The ambiguity of African social identity will be the focus of the Harn Museum of Art's newest exhibit, which opens today.
The video exhibit, named "Cross-Currents in Recent Video Installation: Water as Metaphor for Identity," was chosen to give the Harn a new way to display art from Africa and present a view of the continent that challenges some negative stereotypes, said Susan Cooksey, the museum's curator of African art.
The exhibit was borrowed from the Tufts University Art Gallery in Medford, Mass., where it premiered. The Harn is the first outside venue to showcase it, Cooksey said.
Cooksey said she believes this exhibit will provoke viewers to learn from and relate to people of different backgrounds as they gaze at artwork projected on screens as large as 30 feet wide by 9 feet tall. The screens are adorned with images depicting family, violence, politics and religion.
As the element linking the four installations, water drips, flows and splashes as the artists' videos play.
"Water shows how things are diluted," Cooksey said. "It's an appropriate metaphor with this changing of boundaries in the world."
The exhibit features video installations by four international artists. Two are from South Africa, one is from Egypt and another is from Kenya, she said.
"African art includes a lot of video now, and people do not think about African contemporary art and their use of technology," Cooksey said.
Each of the artist's life experiences is transferred to the screen and encompasses ideas about identity shifts, Cooksey said.
"It's a different kind of exhibit," she said.
"Water," an Egyptian piece in the collection by Moataz Nasr, has a pool of water beneath the screen that reflects a video with strong, dark silhouettes and pictures about government control.
Ingrid Mwangi's "Down By the River" features a path of Kenyan red soil with inscribed words scattered beneath a suspended projector that is meant to demonstrate oppression and rebellion.
Vivid images of spiritual transformation are offered by the South African artist Zwelethu Mthethwa in "Crossings" with depictions of baptism on a three-channel digital video with a rear projection.
The exhibit is free and will be on display through Sept. 7.
