ROMUALD HAZOUMÈ AT THE IRISH MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Romuald Hazoumè, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Royal Hospital, Military Road, Kilmainham,

Dublin, 09 February - 15 May 2011

The exhibition by artist Romuald Hazoumè, curated by Director of IMMA Enrique Juncosa

and Seán Kissane, Head of Exhibitions, is the first solo show by an African artist presented by the

Irish institution, following the museum’s program of inclusion of artists from the periphery.

Romuald Hazoumè lives in Cotonou and works in Porto-Novo, both cities in his native

Benin. Winner in 2007 of the Arnold Bodé Prize at documenta 12, he has gained increasing

recognition both in his country and in Europe over the past fifteen years. His most famous works

are his on-going series of masks made of found objects and discarded petrol canisters and the

installation La Bouche du Roi (2005) -unfortunately not part of this exhibition-, which consists of

three hundred and forty oil containers that replicate the English slave- ship Brookes.

The first indication of his presence in Dublin is a large sphere made of cut petrol containers

that stands in the middle of the museum’s courtyard. From afar, it looks like, well, nothing new.

The containers have been arranged so that the different colours of the marks made into the rough

black plastic are aligned, reminding of a football balloon, the world, overpopulation, solidarity, all

in the one planet . Other visitors who approach Exit Ball (2009) also seem irresistibly tempted to

touch it, perhaps because at first the only thing that makes this sculpture different from other

conceptual sculptures is the fact that its materials bear the imprint of actual African soil.

The walls of the first room of Hazoumè’s exhibition display some of his masks made of

found objects and jerry cans. The gaping spouts of the petrol cans suggest mouths, handles turn into

noses and the curves into facial features. Wires, cloths, and different found objects add the details.

Curled black wire turns a wide round jerry can into Citoyenne (Woman citizen -1997), an upside-

down watering can is an Autoportrait (1995). The titles -some French, some in English and some

in what could be Fon or Yoruba - can be playful, like Bye Bye (2009), the title that accompanies a

mask made of a toaster with a long old-fashioned black phone receiver for a nose, which the artist

made at the time Bush stepped down from office and lost his red hotline phone. Seemingly simple,

the masks look like portraits of contemporary African life, and manage to retain this illusion

without turning into obvious tricks. They appear initially as straightforward, after all, we assume we

are somehow familiar with African masks.

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Romuald Hazoumè, Citoyenne (1997)

Mixed media, found objects, 40x40x30cm.

Before Picasso and Braque turned their attention to them, mask-making had long been a

tradition of Yoruba people. Among the Yoruba - Hazoumè’s ancestry- masks are sacred objects,

and as such would have to be destroyed or hidden if having been used in an actual ritual. Genuine

sacred or ritual masks could not be made for a commercial purpose, masks made expressly for sale

to European collectors resembled the real ones, but these masks would never have been part of a

ritual or been consecrated. As Gerard Houghton points out in one of the essays included in the fully-

illustrated catalogue that accompanies this exhibition, Hazoumè’s masks can be seen as a teasing

commentary on the Western stereotype of the African mask, as recycled objects, as real-life

portraits, or as an indication of ‘the one thing it decidedly isn’t - an African mask’1. If they were,

they could not be displayed in the non-sacred context of a museum or gallery as works of art.

Hazoumè’s masks are inmediate and at the same time complex. They quietly comment on

the relationship between the west and contemporary Africa, where much of Europe’s junk enters

their largely second-hand market as ‘aid’. In his own words, Hazoumè makes new masks ‘with the

rubbish people send us from Europe, and I send them back to galleries with my culture inside

them’. Hazoumè’s disrupts the cycle of business between the two continents by returning waste to

where it came from changed into a commodity. The relationship with art is not left untouched, as

1 Gerard Houghton, ‘A Language to Behold’, Romuald Hazoumè, p.32

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the artist cleverly re-appropriates the African mask for his homeland. The gesture could be

interpreted as political, cynical or angry, yet it is not these emotions that the masks seem to be

communicating. The masks, in fact, invite our responses and interpretations, but they themselves

remain absolutely silent, as if they were utterly present in a dimension we cannot reach.

On his essay ‘Chaos and Metamorphosis’2, written for the catalogue of Africa Remix, the

curator and critic Simon Njami offers some insight into this silence. He asserts that in Africa voice

is the privileged means of expression, but creativity does not speak. This he sees as creativity’s

possible refusal to expose itself and take part in self-comment, to play by rules devised for and by

others. The west has long tried to decode African arts from and through its own point of view,

building up academic literature on the subject from the nineteenth century on, cataloguing and

labeling objects - while their creators still remained silent. Nowadays, according to Njami, some

African artists have unlearned to remain silent but many remain so, in both cases caring about their

work being seen but not about the labels attached to them. Even the ones that seem to have given in

to the required discourse, intimately know that some things should be left unsaid and that no

analysis can erase the meaning and origin of works. This silence is, for Njami, the best approach to

African creativity. ‘Everything starts and finishes with this silence’3. When asked why he makes

masks, Hazoumè’s answer seems to confirm Njami: ‘African artists, by definition, make masks, I

am an African artist, therefore, I make masks’4.

