blottings, smoothing, palimpsest and blurrings, using implements that may have been sticks, needles, knives, feathers as well as the humble brush. The energy of the line is more Basquiat than Kandinsky and there is often a verticality in the movement of the Work, an arrowing up. There are glimpses of the representational within these pieces: African features appear in the curve of a lip or the shape of a nose, but the general fluidity bypasses representation for mood and conjures up causeways, routes, journeys, diasporan energy: these works elevate movement, are anathema to stasis. Three: Giclee Prints On the top floor are some Giclee prints. Drawn (I assume) at a screen rather than on physical material, they are more sculpted pieces. The work named ‘Salon’ shows women in a hair shop; we see the window light flooding in, the women inside, the work on hair going on by the staff, a waiting customer on a mobile phone. It is a highly recognisable slice of daily life image, yet not a prettification. It works well with the Giclee print in the same room, ‘Birth of Venus’ which reworks Botticelli’s image of the white, European woman stepping from a scallop shell. In Oludele’s version, this ideal of beauty is overthrown. ‘Band’ is another impressive Giclee print that, in its counterpointing of black and white, in the rhythm of the shapes made, perhaps echoes the playing of the base guitarist, trumpeter and keyboard musicians which it features. Its vibrant, confident colours, it daring angularity, the gelede mask shapes of the musicians’ faces, all come together in a sense of celebration, in veneration of spirits old and praise of spirits new. The exhibition work as a whole is testament to the hybridities, Africanities and fluidities of the music scene, and of the wider diverse communities of contemporary post-colonial Manchester, UK. It is well curated, the art smartly displayed in arrangements, contexts and juxtapositions that let each piece breathe. Oludeles’s deep grasp of African and European aesthetic traditions, and his unique sensibility combine to produce a magnificent exhibition that announces the arrival of an artist of astonishing range and formidable talent. Until 22nd September 2018 at The Horsfall: 87-91 Great Ancoats Street, Manchester city...

Play Review: Hamlet, at The Lowry, Manchester, UK, Jan 2018, by Pete Kalu

This youthful, bleak, exuberant Hamlet is played with panache and at full tilt. The set design is two parts West African court, one part Basquiat. Live African master drummers bring a stormy atmosphere to proceedings at court. The cast is predominantly black. It’s a black Hamlet. I used to think it’s a bizarre play, Hamlet, because nothing much happens yet it somehow grips. Essentially a young man thinks of killing his step-father for three hours. Paapa Essiedu’s Hamlet does not so much illuminate the play as set fire to the stage, and makes transparent that the play’s grip is all in its psychological narrative – the torment, rage and grief – the hell Hamlet is trapped in. Imagine having to face your father’s killer every day, and he’s sleeping with your mum too – wrong on so many levels! Paapa Essiedu is a real star turn – I can’t believe he will not go on to be a king of stage and film and I felt privileged to see him perform on Wednesday at The Lowry. I’ll be able to look back and say, “I was there!” I watched in awe. He seemed so supple in movement and in voice, so contemporary, alive, pacing, sauntering, sharing space with and yet on another plane to the other actors, the characters around him, as he is meant to be – it’s his play. He’s a young Hamlet. Essiedu’s vocal control and range, his informal, sinuous bodily flow, his sneering disdain, his juvenile jests – the timing he lands every time, his whiplash wit, his almost wilful beckoning of hot insanity to come take him – anything is better than the cold hell he is in – all feed into this whirl who works the stage like a man possessed, like some Orisha has descended upon him and is inhabiting him. Inspired and tortured. Blazing. Watching his youthful burn and torment, it struck me Hamlet is a play that speaks so well to the hot topic of mental health and young people. Enough about Hamlet. The stage was blessed with many superb performances. Mimi Ndiweni’s Ophelia is a multi-faceted gem – solicitous with her father, endearing, tender even in her manoeuvrings around Hamlet. Her harrowing disintegration after the death of her father is painful to the max. Tanya Moodie’s Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, combines haughtiness and conniving with a surprising warmth. Clarence Smith’s Claudius, the murdering step-father is magnificent – his pragmatist, realpolitik reasoning simultaneously repellent and utterly convincing. The grave scene, done with a West African inflection, is rip-roaringly funny, testament to the impression I got that even the bit part actors such as the grave-diggers had serious acting...

