African art, a universal art: posthumous exhibition in Bologna by Africanist Ezio Bassani

From March 28 to September 8, 2019, the Museo Civico Archeologico di Bologna is hosting the exhibition Ex Africa. Stories and Identities of a Universal Art. The purpose of our exhibition is to tell how African and European events are intertwined from antiquity to the present through “stories” of art, identity, travel and encounters starting from the chronicles of travel and early contact between Europeans and Africans.

An exhibition divided into several sections: from the formal quality expressed in works of large and small size, to ancient objects from famous African kingdoms along with masks, ritual and power figures. The new frontiers of African art research are also proposed: the antiquity of those manifestations and the identification of some “hands of the masters” and with a section investigating the diverse aesthetics of vodu, an accumulative art imbued with sacredness in its persistent becoming with works that are exhibited in Italy for the first time.

This is not an ethnographic exhibition, or at least that is the intent of curators Ezio Bassani (a great Africanist who passed away during the design work at the age of 94) and Gigi Pezzoli, but rather an exhibition that aims to overcome the generalist/specialist dichotomy, aiming to tell stories of art, identity, power, sacredness, encounters and dialogues. Ex Africa is made possible through the collaboration of some of the most important international museums and collections. TheUN deemed the project consistent with the goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

The exhibition has benefited from the contributions of Italian and foreign scholars, and is dedicated to the memory of Bassani himself, who passed away suddenly during the work of the project at the age of 94, and a figure to whom we owe the spread of knowledge of African art in our country.

To learn more you can visit the exhibition’s official website by clicking here.

Pictured: Man Ray, Noire et blanche, 1926, photograph / photograph new print (1980) © Man Ray Trust by SIAE 2018

African art, a universal art: posthumous exhibition in Bologna by Africanist Ezio Bassani

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