|
For the occasion of the Shanghai Biennale, stage候台BACK is
pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of Bili Bidjocka in mainland
China. This exhibition includes performance, installation, video works,
drawing and sculptures.
For over two thousand years, many artists have been inspired by
The Last Supper, Christ's last meal during which the son of God delivered
his testament. There are thirteen people at the table, as if in a perfectly
staged play. With …Do Not Take It, Do Not Eat It, This Is
Not My Body…, the Cameroon artist is showing us some sort of
anti-Last Supper. A secular proposal in which God, in his Judeo-Christian
conception, is absent. The event—it is a better expression than
the word "show," which doesn't correspond to the theme at all—takes
place in two stages. We could describe it as a diptych. On the one
hand, it is a purely formal element: a bead curtain which, borrowing from
the Leonard da Vinci painting, represents a sketch, an abstract projection,
presenting us with an empty table. Christ and his apostles appear to have
deserted their places and we are left to wonder if it is not primarily a
temporal experience that we are facing. The table is empty as if it is
enough in itself. As if it doesn't matter if the meal took place before or
after. It is up to us to fill the haunted void. This void, which we know
represents the very essence of all spirituality: the omnipresence of
absence. Absence as an impossible idealisation, absence as a grip that is
lost forever and which will remain nothing but a memory. A naturally
truncated memory since only our despairing determination convinces us that
there is something to see. Absence as the symbol of a new epiphany.
This tableau's counterpart is a lively and carnal scene (the word
is used deliberately). A moment of physical presence, which the spectator
is invited to look at. In this lively tableau, it is the meal, and not its
abstraction, which marks the curtain's counterpoint. The curtain, in its
primary function, is reduced to a decorative element. A decorative element
overdetermining that the performance will try to contradict by playing, not
on the reference but on its contestation. The human becomes the centre of
any possible realisation, and the display as a whole represents this part
of the painting, which is so dear to the artist. Again, the meal itself is
not the goal. Everything lies in the process. The long road leading to the
final supper. There may be no supper. As in the curtain, we could have been
invited to imagine the time before and the time afterwards. However, since
the performance is the aesthetic and conceptual contradiction of the
curtain, the spectator has the privilege of seeing that which cannot
normally be seen, and will later say, as Rimbaud did, that they have seen,
some times, that which man believes he has seen. This carnal moment, this
moment of life, in the very sense of the term, undoubtedly holds the key to
the riddle presented by the title of this moment. It depicts the age-old
battle between God and humans.
This ontological experience,
which combines the secular and the sacred whilst humanising concepts that
have been lost, by dint of its meaning being mechanically repeated, reminds
us that sharing, in its simplicity and spontaneity, is what makes humanity.
A reminder which is greatly appreciated in these troubled times.
Written by Simon Njami, Paris 2012.
Bili Bidjocka has
attended numerous collectives and he has shown in the Biennale of
Johannesburg (1997), Havana (1997), Biennale Dakar (2000), Taipei (2004)
and Venice Biennale (inside Check List - Luanda Pop, 2007, curated
by Fernando Alvim and Simon Njami); he has exhibited his works in the New
Museum of Contemporary Art of New York and in the exposition Africa
Remix(Düsseldorf, London, Paris, Tokyo, Johannesburg,
2005–2007). He founded and directed the contemporary Art Center
Matrix Art Project in Brussels. He lives and works in Paris, France.
|
