It seems rather arbitrary to pick out the African artists from ‘The Ungovernables’, the New Museum’s triennial show. The first thing that appears (if, like me, you start on the fifth floor and work your way down) is a neat stack of Zimbabwean billion dollar bills, put there by Thai artist Pratchaya Phinthong. The show brings together thirty-four different individual artists and collectives. All the artists were born in the 70s and 80s, but beyond this the curation refuses to place the diverse works in any categories. Two Egyptian artists were, for me, among the show’s highlights. Against much of the Egyptian contemporary art recently discussed here, this is art which scrupulously rejects ‘revolutionary kitsch’. I’d seen pictures of Iman Issa’s work before – colourful shapes like wild prostheses out of a Mondrian painting – which didn’t communicate much. But in the white cube gallery space (see above) the clear lines and planes of these inscrutable monuments have a peculiar impact. It’s difficult to know what to say about Hassan Khan’s film “Jewel” (still below) – which shows two men dancing to a Sha’bi soundtrack – it’s great. Seriously, hypnotically playful. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s portraits achieve a drama which reminds me of Manet’s ability to illuminate darkness with a point of light. On the ground floor the work of the Invisible Borders Trans-African Photography Project covers one wall. We are keen to see more of this ambitious organisation, recently established in Lagos. See their blog on OccupyNigeria here. In the same room, Nana Oforiatta-Ayim’s film ‘Nowhere Else But Here’ presents a writerly account of a roadtrip with the Invisible Borders group: http://vimeo.com/37006434

Last month the Daily Beast decided that Cairo had lost its voice. It reminded me of a New York Times article which renamed Cairo The City Where You Can't Hear Yourself Scream. It’s a city (or something), not a commercial for cough medicine. This seems to be a commonplace for writing about cities in developing countries; the overwhelming noise of the city, this truism dictates, has deprived its inhabitants the self-expression you see in the hushed sanctuary of a Western metropolis. Does this mean the sound of the traffic heard by the correspondent from on taxi journeys between the airport, hotel, meetings, dinner and airport. What about the suburbs which corral the city? This dramatises the Arab Spring as a deprivation - rather than an extraordinary realisation of - voice. This kind of writing has too often forgotten that cities in America and the UK have witnessed an array of diverse and innovative acts of police aggression against protesters. Now, the Beast has tried to characterise a 'threat to contemporary art' by Egyptian ‘Islamists’. They quote Weaam El-Masry, who is concerned, no doubt rightly, that her sketches of globular naked women will provoke negative reactions from conservatives. The suggestion, however, that these works are ‘risque by almost any standards’ is untrue. Dark allusions to potential ‘Islamist’ aggression does not serve the art community, who remain committed to representing themselves. Events in the last year have raised some important questions and some real challenges to art: can a vibrant community be sustained while self-expression is restricted by a political elite, education system, widespread poverty and conservativism? Since the revolution, the country – and Cairo in particular – has seen a significant influx of foreign journalists in search of artists. Things like ‘The Noise of Cairo’ – a documentary (which interviews some of the artists I've mentioned in recent posts) by German filmmaker, Heiko Lange, seem to celebrate 2011 as a new opportunity for artistic self-expression. And yet a widespread conclusion in the international media finds revolutionary art embarrassingly straightforward. The truth is probably more complex – although the best art of the post-Mubarak era has not yet been made, the revolution has posed some difficult and valuable problems which are already being worked through. Suggestions that making art is impossible in Egypt are unhelpful, and journalism that hears Egyptian self-expression as a stifled scream is deeply suspect.

