Sokari Douglas Camp Strength of Feeling (review)

Nka•167 Journal of Contemporary African Art 166•Nka In December 2006, the UK newspaper The Independent listed Sokari Douglas Camp as one of the “50 best African artists,” situating her name amid a prominent group of individuals including Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe.1 Utne Reader reprinted this article for U.S. audiences in September 2007.2 Over the past two decades, Sokari has earned a position of note in the world of contemporary art. She is well known for expressive, steel figurative sculptures , which engage ideas of West African culture, such as masquerade and performance, and how these concepts relate to international, cross-cultural identities. Sokari’s early sculptural work will continue to captivate audiences, but can more recent, thematic developments in the artist’s work even further raise consciousness about the relationship between West Africa and the West? From November 2008 through January 2009, Nottingham’s New Art Exchange featured a retrospective of Sokari Douglas Camp’s sculptural work from 1995 to 2008. Curated by Michael Forbes, Strength of Feeling presented critical changes in the development of Sokari’s work. The fifteen sculptures displayed the artist’s response to the global politics affecting West Africans worldwide. Though the exhibition highlighted the artist’s concern with the rise in international violence, it concluded with more recent pieces illustrative of the artist’s decision to abandon violent imagery. The exhibition was grouped thematically with a nod to the chronology of Sokari’s work. Two sculptures from 1995 represented the artist’s famed early engagements with ideas of West African masquerade. However, the artist’s 1998 self-portrait Assessment presented a turning point in her career. Here, Sokari depicts her own figure in steel with welding goggles perched on her brow. Her knees are bent and her arms heave up an image of an oil refinery transferred onto glass. Through her self-portrait , the artist depicts her trepidation about industrial oil interests and their impact on the people of West Africa with whom she passionately identifies. As an expatriate Nigerian living in the United Kingdom, Sokari evidences her own sense of responsibility to call attention to these difficult international relationships. With this social accountability in mind, the artist’s more recent figurative works continue to capture movement, light, and color through burnished, painted, and welded steel. However, Sokari makes the physical weight of the steel even more apparent. Works such as the 2006 Accessories Worn in the Delta and the 2004 Teasing Suicide display figures wielding machine guns, rifles , and belts of bullets. The bodies still wear Dutch-wax printed cloth that the artist inventively fashions out of metal, but even the fabrics appear to make note of political rivalries with faces and years etched into the patterns . In Sokari’s 2002 Bin Laden Pieta she takes up the issue of modern-day terrorism . A steel burka covering the female figure’s entire body strongly contrasts what should have been the traditionally light fabric of orthodox Islamic women’s dress. The figure’s arms cradle a glass-transferred image of the World Trade Center. The artist includes a woven background with two glass images of Bin Laden on either side of the figure. These references to multiple culSOKARI DOUGLAS CAMP STRENGTH OF FEELING NEW ART EXCHANGE, NOTTINGHAM NOVEMBER 10, 2008– JANUARY 19, 2009 REVIEWS tures, especially with the unidentified woman engaged with Middle Eastern traditions crouched in front of the West African woven screen, identify the tensions of living within diversity. The inclusion of smaller preliminary sculptures in the exhibition was compelling as they showed the artist’s process. The small maquettes of the group of figures in Family Teasing Suicide and The Living Memorial to Ken Saro-Wiwa were impressive examples of Sokari’s modeling techniques. The small-scale models offered audiences the ability to examine the artist’s original decisions about thematic concerns and the shape of the work. The preliminary models also permitted audiences to see how the artist’s plans changed over the course of construction of the larger-scale works. In particular, Sokari’s artistic ability to test the spontaneity of steel, as a brittle medium, became more apparent in the contrast between the smoother...