Bøger af Chika Okeke-Agulu

Maske is an album of Phyllis Galembo's powerful and thrilling masquerade photographs, from Nigeria, Benin, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Zambia, and Haiti. Introduced by art historian Chika Okeke-Agulu, Galembo's pictures describe traditional masqueraders and carnival characters and are themselves works of vivid artistic imagination.

Authored by two acclaimed scholars, Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu, this is the most comprehensive and authoritative account yet on the work of El Anatsui, the world-renowned Ghanaian-born sculptor. The product of more than three decades of research and close collaboration with the artist, it shows how his early wood reliefs and terracottas, and the later monumental metal sculptures, express a search for alternative models of art-making. The authors argue that the pervasiveness of fragmentation as a compositional device in Anatsui¿s oeuvre evokes the impact of colonization and postcolonial forces on African cultures. At the same time, the invocation of resilience and fragility invests his shape-shifting sculptures with iconic power. The authors also show how, in his critically acclaimed metal works, the manual labor of flattening, cutting, twisting and crushing bottle caps and using copper wires to suture and stitch the elements into one dazzling, reconfigurable epic piece serves as a powerful metaphor for human life. This book presents Anatsui as a visionary of incomparable imagination, also situating his work within a broader historical context¿specifically, the postcolonial modernism of midcentury African artists and writers, the cultural ferment of post-independence Ghana and the intellectual environment of the 1970s Nsukka School. By recovering these histories, the authors show how and why Anatsui became one of the most formidable sculptors of our time.

Written by one of the foremost scholars of African art and featuring more than 125 color images, Postcolonial Modernism chronicles the emergence of artistic modernism in Nigeria in the heady years surrounding political independence in 1960.

With more than 600 images, this is primarily an art book, with priority given to the reproduction of high quality images selected from the artist¿s sketch books dating from 1963 to the present. Even so, the book includes contextual essays and interviews with the artist by the author, as well as a timeline and comprehensive bibliography of the artist.