Following a traditional west-African mural technique, earth pigments mixed with cow dung

create a textured background in the four paintings in the second room. Over the background, a mix

with modern acrylics draws flattened geometric shapes, fluid lines and the outline of an animal. If

they belonged to the Suprematist or the abstract geometric tradition, we would have an idea of

how to approach these paintings. It is striking the way the vibrational energy of these canvases

communicates itself, yet it is hard to know how to read them and silence makes itself felt again.

Hazoumè himself does not even consider these canvases ‘paintings’ in our sense of the term,

nor does he consider himself an ‘artist’ in the western sense. He sees himself as an aré. An aré in

Yoruba culture is a traditional artist, but the concept includes characteristics that are not called

forth by the word ‘artist’. Cultural exchange is part of the aré’s tasks, and he is expected to travel

and settle among different peoples to enhance his skills and to transmit his own knowledge. He is a

respected representative of Yoruba culture, seen to embody spiritual, social and symbolic

knowledge.

2 Simon Njami (ed.),Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2005, pp.16,17

3 Ibid; p.17

4 Gerard Houghton, ‘A Language to Behold’, p.30

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The signs in his canvases come from African languages and scripts on which Hazoumè has

long had an interest. To understand each of them would require a deep knowledge of languages and

thought systems as varied as Zarma from Nigeria, Bamun script from Cameroon or Fante glyphs

from Ghana. The Yoruba writing and the marks at the bottom of the canvases refer to different

readings of the Ifá. For Hazoumè, the core meaning of all signs is comprised in the Ifá system.

The Yoruba Ifá system, older and more complex than the better-known I-Ching, is the

language through which gods communicate with men. The two hundred and fifty-six possible

combinations of its sixteen main ‘books’ and the countless proverbs and poems related to each

possible outcome contain the complex Yoruba world-view. Ifá, as well as a healing and divination

system, is also a philosophical system that shapes Hazoumè’s ideas about art and the meaning of

creativity. He considers the canvases central to his creative practice, not strictly paintings but

‘evocations’ of another reality.

In a way, the canvases are a slice of the present, readings and interpretations of a current

situation, yet they resonate with the ancestral past. This synthesis of present and history appears yet

again in the photographs and videos in the next rooms, which document the smuggling of oil from

neighbouring oil-rich Nigeria into Benin.

Romuald Hazoumè, Humain Ba (2009)

Acrylic, cow dung and earth pigment on canvas, 126 x 170 cm

Lete-Meji 1993, 140x200cm

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Benin, poor in oil deposits, depends heavily on imported oil from Nigeria. The legal

supplies of it, however, are very unstable. The multinational companies exploiting Nigerian oil

export it mainly to other continents, and Nigeria paradoxically depends on oil imported at world-

market set prices for its internal consumption, a situation that benefits companies and local

government officials. Unemployment in both countries is very high, and people find their own way

of benefiting and covering local demand by tapping illegally into the international oil plants’

pipelines and smuggling the fuel.

The videos La Roulette Béninoise (2004) and La Bouche du Roi (2005) show how this

Nigerian oil is transported into Benin by boat, bicycle, scooters and trucks by men and children

known in Benin as the Kpayo Army. The jerry cans used to carry denatured oil or kpayo are riskly

heated to extend their capacity to their maximum, then tied in enormous bunches. Men can carry up

to fifty of these jerry cans in their battered motorcycles, their arms and faces barely visible, as most

of Hazoumè’s large photographs show. The titles of the photographs are playfully ironic, as in

Twin Airbags (2004), a back shoot of two kpayo men on their motorbikes. Only by a fragment of

the back wheels and a foot on the red dusty road can we recognize these giant balls of petrol

containers as transport. It becomes clear that oil containers in Hazoumè’s work are not just rubbish,

they are a strong symbol of modern-day slavery, on-going exploitation and neo-colonialism.

Romuald Hazoumè, Twin Airbags, (2004)

C-type digital print, 80 x 120 cm

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This is everyday life in Benin, where an extremely dangerous occupation that frequently

claims lives provides the fuel on which 90% of cars run, but Hazoumè’s concern is neither shock

nor didactic rhetoric. The Kpayo Army documentation remains at portrait level, and does not fall

into grimly media stereotypes of misery and strife in Africa that would call for a sense of

commiseration for these poor nations that do not know how to rule themselves.

La Bouche du Roi starts with shots of the colourful convenience stalls where the containers

are sold, interspersed with images of arms and ankles covered in equally colourful beaded

jewellery. This is a place where aesthetic sense is part of the everyday, where art happens regardless

of institutional sanctioning. He does not reproduce images of famine, violence or horror, here life

retains its dignity and force. Oil containers may end up as rubbish bins or turned into an accidental

mask when run over by a truck, but acting as footballs or percussion instruments may also be part

of their life-cycle.

