Lucy’s iris

This is the second stage of the exhibition currently on show at Musac in León (Spain), where it was initiated by Orlando Britto Jinorio, who runs CAAM in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain).

This spring, the museum is celebrating 100 years of Dada with an exhibition devoted to the artist Raoul Hausmann. This is the first comprehensive presentation of the Raoul Hausmann collection held by the Musée Départemental d’Art Contemporain de Rochechouart since the 1994 retrospective.

For a long time, the oldest man found on Earth was Lucy. In 1974, a team of anthropologists led by Donald Johanson and Tom Gray discovered the skeleton of a small, one-metre-tall woman in Ethiopia. For several decades, she was considered the missing link in evolution and, at 3.2 million years old, she became the grandmother of humanity in the collective imagination. But why not give her a name chosen from African cultures? After all, she owes her first name to the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, which was playing constantly on the radio when she was discovered. In retrospect, this choice seems to symbolise a vision that is still centred on the West, despite the independence movements and decolonisation. Shortly afterwards, Lucy was renamed Dinknesh by the Ethiopians, which means ‘you are marvellous’.

This historical fact is the starting point for the L’Iris de Lucy project, which symbolically places itself under the aegis and gaze of Lucy, the adolescent grandmother of humanity. Paradoxically, Lucy’s popularity well beyond scientific circles masks the fact that, for a long time, the gender and continent least looked at in the cultural and public sphere were women and Africa. The L’Iris de Lucy exhibition is not intended to be exhaustive, but to bring together the artistic work of some twenty women artists from Africa and their individual contributions to the cultural construction of the continent, and more broadly to art today.

This is the second stage of the exhibition currently on show at the Musac in León (Spain), where it was initiated by Orlando Britto Jinorio, director of CAAM in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain). It comes at a time when the African art scene is gaining worldwide recognition, and when the issue of feminism among African women artists is increasingly and rightly being raised. This project brings together singular artists who cannot be summed up by the overly broad term ‘contemporary African art’. It includes artists currently living in Africa, from the Maghreb to South Africa, as well as those from the diaspora. The exhibition also features paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, videos, performances, tapestries and installations. Through this diversity, so many cultural and artistic facets are explored, responding to different contexts, but also to cross-cutting issues: identity, the body, the environment, historical heritage, memory, post-colonialism, migration, the past and the future. Interweaving politics and poetry, the works on display here offer as many perspectives as there are artists.