Besides discharging the important function of ferrying much needed food across nations, these Mammy Wagons serve as billboards for artistic sign writing and paintings. These paintings might feature popular films, national symbols, or interpretations of African folktales. Indeed, as the Mammy Wagons speed across poorly maintained roads and careen around uncertain corners, their billboards offer readers and onlookers a canvas of desires, frustrations, and hopes for a better society.

AFRICA: SEE YOU, SEE ME! takes its name from the artwork on a Mammy Wagon that I saw on a Nigerian road many years ago. As it crossed us, it inspired the occupants of my more sedate vehicle to wonder how we, as Africans, see and imagine ourselves, as well as how we want others to see us.

AFRICA: SEE YOU, SEE ME! is organized in 3 parts. The first section features studio portraits of Africans seeking to write themselves into the urban landscapes to which they have migrated. It presents African photographers as they tamed, adapted and subverted the framing devices and photographic conventions bequeathed them by their former colonial masters. The black and white photographs by Meissa Gaye, Seydou Keita, Vandupuye, Ricardo Rangel, Okhai Ojeikere, Mamadou Mbaye and Malick Sidibe illustrate a tense dialogue between the photographer and the photographed as they collaborate in inscribing African spaces and “selves” into photographic texts. Other themes in this section include the structures of African cities, societies and communities in formation, and representations of “looks” outside the studio from photographers in every region of the continent. This part of the exhibition also includes photographs of some of Africa’s anti-colonial heroes who hoped for genuine liberation.

The second section showcases early ethnographic portraits that imagined Africa as a wilderness peopled by Europe’s primitive “Other”. We have also used the strategy of re-reading these photographs to draw attention to them as objects within the history of photography. That history was itself a significant product of an industrialized world that defined not only progress, but also constructed those at the center and peripheries of such progress in certain ways.

The final section highlights contemporary photographs of Africa and Africans by non-African photographers who share a dialogic relationship with African artists. Thus, their work has expanded both African spheres of influence and multiplied the spaces in which Africans are photographed as subjects of history.

Like the Mammy Wagon I once saw on Nigerian roads, these photographs join works presented in the other sections, to tell Africans and the rest of the world: See You, See Me.

A Photographic exhibition curated by Awam Amkpa
Associate Curator: Madala Hilaire
Produced by Africa.Cont / Museu da Cidade / Municipality of Lisbon, Lisboa, Portugal.
Itinerary: New York (USA) for 6 weeks; Florence (Italy) for 6 weeks; Accra (Ghana) for 4 weeks; Lagos (Nigeria) for 4 weeks

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