Yonamine - WASH 2008 Click on the images to Watch the Videos
Yonamine (b. 1975) and Kiluanji Kia Henda (B. 1979) are more than just two artists hailing from the most recent generation of contemporary Angolan artists. They are friends, were both born in Luanda and are both living in Lisbon at the moment perhaps because “Lisbon is a clean Luanda” (Yonamine). A double L unites them, but the path they have also chosen and the subjects underlying their work also warrants our looking at them together.
Kiluanji’s training led him between South Africa and Luanda; Yonamine between Luanda, the Congo, Brazil and the UK. The war was the main cause for so much wandering and when there is such a lot of wandering, one belongs everywhere and nowhere.
In “Plastic Surgery” and “Imperfect Chapels”, Kiluanji refers to the Angolan artist, Kapela, an important landmark for his generation, and the latter’s art studio. The imagery reveals a fairly dilapidated space although at the same time, it has something of redemption and the sublime about it. The organic is raised to something sacred or, at very least, to an artistic universality. The same happens in “Material” and “Material II” which brings together the language of photo-journalism and conceptual photography. In "Gardens of Babylon" Kiluanji develops a futuristic narrative around the Sines refineries (situated south of Lisbon), a topic he intends to pursue in his future work, in order to challenge discourses on Africa, generally dominated by the past.
The combination of different registers and languages is carried further in Yonamine’s work. Painting, drawing, engraving, graffiti, photography, video and installation intermesh to create a discourse which contains as much criticism and disruptive power as it does a sort of velvet violence, or if you will, an aesthetic violence as we see in “Wash” (2008), for example. It is a double projection in which one side projects the page of a newspaper speaking about illegal immigration where the page is being cleaned and scrubbed non-stop by a hand wearing a black rubber glove; on the other side, exactly on the opposite face of the same projection, the artist himself appears, setting fire to a wall newspaper. The frames are as terrible as they are fascinating.
The density and wave upon wave of feelings run through Yonamine’s work, from his “Lee Bang A,” which is evocative of the Chinese living in Luanda, to “Tuga Suave”, a series of serigraphs reproducing a packet of cigarettes called Português Suave, where part of the text has been blacked out in order to create a new meaning that is not about smoking, but about the Portuguese.
Born after Portuguese colonial rule had ended, Yonamine and Kiluanje grew up during the war. Living now in a period of peace, their work builds up a network of references and memories, an emotional map that guides us through the ruins and scars while at the same time creating a powerful, unique artistic identity.
The combination of different registers and languages is carried further in Yonamine’s work. Painting, drawing, engraving, graffiti, photography, video and installation intermesh to create a discourse which contains as much criticism and disruptive power as it does a sort of velvet violence, or if you will, an aesthetic violence as we see in “Wash” (2008), for example. It is a double projection in which one side projects the page of a newspaper speaking about illegal immigration where the page is being cleaned and scrubbed non-stop by a hand wearing a black rubber glove; on the other side, exactly on the opposite face of the same projection, the artist himself appears, setting fire to a wall newspaper. The frames are as terrible as they are fascinating.
The density and wave upon wave of feelings run through Yonamine’s work, from his “Lee Bang A,” which is evocative of the Chinese living in Luanda, to “Tuga Suave”, a series of serigraphs reproducing a packet of cigarettes called Português Suave, where part of the text has been blacked out in order to create a new meaning that is not about smoking, but about the Portuguese.