Very short review of The Granta Book of the American Short Story 1992 (republished 1998). Pete Kalu

This is a 710-page collection of 43 stories chosen by editor, Richard Ford. It has a thought-provoking introduction by Ford, that meditates on the evolution of the short story genre. The intro ends with the rousing declaration that the stories ‘do the best for us that fiction can do. Now, read.’ So read I did. It’s an enthralling kaleidoscope. How ‘American’ is it? What slowly became apparent to me was this sense of a literary nation back in 1992 confident in its whiteness. The white writers hardly see any other races. The latter are not so much side characters as peripheral or invisible. That was 1992. It’s taken 25 years for ‘diverse’ people to move from peripheral to side, then to close side. And the progression over the next 25 years I expect will be from close side to central. By central I mean to be depicted not as exotified beings, nor used to “provid[e] local colour”, as Morrison puts it in her essay, Playing In The Dark, nor as moral backdrop for white characters, another of Morrison’s barbed apercus. The point at which we become central will also be the the point at which white readers read black authors as a matter of good civics for sure, but also because they understand the world, including the world of the imagination, is shared by all and not owned by a...

Ekua Bayunu Re:Birth exhibition 500 word review by Pete Kalu

Ekua Banuyu’s ReBirth is showing at Chuck Gallery, Manchester, UK from 14th January 2018. There are a number of works in the exhibition, including 2D paintings, plinthed 3D figures, a video installation and a glass cage of curios. I looked primarily at the three women sculpture named Okoh Women Series – see photo. The three women are dressed in African wax print fabrics. I’ve seen such fabric worn in Nigeria to weddings, thanksgivings and public celebrations. – they are not rare garments, but neither are they workaday clothes. The women look mobile – as if dancing, though perhaps I am influenced by the video installation showing the artist herself dancing. The faces on the three figures are individually distinctive but not individuated: they appear archetypal or ancestral; to my eyes they have in form something in common with the Yoruba Gelede masks I studied when researching for a Carnival band one year. Again, the context may be influential. Around them are other, free-standing figures, soaring from steel-looking plinths that have more classical African mask images embedded in the plinths, almost as guardians. In contrast, the three women have an aura of modernity. They are celebrating what? I wonder. There are three women. Why three? Two is an intimacy. Three is a group. So this is an expression of a group, some joy between them or symbolised through them. Then the thing of surprise. They are standing on slate. Welsh slate, to my eyes. The northern rooftop material. Not only slate, but reclaimed slate – it still has the old holes where the original clout nails were knocked in and subsequently yanked out. And this does something. It locates these women in Northern England, slate being part of the vernacular of the Northern English landscape. And I find myself imagining a roof somewhere in the North under which perhaps these women might have danced. And looking at them, I’m thrown to memory – of how often on a grey day in Manchester I’ve been cheered by visiting a West African home, most times not luxurious, often that of someone or some family struggling to make ends meet. But the irrepressible African spirit would be there, under that grey rooftop. It is the reclaimed slate the figures stand on that brings this installation into the Here and Now, that speaks of Diaspora. The slate pulls in all the standard UK iterations and folk memory of art that evoke a narrow, white Englishness – from Lowry to Constable to Turner – and layers onto this base of grey the three African women’s vibrancy, their colour and vigour. It is a juxtaposition that brings the piece from technical excellence to wonder, making the art grounded and of its time, yet also radical, and timeless in its beauty. Chuck Gallery is at 166 Plymouth Grove, Manchester M13 OAF and www.chuckgallery.com More about Ekua Bayunu can be found at http://www.ekuabayunu.com/...