Last Thursday evening the Grahamstown public was treated to a fine art exhibition of the highest order by Masters Fine Art student, Dotun Makun, at the Albany History Museum Alumni Gallery with his 'Alien Nation' exhibition. Alien Nation consists of two series of paintings, both of Nigerian foreign nationals in South Africa, called 'Ghana Must Go' and 'The Outsider'.
Last Thursday evening the Grahamstown public was treated to a fine art exhibition of the highest order by Masters Fine Art student, Dotun Makun, at the Albany History Museum Alumni Gallery with his 'Alien Nation' exhibition. Alien Nation consists of two series of paintings, both of Nigerian foreign nationals in South Africa, called 'Ghana Must Go' and 'The Outsider'.
Prof Ruth Simbao of Rhodes University's Fine Art Department opened the evening with a speech, emphasising the need for people to look beyond racial- and gender-stereotyping forms of patriotism that lead to violence, "and the pigeon-holing of artists." She said it would be "unhelpful to label Makun as a Nigerian artist as if his 'Nigerianness' – whatever that would mean – would necessarily be imbued in all his work, boxing him into a constructed framework."
The Outsider is comprised of seven vast, dark portraits of Nigerian women who live and work in Grahamstown. Makun based the composition of his portraits on the proportions of passport photos, signifying their identity as well as their currency of crossing international borders. These large scale works were painted from real-life, with the artist engaging in the traditional studio portrait process, which is one of careful perceptual observation and a telling interaction between sitter and painter.
Ghana Must Go is a collection of Nigerian men. Again, each portrait is worked from life, but here the background has shifted from the brooding darkness of the first series, to a visually upbeat, but conceptually sinister pattern of the "Ghana-must-go bags". Makun said these bags, iconic of African traders and travellers, have been given many names. In Nigeria, they were given the "Ghana-must-go" label after Ghanaians were forcibly removed from Nigeria in 1983.
Makun has been on both sides of exile’s fence: as a Nigerian in Nigeria at a time when Ghanaians were expelled, and also as a Nigerian in a foreign country still overshadowed by xenophobia. Makun also mentioned that the patterns in the Ghana Must Go paintings represented the notion of stereotyping in relation to repetition and by labelling.
In his paintings Makun draws a parallel between the imagined community of a nation and the imagined identities we read in faces, and it is the instability of these assumptions that enable us to challenge stereotypes. "All the models were selected rather randomly as I set out to paint people of Nigerian origin living in Grahamstown, who would avail themselves to sit for me," said Makun.
He singled out Tanya Poole, Prof Ruth Simbao and the late Mark Hipper as well as a few other colleagues at the art department who helped him to accomplish his two-and-half-year project.
Makun said that he plans to show the Alien Nation exhibition at the Brundyn + Gonsalves gallery in Cape Town some time next year.
