Africa-Press – Angola. “We, Os Do Makulusu” is the title of the joint work by Angolan artists Nelo Teixeira and Hamilton Francisco “Babu”, which has been on display since Thursday at the new website of the Espaço Luanda Arte (ELA) gallery, in the capital.
The contemporary art space, with more than seven years of existence, was closed for two years, due to the pandemic, and reopened its doors to the public with a new address, now located in the Cunha & Irmão warehouse, on Rua Alfredo Troni, downtown. from Luanda.
The exhibition, a work of art made on cotton paper, is inspired by the homonymous literary work by José Luandino Vieira, written in 1967, when he was imprisoned in the Tarrafal Concentration Camp, on the island of Santiago, in Cape Verde.
The exhibition’s producer, curator and gallery owner, Dominick Maia Tanner, said that the exhibition seeks to show Luandino Vieira’s utopian perspective of an Angolan nation free from colonial power, but based on the sum of traditional knowledge and that acquired with the experience of modernity. . “A post-colonial society, which is a permanent battleground between factors of maintenance and change”, he said.
For Dominick Maia Tanner, the show is a vision of the traditional and the modern, in a city in constant change. “This is what happens when you travel through Luanda and, in this crossing, you have access to avenues, main streets and the most hidden alleys, through a point of view that allows panoramic, sometimes microscopic views of the colonization process”, he explained.
This point of view, he explained, was the basis of the “duet” between Nelo Teixeira and Babu, two artists now living in the diaspora, but united by friendship and by the experiences, often suffered, in the streets of Luanda.
“The starting point is a book, whose work was recreated through some matrices and artisanal serigraphs, printed on cotton paper, to allow the public to travel alongside these two artists on a journey through the streets of Angola”, he highlighted.
In the exhibition, in a tone of nostalgia and simultaneously of hope, the artists projected worked images of better days for Angolans. “The idea is that ‘We, Os Do Makulusu’ could give way to ‘We, Os De Angola'”, he said.
The exhibition, which is open until the 30th of April, can be visited by the public from Tuesday to Sunday, from 12:00 to 20:00.
Authors
Carpenter and self-taught artist, Nelo Teixeira was born in Mbanza Kongo, Zaire, and has been working with recycled material, due to his uncle’s influence. Since the 1990s, he has been a member of the group “Os Nacionalistas” and a member of the National Union of Plastic Artists (UNAP) .
Hamilton Francisco “Babu” studied industrial design at the Manauto 2 Training and Technology Center in Luanda. He moved to Portugal where he continued to study various painting techniques. He currently works as a visual artist in the Museums in the Center project, in Coimbra. Among the individual exhibitions, three stand out in 2014: “O Diário Comum”, in Aveiro, “Pop Story”, in Coimbra, and “A Revolta do Atlas”, in Lisbon. The artist also participated in the residency “Jovens Artistas Angolanos”. In March 2016 he presented the exhibition “Frágil”, at Galeria Tamar Golan, in Luanda.
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