Om Kalthoum, the late great Egyptian singer, stands in the studio of Khaled Hafez. Her eyes are closed, her mouth open in song or lament. There is not one of her, but six (including a shadow), laser-printed repetitively across a wide canvas. She has her trademark hair, evening dress, large earrings. One hand raised in emphasis. The other holds a curious flesh-coloured object. A stained shawl? A chicken with its neck wrung? ‘First as tragedy, then as farce.’ Khaled, one of the most internationally-celebrated Egyptian painters, is working through the visual clichés of her legacy. One of Kalthoum’s nicknames is Arabic for “the woman”, a word he says comes from Isis. For Khaled, the tension between her quest for a secular womanhood, and the old-fashioned elegance she represents, makes her an embodiment of independent Egypt. I visited Khaled’s studio in Heliopolis at the beginning of January to ask for his perspective on contemporary art and the situation in Cairo. “I was teaching in January [2011] and, for the first time, no students turned up. I said ‘Okay, we will arrange for another day.’ But the next week they said ‘are you coming to the protest?’” Khaled went to school with Gamal Mubarak (“we played soccer together”). This is perhaps partly why the revolution represented such a shock: “we were politically programmed. We were deceived.” Khaled trained as a doctor, and during the protests he revisited this profession; he and his wife visited Tahrir Square on alternate days, taking turns to look after the children. Khaled has, like many others, found it hard to make work in the last year: “After the revolution, I did not think I would go back to painting … I started work on a Tahrir Square painting then stopped. I founded it physically difficult … The work was too literal, too sensational. When I look at it I admire only the effort.” But eventually the work has recommenced: he made video diaries, three simultaneous videos of found footage. And he started painting again: “painting is like singing, dancing, squash, you must do it every day. Two months ago I started dripping and underpainting. It is the best thing in the world to do when you are not inspired." His studio is now lined with canvases, dripping with colour, destined for exhibition at the Safarkhan gallery. These are evidence of furious recent activity: 20 square metres painted in 29 days. Khaled tells me he wants to turn the gallery into a ‘tomb’, to make the viewer ‘suffocate’. His work before the uprisings was beginning to develop a visual iconography whose grammar originates in ancient Egyptian painting. The tombs at Saqqara, or that of Rameses III, he says, evidence the creation of ‘rules for painting: flat, floor-to-ceiling, organised from right-to-left and left-to-right’. These paintings have a ‘rigorous layout’ like that of modern advertising. Inspired by the collections of imagery and prayers in the ‘Book of the Dead’, this series is called ‘The Book of Flight’. Many Egyptian artists have decided to leave since the uprisings. Flight must be a temptation and a dilemma for the artist. To confront the situation or escape from it. The vocabulary of Khaled’s work is however, explicitly modern. Watching a child play with military toys, he realised the child knew all the correct names for the technologies, and decided he wanted to build a ‘new hieroglyphics out of military symbols … a new alphabet.’ This work was started in isolation during a residency at the McColl Center in North Carolina. Configurations of soldiers fill the canvases, tiny bodies arranged into what look, at a distance, like pure patterns. Khaled claims that in his paintings there are ‘no emotional gestures’. Modernist Western painting is a strong influence: Rauschenberg, Picasso, Klimt. Basquiat is “like a God”. I wonder if there is some antipathy in contemporary art towards painting. There are young artists in Egypt who “get together and say ‘Alain Badiou says painting is dead.’ **** Alain Badiou.” With the evocation of ancient iconography, I wonder, does this work represent the search for a pre-Islamic state? Do these visual archaeologies involve attempts to validate the artist’s work? He shows me a new painting, “my Sister Julia painting”: Julia Robert’s face emerges from a burka. This is a response, he says, to Salafi demonstrations against the reports that two Coptic sisters had been prevented from converting to Islam. Khaled also experiments in film, and his 2006 video piece ‘Revolution’, has been described as premonitory. “But,” he says, “it referred to previous revolutions of the 1950s and its promises …” Promises whose non-fulfilment led to last year’s uprisings. The screen is split into three, representing the splitting between the promises of revolution, its real motivations, and inevitable outcome. “I am always in search of déjà vu,” he reflects. This attitude manifests itself in the dialogue between the ancient and the modern which dominates his painting. Khaled is a student of iconography, passionately interested in the visual archaeology of symbols. The star of David, he tells me, reaching over to point at an image of a six-pointed star, is also found in ancient Egypt. This ‘cultural recycling’ is also present in the Bible: Abraham, Sara, Adam, all have their etymological origin in Egyptian mythology. Batman, he gestures towards a crouching, long-eared creature, comes from the Egyptian god Amun-Ra. Are Egyptians, then, the best pop artists? “Egypt invented beer, wine … the modern army,” he quickly responds, “does that mean ours is the best?” With some distance from last year’s uprising, if the violence of Egypt’s political transition does not pose greater problems, Khaled’s work will no doubt develop a sophisticated system for deciphering the present. He has four paintings in  "Hajj" at the British Museum and exhibitions coming up in Manchester, Kaohsiung, and Havana. Art in Egypt must be janus-faced. It contends with the past – not merely with last year's spectacular events, or the fifty years of independence but with the whole visual history of this civilisation – and looks towards a future populated with uncertainties. The establishment of a new government and writing of a new constitution may cause new tensions leading to years of conflict. Art has been challenged to justify itself as Egyptian, and popular elements of society are seeking its total alienation from national discourses; but Egyptian contemporary art is playing a more important part than ever before in the international conversation art is. And Khaled would surely want to remind us that Janus too was invented in Egypt.

