For this second edition of Paris+ by Art Basel, MAGNIN-A gallery proposes to exhibit the works of two women artists from different generations, Seyni Awa Camara and Wura-Natasha Ogunji; a dreamlike journey to the confines of singular visions where the clay sculptures of the Senegalese artist resonate with the delicately embroidered papers of the American-Nigerian artist.
Camara and Ogunji both question the relationship to intimacy and the body. Through techniques that transcend the classical formal repertoire, they reveal poetic works where beings tend to metamorphose and intertwine to underline the transient nature of life. Their very different paths have been noticed by major institutions.
Seyni Awa Camara was born in 1945 in Casamance in southern Senegal, which she has never left. The origin of her art is often associated with a legend. During her childhood, she and her two brothers disappeared in the forest for several days during which they received a mysterious divine initiation. According to her, the geniuses of God who kept them out of sight would have taught them to work the earth. This event would have been the basis for her unparalleled work. Since then, she models stories, monsters, dreams...
These large figures, often human, sometimes animal, on which a profusion of children or mystical beings intertwine, tell part of her story. That of a painful past where her motherhood was compromised in a society that gives it a primordial importance. Her work takes the viewer into a dreamlike world of intimacy and questioning.
Camara's work was first revealed in Europe during the exhibition Magiciens de la Terre in 1989, organized at the Centre Pompidou and the Halle de la Villette in Paris, presented alongside Louise Bourgeois. The latter dedicated a text to her in 1994 in the book Contemporary Arts of Africa: "Like everyone else on earth, she seeks intimacy—a need to relate to someone in a gratifying fashion. However interesting, the imagery is repetitious. But it is also personal. I recognize her originality and a certain beauty. Now, beauty is a dangerous word because notions of "beauty" are relative. So let me be very clear: the work gives me pleasure to look at. As one artist to the other, I respect, like and enjoy Camara."
Her work has since been shown in major exhibitions (49th Venice Biennale, 2001; African Art Now, MFAH, Houston, 2005; 100% Africa, Guggenheim Bilbao, 2006; Art/Afrique: Le Nouvel Atelier, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 2017; Amongst the Living with Seyni Awa Camara, Michael Armitage, White Cube, 2022) and has been included in prestigious collections (Fondation Louis Vuitton, Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, Voorlinden Museum, CAAC: The Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection).
Wura-Natasha Ogunji was born in 1970 in Missouri, United States, to an American mother with whom she grew up and to a Nigerian father, whom she went in search of as an adult. Her practice is multidisciplinary, first as a photographer and then as a video artist, she now focuses on performance and paper technique.
Consisting of hand-sewn figures heightened with ink and graphite on tracing paper, her drawings are intrinsically linked to movement. Ogunji is fascinated by gesture and makes her body a subject of study. Her connection to it, her curiosity about its physicality and limitations, is a key element in all her work. “My goal is to transpose who I am as a human, to mark the space, and I do so with deep honesty and integrity."
Her drawings also highlight power and social presence, and more universally how women stand out through their ordinary or heroic actions. She continually manipulates and experiments with her material, incising and sewing through the paper, playing with its transparency so that her works become physically and conceptually layered. "I try to explore the outer limits of my imagination in a way that is connected to other people's imaginations and other experiences of being human in the world."
Wura-Natasha Ogunji's work has been exhibited in major cultural institutions. Recent exhibitions include rīvus, 23rd Biennale of Sydney, 2022; The Power of My Hands, Africa(s): Women Artists, Museum of Modern Art, Paris, 2021 and Alpha Crucis: Contemporary African Art, Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo, 2020. She served as artist-curator for the 33rd São Paulo Biennale, where her large-scale performance Days of Being Free was first presented.
Although her path has never yet crossed that of Seyni Awa Camara, they both share a desire to materialize the intimate, to inscribe in space their personal history, but also the history of women, giving rise to fascinating and singular works.
