Lhola Amira: Facing the Future – Announcements

Inauguration December 17, 2022, Lhola Amira: Facing the future launches the San Francisco Museums of Fine Arts’ new African art program, highlighting the permanent collection as a site for exploring the evolving nature of African arts and their meanings today. Led by Natasha Becker, the inaugural Curator of African Art, the program features contemporary artists whose work draws on and engages Africa’s artistic and cultural traditions. First to present, Lhola Amira (b. 1984, Gugulethu, South Africa) embodies South African Nguni spiritual practices in HER* life and work, emphasizing the power of remembering her ancestors.

“Natasha Becker has designed a program that is timely and relevant in its approach, interpreting the Fine Arts Museums’ collection of African art as a body of aesthetic practices that are very much alive in the work of contemporary artists from the African continent and around the world. the world. diaspora,” said Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums. “In Lhola Amira: Facing the futureVisitors will be able to follow the journey of ancestor veneration from 19th and 20th century figures in our permanent collections galleries to new works of art that Lhola Amira has created specifically for the space.”

The artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States, Facing the Future gather the new Amira Philisa: Zinza Mphefumlo Wami—or portal for spiritual reflection and connection— and YOUR single-channel video projection exploring indigenous forms of healing within the African diaspora, IRMANDADE: The shape of water in Pindorama (2018-2020). Created in response to the ancient sculptures in the permanent collection, Amira’s Philisa installation or “Constellation” Zinza Mphefumlo Wami invites viewers to “rest with the spirit.” Designed to be accessible to all, this portal for remembrance and resurrection combines beaded curtains with a ceremonial bowl of salt for cleansing, golden pillars with candles and pitchers of water for channeling, and songs to help invoke ancient energies. The many ways in which African artworks convey the sacredness of life are further explored in the ancestor figures in the permanent collection, objects of communication with the divine, and masquerades that enliven and reverence the previous generations.

BRANDADE Follow Amira’s journey through Bahia, Brazil. A work of “looks” rather than “performance”, the film is the artist’s response to the wounds of water, land and generations of descendants of enslaved peoples throughout the diaspora. In HER “Apparitions”, Amira relates to the specific geographic, political, and socio-economic conditions of the place. Her ceremonial washing of the feet of Afro-Brazilian women in BRANDADE gestures towards healing through ancient wisdom and is in itself an act of deep recognition of diasporic connections. “Healing ourselves”, says the artist, “is also healing our ancestors”. Lhola Amira HERSELF identifies as an ancestral presence that coexists in the body of the healer Khanyisile Mbongwa.

“I invited Lhola Amira to be the first artist to participate in our Contemporary African Art program due to the urgency of HER call to recover indigenous wisdom and healing practices as a way to address the psychological, spiritual and environmental wounds that are prevalent in our world. today”, says Natasha Becker. “THEYSELF are a plural being, an ancient presence, and HER aesthetic intervention of hers in the museum importantly acknowledges the wounds of Africans and Native Americans in the name of greater love and compassion.”

The new African art program is the latest initiative by the Fine Arts Museums to present the work of living artists in dialogue with the permanent collections, as has been the practice of its contemporary art program for the last 6 years. With a newly designed temporary exhibition gallery leading into the permanent collection, the African Art program will continue to bring artists deeply engaged with African art, culture and society to Fine Art Museums to amplify the vibrancy of the collection of african art. Amira will make an “Appearance” to open Facing the Future and consecrate the exhibition as a sacred space.

*Lhola Amira uses the capitalized pronouns ELLOS/ELLOS/HIS.

Organization of exhibitions
This exhibition is organized by the San Francisco Museums of Fine Arts, with the generous support of Denise Littlefield Sobel.