Tunisian born artist Amel Bennys, who works between Tunis and Paris, has just had her first solo show at the Selma Feriani Gallery in London. 'Get Up - Stand Up' includes 'Fin de Partie', a series of heavy-duty mixed media works on canvas and a selection of sketch-books.

We can deduce certain trends about Egyptian painting and the nature of its buyers.

As part of a series of year-end posts--we're taking a break from Friday, December 23, till January 5, 2012, we're hoping to post 10 "Lists of 10" this week. (We're trying to be cool by calling it "10x10"). So two lists per day. Orlando Reade, who blogs for us from London, starts us of with his list of 10 photographers to watch in 2012. He's picked five African artists and five Europeans who have been working in Africa.

Is African studio photography, Cape Town art writer Sean O’Toole asks in frieze magazine, dying out? The answer, non-subscribers, is maybe. Everywhere in the modern world the business of professional photography is in decline. O'Tool argues that studio photography has suffered the economies of the ‘digital revolution’ and the rise of the mobile phone camera. According to him the easy publishing of social networking sites has dealt a death blow to the popular African institution. Studio photography has been the medium of many of Africa’s most internationally renowned artists. Malick Sidibé’s (b. 1935) joyful shots of independent Mali, are celebrated in this year’s Paris Photo and the ninth biennale in his native Bamako. Similarly, the virtuosic monochrome portraits of Seydou Keïta (1921-2001) have gathered acclaim since his first exhibition in Paris in 1994. The two Malian photographers are often coupled together in indexes of African photography, but there is an critical distinction between their practices. Sidibé went onto the streets of Bamako, and used his talents for reportage. In 1962, two years after Independence, Keïta was nominated official photographer of the single-party socialist state. In a 2008 interview with lensculture, Sidibé spoke about Keïta:

People showed me his photos, but I didn’t go to his studio. Many things prevented me from going to Seydou’s. With my notoriety from reporting, going to Seydou’s studio … They all had it in their minds I might put a spell on them, or something like that, to make them lose customers, so I never went to the studio. … It was Seydou who came to me to bring cameras to be repaired. Back then, Seydou had almost finished at his studio. He was now working for the government, taking ID photos of prisoners, and so on. So I did not go to Seydou’s studio. No.

