Artist Statement Nia Hampton
How to Make an Image of Africa
How to Make an Image of Africa features two video works, one digital textile printing and a series of postcards to comment on tourism and image making specifically in the West African country of Senegal. Since being back Stateside from traveling to Senegal, I’ve been told that my photos are enchanting, mysterious and anthropological. I’m shocked when someone asks if the people in my unedited image are waiting for a boat to take them to Italy. In candidly capturing a community in an ordinary moment of sea gazing, and then editing it for Instagram consumption, I unintentionally contributed to a canon that renders Africans as props. In researching the history of Senegal, I became aware of who and what has been sacrificed for this ideal representation of a stable West African country. This has influenced me to make my entire candidacy semester show an investigation of my own artistic decisions as a black artist who makes work about the diaspora. I often feel an overwhelming responsibility to show Africa and its diaspora as worthy and respectable, even if it means manipulating the truth of the geopolitical circumstances. In an attempt to grapple with my own guilt about my practice I lean heavily into satire throughout this show.
Wish You Were Here is a series of satirical postcards featuring my original photography from Gorée Island, Dakar, Senegal, to convey the absurdity of making the largest slave trading center from the 15th to the 19th century into a tourist attraction. This series is partially inspired by Awol Erizku’s Girl with a Bamboo Earring1 because I’m appropriating a widespread Western medium of image making; the postcard, in the same way that Awol’s work appropriates the oil painting portraiture style of the great Dutch masters. Through the use of the cliche tourist line “I went to [insert country] and all I got was [insert souvenir]” I expand on a mix of profound and mundane occurrences that are relevant to my experience on the island and the controversial legacy it holds as an institution. One postcard mentions the anti-imperialist activist Omar Blondin Diop2 whose life was taken by the Senegalese state on Goree Island in retaliation for challenging the neo-colonialist reign of “postcolonial” President Leopeld Sedar Senghor3 in 1975.
Jigeen, Gestu (Woman, Research) is an experimental video composed of clips from my Wolof language classes and footage I managed to record on my trip despite not speaking Wolof or French. Much of the footage is taken from the back seat of a taxi which reinforces my position as a tourist in Dakar. It’s an attempt to share the variety of landscapes and activities in Dakar and give the viewer a taste of the motherland that many Black Americans crave.
Nothing but Peace (Jammreik) is a digital image printed on fabric and partially framed. This photo taken by me, an artist-researcher on my third day in Dakar, Senegal conveys the implicit bias of my photography training. It is a classically beautiful image by Western standards taken from the gaze of a tourist. Inside the frame, the photo is serene and harmonious, encapsulating the rule of thirds. A matte gray sky contrasts the dark blue shirts on African men who surround a woman holding her child dressed in traditional Islamic garb the color of marigolds. We can’t tell where these people are from but we know it’s different and mysterious. This absence of context invokes orientalism4, which according to Edward Said is the often racist or romanticized stereotypes that perpetuate views of Eastern people as inferior, subservient and in need of saving via Western colonialism and imperialism. Hanging outside of the frame is more information about the reality of this photo; a woman in a green striped dress gazing into a cell phone, her hair uncovered - a small boy with a plastic sword - a black bookbag - the forehead of a man standing incredibly close to the camera phone on which this photo was taken. These elements betray the mystery of the community I captured via a camera phone, which in my attempt to share this image digitally on Instagram was forced to crop out. The result was a sanitized and mysterious image of a beach day in Dakar that on the surface appears stable and serene. I leave the image unedited and partially framed to make the frame a topic in and of itself. I’m inspired by Bansky’s take on the Gleaners5 in which the frame becomes a part of the work because I can’t uncapture the image I created during my first visit to Senegal, but I can make the framing of my own gaze more apparent and hope to use it as an entryway to document my own internalized prejudices and possibly unlearn them.
Nialibrealism is a video in which I manually edit Nothing but Peace (Jammriek) with the assistance of multicultural allies. In this piece, I portray a neoliberal6 African artist who wants to convey her people in a flattering light, even if it’s through the use of violence. This character is inspired by the aforementioned poet president Leopold Sedar Senghor, who was a proponent of Negritude7 but also sought to maintain a Western-sanctioned stability in Senegal through placating the French and the West in general throughout his 20 year rule. In the video I use my exacto knife to cut the undesired Africans out of the photo while seeking approval from the French voice that gives directions off camera to replicate how Senghor sacrificed his own people for the approval of the French. In manipulating the image of Senegal in the style of Senghor, I highlight how subtle and easy it is to contribute to an artistic canon of photography that has historically ignored the agency of Africans on their own land. This is an attempt at holding myself accountable as an artist while pushing the viewer to grapple with their own projections and ideas in regards to not only making images about Africa, but also viewing them.
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. “Awol Erizku - Photographs New York Tuesday, April 4, 2017 | Phillips.” n.d. Phillips. Accessed November 4, 2024. https://www.phillips.com/detail/awol-erizku/NY040117/330. Awol Erizku, an African artist appropriated Johannes Vermeer’s famed Girl with a Pearl Earring and sold his version for $52,500 in 2009. Some applaud the work for being radical while others think it's another instance of Africa's need to assimilate into a Western style.
2. “Omar Blondin Diop’s Death Showed the Horrors of Neocolonialism.” n.d. Jacobin. Accessed November 4, 2024. https://jacobin.com/2021/06/omar-blondin-diop-case-death-legacy-senegal. Omar Blondin Diop's death at the hands of a supposedly African socialist post colonial government exposed the sacrifices made in an attempt to present an image of a stable West African country.
3. Lamola, Malesela John. 2017. “SENGHOR, GLOBALISM AND AFRICANITY.” Phronimon, no. 2 (February). https://doi.org/10.25159/2413-3086/1967.Post Colonial Senegalese President Senghor has a complex relationship to his identity as an African who was colonized by France and it shows in his 20 years rule of Senegal.
4. Hibri, Cyma. 2023. “Orientalism: Edward Said’s Groundbreaking Book Explained.” The Conversation. https://facebook.com/ConversationEDU. February 12,2023.https://theconversation.com/orientalism-edward-saids-groundbreaking-bo ok-explained-197429.
Said defines Orientalism as racist tropes that present Islamic cultures as inferior and in need of saving which justifies Western Imperialism.
5. laboureau. 2021. “Agency Job (The Gleaners), 2009 - Banksy Explained.” Banksy Explained -. April 11, 2021. https://banksyexplained.com/the-gleaners-2009/. Banksy's use of the frame gives autonomy to the subject of the painting, a brown faced laborer who gazes off into the distance while smoking a cigarette and sitting on the frame of the art work.
6. Falcone, Daniel, Annika Hammerschlag / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images, Jamila Osman, Daniel Falcone “Neoliberalism Sucked Senegal Dry. Now Its Democracy Is at Stake.” Truthout, June 25, 2023. https://truthout.org/articles/neoliberalism-sucked-senegal-dry-now-its-democracy
is-at-stake/.
This article explains how certain neoliberal policies like privatization and deregulation have diminished the quality of life for Senegalese people and may contribute to the future destabilization of the country.
7. Tate. n.d. “Négritude | Tate.” Tate. Accessed November 4, 2024. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/n/negritude.
Negritude is an anti-colonial cultural, political movement led by African and Caribbean students looking to reclaim their own values in Paris in the 1930s.