Seyni Awa Camara: Magician of Our Earth – The Gallery of Everything & Bac’ART

Produced in collaboration with Bac’ART Foundation and The Gallery of Everything, Magician of Our Earth discusses the life and art of Seyni Awa Camara: the remarkable Senegalese sculptor, who passed away earlier this year, and will be celebrated with a solo exhibition at the fair (Booth M4).

Camara learned pottery from her mother, who bequeathed unto her child the ceramic traditions of her culture. Yet she went on to develop an intensely personal visual language, protected by the spirits who taught her to work with clay and whose influence would become central to her practice.

Camara first gained international recognition through Magiciens de la Terre (1989), which was later challenged for its centring of the mystical African artist. Louise Bourgeois railed against the eroticised interpretation held by most critics and instead highlighted Camara’s technical mastery and intimate treatment of family and memory.

Today, her inclusion in Alison Gingeras’ The Woman Question at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, highlights an important curatorial dilemma: the absence of women from art history. Camara’s inclusion was significant, for she was presented not as a traditional or ethnographic artist, but within a long history of women making important and independent art.

It is this legacy which the talk will consider, along with what artist Michael Armitage described as the voiceless spirit of someone you once knew well.

The talk will be preceded by a screening of the award-winning documentary Giving Birth by Fatou Bintou Kandé Senghor, previously selected by curator Okwui Enwezor for All the World’s Futures at the 2015 Venice Biennale.

PanellistsSandrine Bacquaert, Collector and Founder of Bac’ART Foundation
James Brett, Curator and Founder of The Museum + Gallery of Everything
Jennifer Higgie, Curator and Author (The Mirror and the Palette, The Other Side)
Fatou Bintou Kandé Senghor, Photographer and Filmmaker (Giving Birth)
Maya Varichon el Zanaty, Curator and Producer (Seyni Awa Camara)

Image caption: Portrait of Seyni Awa Camara by André Magnin, 2000