Africa

Africa, Artistic Expressions of a Continent

“Turn a tree into firewood and it will burn; but it will never give you flowers and fruit again.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), Bengali poet

The ancient metaphor of fertility related to the vital force and potency of trees, with their deep roots, their stem as a foundation, their ramifications as unfoldings of themselves, their legacy as symbolic flowers and fruits, was never more adequate as to be applied to the permanent links with our Mother Africa. If we then think of the metaphors of the gigantic baobab tree, from the more severe historical references associated with slavery by the so-called “tree of oblivion” to the milder ones, such as the famous tree in the book The Little Prince, the lessons arising therefrom would be analogous: “You become eternally responsible for what you captivate”, as Saint-Exupéry said.

If artistic expressions arise from the senses, the legacy of civilizations arises from the hands; and how beautiful are the manifestations of peoples, how beautiful are the arts of Africa! The love and yearning for the beautiful, the love and fear of nature and the gods and the fearless appreciation of civilization were so dear to African nations that they indistinctly distributed and reputed all aspects of existence, contradictory or not, some form of artistic expression.

The arts demarcate the forms of a time. The long-term exhibition “Africa, Artistic Expressions of a Continent” thus presents one of the essential points of the transition in the development of older African arts, since their withdrawal from the continent and the subsequent decontextualization of their intrinsic meanings, seen in the modern and contemporary world from an emphasis on their artistic forms. Previously restricted to European museums as objects of so-called traditional millenary cultures, today the works bequeathed from Africa have been able to conform to today's artistic work, offering the so-called “traditional contemporary African art” to the whole world, as it is known by specialists. These works are instruments of recent and authentic modernization of African popular arts or even modern reproductions of ancient pieces destined mainly for emerging markets in the tropics.

Strengthening institutional ties, the Oscar Niemeyer Museum (MON) received this important donation of African works from the Ivani and Jorge Yunes Collection (CIJY). Over more than fifty years, the couple has acquired works that span five continents. This donation includes around 1700 objects from Africa: masks, statuettes, busts, miniatures, everyday objects, musical instruments and a large number of other pieces. In a positive way, they are now part of the Oscar Niemeyer Museum collection, which we congratulate for having taken this opportune step, enriching its collection and, at the same time, the entire African legacy in Paraná and Brazil. We invite everyone to take an active part in this immersion in African art, observing its forms in what they themselves may surprise and allow an equivalent enjoyment to others in the artistic universe, without watertight determinations, taking this dialogue a step further.

From the great tree of Africa, multiple fruits and new legacies were generated. It was no coincidence that, like most sub-Saharan peoples, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, the Mayans, the Incas, the Aztecs and basically all the great civilizations developed a culture of wearing masks and made representations in sculpture . With the exhibition of objects from such different cultural heritages, we find here an important point in common: within the museum, these arts are elevated to the same artistic platform, equaling African art to the level of world art. Here is a way to honor the visual ancestry of the past and to open up the new plantings, routes and perspectives of this art in the future.

Renato Araújo da Silva
Curator and Specialist in African Art