Personale by Samuel Fosso in the Salzburg Museum of Modern Art
With the first personale by Samuel Fosso, the Salzburg Museum of Modern Art is continuing on its path of broadening the public’s view of Western artistic creation to other continents. Fosso, who was born in Cameroon in 1962, is one of the most renowned voices in contemporary African photography, said curator Jürgen Tabor on Friday at the presentation of the exhibition, which can be seen in the Museum der Moderne on the Mönchsberg until April 10, 2023.
While Fosso, who came to Salzburg himself for the opening of the exhibition, is already a well-known name in the French, transparent and Anglo-American world, he is still little known among the German-speaking audience. That’s about to change. Parallel to the Salzburg presentation, there is currently also a personal exhibition of the leading artist in Neu-Ulm, reported Tabor.
The self-portrait is a central pillar of Fosso’s work, who opened a portrait photography studio in Bangui, Central African Republic, at the age of 13. As a child, he had lived with his grandparents in a village in Nigeria for several years. After the Biafra War he had to move to his uncle in Bangui. The artist said he sent the grandmother, who was worried about the grandson, self-portraits in black and white staged after typical magazine scenes of the 1970s to show her that he was fine. During the day he photographed his customers, in the evening he staged his private pictures, which were first shown in 1994 at the Bamako Encounters – African Biennial of Photography.
A series commissioned by the French department store chain Tati in 1997 is even more strongly characterized by staging. The Ukrainian self-portraits trace the archetypes of Western and African societies: the golfer, the bourgeois woman, the businessman, the rocker and the tribal chief who succumbed to the lures of power and money in the age of colonialism. Fosso emphasized that showing the complicity of efficient chiefs in colonialism was important to him in this picture, which is a central work of the show.
The 2003 series “My Grandfather’s Dream” is a very personal work. This war healer and wanted the grandson to take over this function in the village from him. But the war and the death of his grandfather made these plans impossible. In the autobiographical work, Fosso stages himself in a life that he could have lived if things had turned out differently. In this “heart project” he knows the rituals, ceremonies and tasks of his grandfather. At first glance, it looks like an ethnographic work, but it is actually autobiographical in character – and therefore probably the most touching part of the exhibition.
The black and white self-portraits that show Fosso in the series “African Spirits” and “Emperor of Africa” as protagonists of the independence and civil rights movement are also impressive. They are re-enactments of well-known recordings of people like Martin Luther King, Haile Selassie, Muhammad Ali or Patrice Lumumba, who are often similar to the originals and precisely for this reason sharpen the eye for what separates and connects.
(SERVICE: “Samuel Fosso”, October 22, 2022 to April 10, 2023, Museum der Moderne, Mönchsberg 32, 5020 Salzburg, www.museumdermoderne.at)