Oil and its forms are central to most of Hazoumè’s work, and he is fully aware that the

Beninese situation is not exceptional but part of a global situation ‘We need to understand that we

have the same problems all over the world on different levels’. If one characteristic had to be found

to define a common identity for a continent as vast as Africa, a prominent one could be the common

experience of colonialism. Hazoumè points at how colonialism is not over, it has just taken new

shape in the form of multinational companies and market forces. The oil market rules life all over,

this is a form of slavery we can relate to, a sort of common ground the artist refers to in the title to

the large panoramic of a goat market - Market Forces: Better to Sell Meat than Men. Perhaps it is

this establishing of a common ground that prevents us from a full descent into white-man guilt

when confronted with the pervasive question of slavery in the works.

The question of slavery and the masks and documentary works seem to come full circle in

the installation Made in Porto-Novo (2009), or MIP for short, a four-piece jazz band accompanied

by a sound installation. Oil containers cut and stapled together create the tall shapes of a saxophone,

a trumpet, twin drums and a double bass. The music coming from these instruments is not the jazz

we are familiar with. To make the sound piece, Hazoumè recorded the sounds of an entire day while

following different members of the Kpayo Army. The resulting music is powerful, striking and

unusual, unmistakably rhythmic and African. Sound becomes the privileged means of description.

The creak of a door, petrol pouring in, engines starting and coughing, the aggressive sound of a

welding-torch and the songs of birds create an intimate map of the lives of the Kpayo men. Initially

impressing as light and playful, it is difficult to tell what makes this work increasingly disturbing -

the fact that the sounds convey so much that the photographs do not, materializing and bringing

closer people we can not see, or the darkly implied commentary on slavery.

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Porto-Novo, Hazoumè’s birthplace, was once one of the biggest slave-loading ports in the

kingdom of Dahomey, present-day Benin, where Africans prisoners of local wars were sold by

tribal chiefs and kings to European slave traders. This is not information most of us have, but even

without knowing this, it is hard not to make the connection with slavery. The numerous gaping

mouths of the cans evoke a tradition of collective music, but for this joyful activity to become the

music we know as jazz, musicians had first to make the crossing into America, a crossing they did

as slaves. It is not uncommon for jerry cans to be marked for identification, but the marks on two of

the containers used in MIP stand out, NN and KK.

Jazz is nowadays considered a somehow intellectual and refined type of music,

paradoxically it comes from one of the most brutal activities businessmen were and are capable of.

The contemporary sounds this particular jazz orchestra is playing are the sounds of contemporary

slavery. And again, as in passing, Hazoumè reminds us that Africa has had and has strong artistic

forms, however convenient it has always been for the west to regard their culture as primitive.

Romuald Hazoumè, Made in Porto-Novo (MIP), 2009

Found objects and sound installation , 450x250x250 cm.

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Bricolage and myth-making, post-colonial, and Homi Bhabha’s hybridity are a few of the

concepts that I would feel tempted to invoke, but the works resist them. If post-modern identity is

not unified and stable, but continually negotiated and marked by fluidity and flexibility, this does

not seem to be what concerns Hazoumè. His works remain specifically located in history and

geography - identity is stated as a fact, not as an exploration or negotiation of a conceptual category.

The readings are multiple and open. It is perfectly possible to elaborate on the relationship

of Hazoumè’s works to, for example, hybridity, but I think what Hazoumè ultimately demands from

us western viewers is that we change our perspectives. Instead of filling them with our discourses

and theories, a more adequate response to the works seems to be partaking in their silence,

remembering that knowledge has many voices, but understanding is silent.

On the way out, Exit Ball seems to have transformed and acquired a new charge, an

extremely heavy one that sets it far from just another conceptual sculpture.

Source all images: October Gallery,

(http://www.octobergallery.co.uk/artists/hazoume/index.shtml).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Irish Museum of Modern Art, Romuald Hazoumè, Ireland: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2011.

McEvilley, Thomas, Fusion: West African Artists at the Venice Biennale, New York: The Museum

for African Art, 1993.

Njami, Simon (ed.), Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany:

Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2005.

October Gallery, Artists, Romuald Hazoumè

(http://www.octobergallery.co.uk/artists/hazoume/index.shtml), accessed 10/04/11.

Spring, Chris, Angaza Africa: African Art Now, London: Laurence King Publishing, 2008.

Steward, Sue, ‘Romuald Hazoumè’s Petrol-Fumed Art’ , The Arts Desk

(http://images.theartsdesk.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=435:romuald-

hazoumes-petrol-fumed-art&Itemid=29), accessed 07/04/11.

White, Michael, “Carrying the past into the present: Romuald Hazoumè , ‘La Bouche du Roi’, 1807

Commemorated” (http://www.history.ac.uk/1807commemorated/exhibitions/art/labouche.html),

accessed 07/04/11.

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