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Latest items? Unedited? Fringe Report Uncut
ARTicle 14
Verdict: Ironic Beninese market
Art Exhibition
Article 14 is billed as a site-specific multi-media installation which attempts to recreate the experience of a street market in the African country of Benin.
For the most part, it seems to achieve this. The exhibit works well with the room housing it - a tall-ceiling room with high windows, in a vintage church-related building. The gallery's white walls meld into the washed-out, white sky in the panoramic, blown-up colour photographs of stalls at an actual Beninese market - augmented by an authentic sound-track. Completing the installation - and its focal point in the centre of the room - is a wheeled stall-cart.
But the exhibition misses a few tricks in providing the complete market experience - probably for reasons of feasibility. What would a visit to the real thing be like?. Would one be able to sit down and have a cup of coffee or some sweets? (The room next to the gallery looks like it was fitted-out to provide food and drink, but seems to have been converted to use as office space.) Would it involve being pestered by street traders? Certainly, it would involve purchase - some people might want to buy from the cart.
More seriously, the exhibition deviates from its stated goal — reproducing the experience of a Beninese market — by passing ironic comment. The stall carries things the real thing probably would not - discarded vacuum cleaners and old, obviously broken, computer hardware. The catalogue says this deviation makes comment on 'post-consumerism' - whatever that means. It says the exhibit is a criticism of state corruption in Africa.
Little of that may come across to someone in London who is not grounded in Africa or its artistic vernacular. The result does not enlighten. It leaves the viewer puzzled as to what is meant to be a realistic experience of a Beninese market-place - and what is an obscure reference to the abstract preoccupations of the artist.
Credits: Artist - Romuald Hazoumé
END
(c) Brad Hall 2005
reviewed Tuesday, 25 October 2005 / October Gallery
Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2012
www.fringereport.com
