A chance meeting with Enock Ilunga

On Monday, I went with my colleague, photographer Rose-Marie Westling - who is here to do a photo documentation of my research - for a belated visit to the new art exhibition "Living Memory" at Henry Tayali Gallery at the Agricultural Showgrounds in Lusaka. We enjoyed the variety of themes and techniques from the represented artists, all of whom have passed away but whose influence and stature in the Zambian art scen seems constant. In particular, I enjoyed the soft colours and sensitive capturing of movement in Godfrey Seti's work, as well as the tongue-in-cheek and highly critical rendering of colonial history in Stephen Kappata's paintings (I am not a collector of anything, but I still kick myself for not buying a few paintings by Kappata in 2000, as I thought of doing, when they were still available and at ridiculuously low prices).



Embarassingly enough, I couldn't honour the kind invitation to the opening a week ago given to Chris and me by the curator of the exhibition, Zenzele … (people in Lusaka seem to take such invitations much more seriously than I am used to from Stockholm), since we were, finally, moving in to our house on that day. Nevertheless, I hope to return to this event (and hopefully an interview with the curator) further on.

Instead, I intend to write about a chance encounter that took place, while my friend and I were browsing through the beatiful, but quiet and empty, exhibition rooms. The only other visitor to the exhibition was a well-built man in his mid-fifties, who was watching us discreetely from the other side of the room. After some time, he approached us and asked where we were from. As we responded, he blurted out: "Ah, kalles kaviar, do you have any with you? "

This turned out to be distinguished artist, Enock Ilunga, a long standing member of the Henry Tayali Art Gallery, with several exhibitions in Sweden and other European countries on his cv. A fascinating conversation ensued. He talked about money, the difficulty of making a living as an artist in Zambia (and in Sweden, though he spoke admiringly about a Swedish, commercially succesful, artist…who has a personal gallery at Drottninggatan in Stockholm), of not getting paid for paintings sold to political dignitaries, about Swedish cheese, snaps, his frustration about the lack of interest from the (growing) Zambian middle-class to buy art instead of fancy cars or extravagant mansions. He also did a striking impersonation of a Swede entering systembolaget (the alcoholic beverages monopoly) on a cold, winter's day.

Finally, he took us out in the back where Mr Ilunga, together with a rasta assistant, had been busy mounting canvases for his upcoming exhibition at Alliance Francaise in Lusaka (12 March, 2009). He did try, acting the stereotypical poor artist, to mildly persuade us to buy a couple of works before the show, but when we politely explained our poor financial status (and that of our institution, the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm) he turned to displaying his art. Canvas after canvas was turned for our viewing pleasure (to me, this was a new experience and I couldn't help but to feel immensely privileged). "Women washing their dirty linnen" "the refugees are not traveling for pleasure, but by necessity", "makishi"




Enock Ilunga is obviously a strikingly competent and experienced painter. With a few brush strokes, he catches shapes, postures and attitudes in the repetitive human forms that appears to be his favourite subjects. Often these forms are not visible at a first glance, but eventually emerge from the seeming chaos of colour. He refused (thank god!) my interpretation of the painting "the woman" as in any way related to the mwana pwo masked character commonly danced in the area of his origin (North Western Province). You have to excuse me, but I am after all an anthropologist prone to making such silly connections between cultural heritage and contemporary expressions, and I suspect that his objection was based on a political rather than aesthetical level. He refuses, like many contemporary artists and I am wholly sympathetic to the idea, to be a representative of his "ancient african heritage", a heritage which we Europeans are constantly imposing on African art. Collectivizing individual expression in other words.

And this goes right at the heart of a problem we have frequently discussed at my Museum in the context of exhibiting (or not exhibiting) contemporary African/Asian/Aboriginal Australian/native American art. Can ethnographic museums when presenting art from Africa, for example, avoid framing art works in such collectivizing terms? Isn't the space tainted with these preconceptions at the outset?

On the other hand, can the powerful and expressive subjectivity of artists like Enock Ilunga really be held back by such forces? As they say in Zambia, I doubt.