Sidibé is clearly troubled by the medium they share, and tries to establish distance between his work and Keïta’s along the lines of professoinalism and politics. The spirit of radical dissidence inhabits Sidibé’s work, which is difficult to place into the categories of the professional photographer. This art is haunted by the camera’s availability as a tool for state control. Photography has always been deeply involved with politics. Early photographs which celebrated the brief life of the 1870 Paris Commune were later used to identify and prosecute the communards. In the first scene of Athol Fugard’s monumental play, Siswe Bansi is dead, a man arrives at a studio in provincial South Africa to have a photograph taken. It is, he says, to send his wife in the country. The play shifts back in time and it transpires that this man is Siswe Bansi, on the run from the police. Bansi and a friend discover a dead man in an alleyway and decide Bansi should steal his identity. The play ends back at the beginning, and Bansi is photographed for his new identity papers. In this studio, photographs are not only taken for personal portraits but passport photography, and the camera is as much an apparatus of state control as a joyful commemoration of life. At the end of the play, Siswe Bansi is dead and the photograph is the document which tells his wife he is still alive; the photograph is a technology which wakes the dead, and kills the living. The young career of Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou (b. 1965), whose work is currently on display at the Jack Bell gallery in London, makes an interesting engagement with the traditions of studio photography. A year ago Agbodjelou was making work which looks unexceptional against the backdrop of post-modern African image-making: grinning men wearing sunglasses and brightly coloured clothing pose against patterned wallpaper. It is clear that the subjects of these photographs are their maker’s clients. Agbodjelou learnt the trade from his father, Joseph Moise Agbodjelou (1912-2000), a photographer well-known in and outside of his native Benin. A small picture by Joseph Agbodjelou sits opposite these smiling men. In this a woman poses in front of a torn studio backdrop which hardly covers the bare wall of the building behind. Leonce Agbodjelou’s most recent series, the Engungun Project, represents a return to these stark and humble beginnings. The Engungun are masqueraders in the Yoruba traditions of Benin and southern Nigeria who ritually cleanse the local community. The actors wear costumes made out of furs, found fabrics, imitation shells and sequins, designed to adorn the motion of their performance. As Charles Gore’s exhibition notes explain, these figures embody ‘both named and unnamed’ ancestors, which often ‘vary from recent deceased and historical forbears, to acting as community executioners of criminals and witches’. No one in the community is permitted to know who the actors are; they become the walking dead. The project of gathering these images was not an unpolitical act: Agbodjelou was sent home from one trip to southern Nigeria by the police, threatened by the presence of his camera. The exhibition notes also mention recent threats to the Engungun traditions:

the rise of Pentecostal churches in the 1990’s across West Africa [presented] a new challenge to Engungun masquerade ... as these churches sought to demonise indigenous religions (and their pantheons of deities) as pagan and dangerous and, as such, to be vehemently rejected. Engungun has responded in elaborating a counter-narrative of localised Yoruba memories, personalised histories and ritual through public performance that upholds the ethical values of the community.

The photographs displayed in the gallery are not labelled, and the viewer is thus denied even their subjects’ namelessness. The streets and rural areas in which the figures are placed are carefully lit to highlight the texture of this studio en plein air. The intended effect of this project is, it seems, not to catalogue this spectacle with an ethnographic lens, but to make its curious spirit manifest. The thesis of O’Toole’s article, that non-specialist publishing on social networking sites endangers the life of African studio photography, demands further thought. The claim recalls a belief, after the invention of the daguerrotype, that painting would become obsolete. Photography did not murder painting, which responded with Impressionism and the birth of a revolutionary avant-garde. It is apparently one of modern art’s most cherished lies to declare a medium bankrupt in order that the next generation of artists inherit the task of reinventing it. O’Toole refers to the work of Cheik Diallo, Santu Mofokeng and Kwame Apagya as exponents of an art-form which is not so much artistically dead, as financially defunct. This argument does not consider the crucial distinction between photography as art and as business. The significance of vocation is concretely proven in Bamako. Seydou Keïta retired in 1977 at the age of 56. O’Toole notes that this was “around the time ‘colour photography took over’ and machines started doing the work”. As it turned out, colour film did not bring about the end of art photography but has contributed to its expansion. Malick Sidibé still practices in the studio he established in 1958. Commentators have often warned of the vulnerability of social networking to abuse by governments and corporations. There are not many countries in which political dissidents may use the internet without some fear of supervision. It is important that photography – in digital and film, in the street and in the studio, on websites and gallery walls – negate the camera’s use as an apparatus of state power and corporate interests. It is difficult to predict how social networking will influence art in the future, but the photographers whose vocation it is to document life in Africa will without doubt continue to confront the politics of image-making with energy and self-consciousness. There is hope within the ethical ambivalence of photography; a camera in certain hands becomes the weapon that disarms itself. Joseph Beuys recognised the same when he called for art to heal the knife that cuts the wound. Leonce Agbodjelou’s odd, faceless images are useful reminders that some things may be photographed but not captured.

