In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reflection (2000), Installation made at HALAntwerp, produced by objectif Photograph: Kurt de Wit & Joris Cerstiaens. Journal of Contemporary African Art The Jet-lag Experiment Philippe Pirotte "I would borrow all the stories. I would love them, and each time, I would lose my memory." Bili Bidjocka, Collage B ili Bidjocka shuns representation, but its remembrance determines the outlook of his installations. Stressing form as a vehicle for seduction, the works read as a voluntarily chosen erasure of all codes that would lead interpretation too obviously towards identification.1 Throughout his work, there is a constant preoccupation with the subversion of affirmative systems of understanding. Suspicious of the new media-hype as well as the actual "globalism" frenzy in the domain of art, Bidjocka situates his artistic practices deliberately in an adopted tradition of painting—that of the Louvre and Prado. Nevertheless, a total acceptance of that tradition seems impossible for him, because he has never met his own memory depicted. Bili Bidjocka's exhibition Reflection (2000) is installed in a small 19th century factory space in Antwerp housing, and setting foot there is entering the space of painting. In the hall, surrounded with a balcony, black and white oversized women's dresses are suspended above 64 square recipient-boxes. The almost weightless garments are each lit with a single bare bulb from within. These ethereal structures are highly evocative, subtly exploring the slippery, polluted notions of blackness and whiteness—and what these terms might possibly mean.^ There has been much speculation around Bidjocka's use of these dresses. They appear in many of his installations but assume different disguises. The first time they turned up was in the painting Untitled (Witches' Ball) (Las Palmas, 1994), and then they appeared in the Trust Me/Fuck You installation during Trafique, S.M.A.K. extra muros (Gent, 1999). Formed by begonias in the garden piece 16.000 holes at the Johannesburg Biennale (1997) or by bananas in La Principe et la Faim #1 (1997), the shape of the dress is cut out in a plot of grass to form a reflecting pool of water in Midi-Minuit-Midi (New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 1997). It also functions as the doorway to a labyrinth in Pediluve (Tokyo, 1999). Deemed as the threshold of absence and presence, or as the "residual sign of a prior presence,"^ Bidjocka saw himself repeating the shape, at a certain moment imposing itself and reaching a kind of perfection. The dress is part of a personal fiction whose sense is unknown even to the artist, though he likes the idea of coherence. It generated the conception of an imaginary work, for the moment, entitled Je suis la seule femme de ma vie. The phrase is taken from a poem Bidjocka once wrote from the position of a woman. Although it doesn 't mean anything, it shies away from identification, from the personal biography, is not affirmative, and is not effective as a slogan. Bili Bidjocka thinks of the dresses as elements of fascination ; their possible symbolism interests him solely to the extent that they can matter for a culture. Being very real things, the dresses become signs. As the indexical presence of bodies, they establish their meaning along the axis of a physical relationship to their referents.^ Perhaps their obsessive recurrence in Bili Bidjocka's work has to do with a deliberately chosen amnesiac condition that relates to the adopted tradition of painting. The impossibility of reproducing the painting of the body is welcomed as readymade in his memory . Reflection recalls a moment in a chess game, frozen. On the balcony surrounding the space, the artist placed some tables with chessboards and clocks, seemingly inviting the spectator to engage in the tricky game of representation. The course of real time is put on hold but remains "suffused with possibilities. The big chessboard on the ground floor constructs this ambiguous power game among artist, work and spectator. In some of the black boxes there is water, reflecting the dresses and the light bulbs, while others are filled with sand and seeds, allowed to grow. A third kind has a hard, inaccessible , bleakly colored surface. Fall/Winter 2001 N k...

pdf

Share