Ângela Ferreira

Installation views Ângela Ferreira, HARD RAIN SHOW
La Criée contemporary art centre & Rennes Regional School of Fine Arts, 2008-2009
© Ângela Ferreira
Courtesy La Criée contemporary art center
Photo credit: Benoît Mauras

From a sincere desire to experiment practices of displacement in our life experiences and collective memories, aiming to question hidden post-colonial histories and geopolitical partitions globally as well as in an extended Europe, Larys Frogier invited for her very first solo exhibition in France the prominent female artist Ângela Ferreira. Born in Maputo, Mozambique, Ângela Ferreira is a Mozambican-Portuguese female installation and video artist who has also lived in South Arica.
For curating the solo exhibition of Ângela Ferreira, Larys Frogier was extremely honored to invite the internationally recognized independent curator, writer and theorist Jürgen Bock, originated from Germany but based in Lisbon Portugal since many years and working as the Director of Maumaus School for Visual Arts.

The project at La Criée was made in partnership with the Berardo Collection Museum in Lisbon, Maumaus School of Visual Arts, the Institut Camöes Portugal, as welll as in collaboration with the Rennes Regional School of Fine Arts.

From such generous friendships, partnerships and collaboration emerged the curatorial concept of HARD RAIN SHOW.
As the guest curator Jürgen Bock states:

"Over the last twenty years Ângela Ferreira has created an extensive oeuvre in which she interrogates geo-political, art historical and gender issues related to given cultural contexts through a range of different media. Her installations frequently include sculptures that evoke modernist practices, combined with semi-documentary photographic and video material. Formulating questions about notions of perspective, her work opens up spaces between the political and the aesthetical. Her first solo exhibition in France is an opportunity for the French audience to engage with Ferreira's body of work. The complex relationships between Europe and Africa are interrogated using the back and forth of modernism and its complicity with colonialism and its utopian promise of a better future. On show at La Criée is Maison Tropicale created in 2007 for the Venice Biennale.
A series of photographs and a large-scale wooden and metal sculpture are inspired by the history of a failed modernist housing project by the (now famous) French designer Jean Prouvé. What was conceived as a mass housing project for Africa resulted between 1949 and 1951 in only three prototypes of a Tropical House sent from France to its colonies: to Niamey in Niger and to Brazzaville in Congo. The 'rediscovery' of Prouvé's design in the 1990s led to the dismantling of all three of them a few years ago, and for them to be brought back to Europe for restoration. They have subsequently been usurped by the current design and art market.
In Ferreira's Maison Tropicale the artist presents photographs of the remains of the houses in Africa, of those parts that were not considered worth being commercialised. The artist combines them with a structure filled with sculptural elements derived from Prouvé's Tropical House designs, transforming them, as curator Jürgen Bock has called it, into 'permanently adrift containers of history'. Two other works are being presented at the Art School in Rennes : In For Mozambique (Model N°2 of a Screen-Orator-Kiosk celebrating a post-Independence Utopia), In For Mozambique (Model No. 2 of a Screen- Orator-Kiosk celebrating a post- independence Utopia) Ângela Ferreira created a specific perspective on the historical momentum of the recently independent country of Mozambique in 1975, linking it in her installation to the history of the modernist utopia of Russian constructivism. Agitprop artist Gustav Klucis's search for a unity between art and the social and political in the 1920s becomes, through Ferreira's evocation of his kiosks, the theoretical and physical base of her installation. Video excerpts of footage of a Bob Dylan concert and a Jean Rouch film, both celebrating the post-independence utopia of a recently-born nation, are projected onto it. Zip Zap Circus School comprises three wooden and canvas modules, proposing an imaginary space between European and African discourses on architecture. Two never built projects are connected in the installation: a Mies van der Rohe 1913 villa with the modernist architect's technique of 'rehearsing' it through wooden and canvas structures that could be moved around on its future site in a park in Holland. The other is a project by the Mozambican architect Pancho Guedes, for a South African Community project for a Circus School in Cape Town, designed in the 1990s."

Manthia Diawara, Maison Tropicale (Trailer), 2008, produced by Maumaus School of Visual Arts.
Mali born Manthia Diawara's documentary is a complement to Ângela Ferreira's artistic project on the Maison Tropicale by Jean Prouvé, which was shown at the Venice Biennale 2007. The film brings to life the hidden stories and memories of those left behind in Africa when the Maisons Tropicales were removed. It is a postcolonial excavation into African identity, art and the notion of cultural patrimony.
© Manthia Diawara