"When We See Us": Swiss museum showcases 100 years of Black figurative painting

euronews (in English)

An ambitious exhibition, showcasing how artists have depicted everyday Black joy in painting over 100 years, has made its way from South Africa to Switzerland.

Transcript

00:00Basically, it's a sprawling panorama of 100 years of Pan-African painting, starting roughly

00:25in 1920 to today, and it's a wide array of figurative imagination of the African continent

00:34and the African diasporas.

00:37The exhibition is entitled When We See Us, and it is derived of an American series created

00:44by the American director, Abba DuVernay, where it was called When They See Us.

00:49When We See Us is basically a reversal of the gaze, meaning that here black curators,

00:56black subjects look at each other, look towards themselves, and try to kind of take over a

01:03more positive notion of black subjectivities.

01:20So this exhibition was conceived by our colleagues at Sites MoCA in Cape Town, South Africa,

01:27and the initial ideas were about imagining an exhibition that would really center on

01:34a more positive notion of black subjectivity, on notions of revelry, joy, the quotidian,

01:43the everydayness, and to kind of bring a new form of imagining the black subject in

01:50our contemporary arena.

01:53It's always a good moment to look at overlooked histories.

02:13I think a good moment is now since we, in general, have to look at a more multi-regional

02:22situation worldwide and globally, and Africa hasn't only been a recent discovery of the

02:31art market, but also in terms of the major change in what is happening in black entrepreneurship,

02:41in ways black individuals are contributing globally to the way this world is going.

02:49So I think we've been more sensitized to take their contribution more seriously today.

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