Photos by Angie Stong
Thursday evening, the SCAD Museum of Art unveiled the largest exhibition they’ve ever hosted. Through the doors lay paintings, sculptures, photographs, installations, videos and more, all part of “The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists.”
The traveling exhibition, curated by art critic and lecturer Simon Njami, premiered in Frankfurt, Germany, earlier this year. Its opening in Savannah was the U.S. debut of the show, and it will stay until Jan. 25, 2015. After that it’ll move to the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C.
Centered on the exploration of themes in Dante Alighieri’s 14th century epic poem “Divine Comedy,” the exhibition features the perspectives of 42 artists from 19 countries across Africa and the African diaspora. The collection covers all of the museum’s 20,000 square feet of exhibition space and spills into the 80,000 square foot courtyard. There’s also work at SCAD’s Pei Ling Chan Gallery on Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard.
“[The exhibition] demonstrates how concepts used in Dante’s poem transcend Western traditions and resonate with diverse contemporary culture,” said Laurie Ann Farrell, SCAD’s executive director of exhibitions, when she introduced a panel discussion that kicked off the evening. “As the title suggests, the exhibition progresses through three stages, offering myriad perspectives on Dante’s visions of afterlife.”
Students meander through the SCAD Museum of Art to see “The Divine Comedy” exhibition.
The panel, moderated by Njami, featured Bili Bidjocka, Moataz Nasr, Joel Andrianomearisoa and Mwangi Hutter. The theater was packed well before it started and soon the classrooms in the academic corridor of the museum, where the discussion was streamed live, filled up, too.
The panel discussed the artists’ personal lives as well as their processes and the concepts behind their work. Beliefs about God and the afterlife came up, but it was mostly about the artists – the dynamism of writing in Bidjocka’s works, negotiation and feeling in Andrianomearisoa’s, racism in Mwangi Hutter’s, and feeling lost in Nasr’s.
Njami offered some insights on the nature of the show as a whole.
“‘The Divine Comedy’ is not an African exhibition. It’s an exhibition of contemporary art, where the artists happen to have some relationship to Africa,” he said. “It’s about the afterlife, it’s about Dante, it’s about how we see the afterlife.”
As for the choice of “Divine Comedy,” Njami said it was to update and internationalize the ancient poem.
“[“Divine Comedy”] was presented as something very universal,” he explained. “I discovered that in this universal book, there was no Asian and no African. So this is the first attempt to turn Dante’s book very universal.”
“I didn’t want any of the artists in the show to read or know Dante,” he said later. “What was important was for them to translate it into their own language, to translate it into their own feelings.”
After the panel, students, professors, museum members and the public were free to take the journey through the galleries. The fact that the exhibition unites the whole space in one conceptual narrative makes it unique. As visitors walk the galleries, they pass through the Heaven section, containing works inspired by “Divine Comedy’s” Paradiso cantica, then Purgatory and end up in the dark Inferno.
“The whole thing is devoted to one idea,” said Avery Martens, a fourth-year photography major from Bermuda and an employee at the museum. “Where normally this museum is divided up into different sections and it’s very static in a way. I really like how this flows.”
“I think it’s something that’s special because it’s spiritual and it’s asking the viewer to go deeper,” said Franki DeSaro, a fourth-year painting major from Redbank, New Jersey. “A lot of people and even artists don’t want to go deeper.”
It’s that going deeper that Njami wanted to foster. None of the works are a direct interpretation of Dante – the artists were only inspired by the content of the poem to create meaning in different ways.
“This is what we meant to do here in this show,” said Njami. “We invited Dante because he’s an old friend of mine. But the people who are making him, Paradiso and Inferno are the artists in the show.
“So look at it. It might help you understand Dante. But don’t look for Dante when you go through the show. Look at the works.”