A painting sits glowering on the wall of the Jack Bell Gallery in London. Figures daubed in bright colours stare out from the canvases against a dark background broken up by bits of newspaper cuttings. This is Les Fantômes, the work of Aboudia, a 26-year-old Ivorian painter whose stark images have recently been receiving some much-deserved attention. In January, Aboudia was working in a studio in Abidjan without electricity. He remained in the city throughout the conflict which broke out in response to the contested 2010 election. His studio was right next to the Golf Hotel, which Ouattara’s party used as their headquarters, and the artist came dangerously close to the conflict, forced to remain inside for days, and often retreating to his cellar when the fighting was nearby. Jack Bell recalls him talking about the burning of bodies in the lot next to his studio, how he observed the three stages of decomposition, grew to know the stench, the different colours of the smoke. Since then, things have been changing fast. A German artist, Stefan Meisel, saw his work on Facebook, immediately bought two paintings, and offered to represent him. Aboudia has received plenty of press for the intimacy of his art with the conflict. An article by Reuters carried the headline: “Ivorian artist paints as bullets whizz overhead”. Aboudia had his first show earlier this year, also at the Jack Bell Gallery, taking his first aeroplane flight to see it. After three days in London he was impatient to return to his studio. His work is due to feature at the forthcoming Painters’ Painters exhibition at the commercial Saatchi Gallery. He is currently on his way to New York to collect his green card. Two of Aboudia’s paintings feature in Les Fantomes, a group exhibition of Central and West African artists. These are the first work of his post-conflict work to be exhibited, and the explicitly political content of the earlier work has been replaced by mythology. The signifiers of war are absent, and the figures evoke the vodou talismans of the northern militia. If the conflict has abated, its phantoms are filling this work. Aboudia’s second painting in this exhibition, The White King (pictured above), uses similar motifs. But the crown has a registered trademark symbol; the language of these paintings exceeds and resists that of global capitalism. There appears to be a content to these works that resists being easily imported to the galleries of Europe. In Aboudia’s work, tribal art is often worked over, erased, and reappears in the reworkings of magazine images. The visual debts to Jean-Michel Basquiat is already one of the stock responses associated with this work, but the real influences are closer to home. The scrawled writing on these canvases are reminders that graffiti, and the culture of the street is of primary importance. The words are often from nouchi, the Ivorian argot originating in Abidjan, the slang of child soldiers. The complex of local and global in Aboudia’s work are presented as part of a dialogue with the other African artists appearing in Les Fantomes. The extraordinary coffins sculpted by Paa Joe, a prostitute-shaped tomb for a prostitute, or a little Mercedes for a car mechanic, statements about their inhabitant’s life work, are at once joyful and colourfully macabre. Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou’s photographs apply the highly-stylised approach of his studio portraits to the ceremonial figures of local ritual in Benin. The other photographer in the exhibition, Hamidou Maiga, documents Mali’s transition into independence and modernity. The Congolese artist, Steve Bandoma takes body parts from magazine clippings reassembling them with watercolour and ink into strange and delicate chimeras. Afedzi Hughes, a Ghanian artist now based in New York, makes paintings which negotiate their own hybridities, measuring an Adidas football boot against a gun, the imported image with associated forms of violence. The proximity of Aboudia’s personal narrative to violence and suffering is the main reason this work has attracted attention, but the intensity and thoughtfulness of his mark-making is justification enough. In May he claimed to have hung up his “war brushes” and started a series on “the children of Abobo train station”. In this work, the explicitly political referents which gives the war paintings their resonance with the European satire of Goya and Picasso are no longer to be found, replaced by a playful and brutal infancy. It will be interesting to see whether the interest in his work maintains if the phantoms with the conflict which has given it its aura of authenticity recede. But it is clear that, whatever happens with next month’s elections in Abidjan, Aboudia’s powers of description will not be wasted. The next exhibition at the Jack Bell Gallery is the Egungun Project, Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou, 17 November – 17 December 2011. * Orlando Reade is a teacher and writer based in London.