Godfried Donkor, Michael Forbes, Johannes Phokela

Godfried Donkor is the history man. His paintings and montages depict history. Not history book history, but a living breathing history that engages and interfaces with a wide and potent range of contemporary concerns. His pictures are multilayered, multifaceted affairs that have a powerful, modern day resonance. His work strikes a variety of chords and nerves. Hardly surprising. For many of us, ‘history’ refuses to be a lifeless and dull conglomeration of boring dates and events from which we are terminally disconnected. Instead, our take on history, more often than not, constructs it as signifying earlier episodes of our current existence. We are, in the twenty-first century, the latest instalments of our history. And as such, like Donkor, we are scarcely able to downgrade its centrality and importance in our lives.

In the words of one source, Donkor’s work “looks back to look forward, it raises questions about prejudice and stereotype, slavery and humanity, the African diaspora and its heroes, and how they have struggled to become acculturated to the western world. [Bonhams catalogue for Modern and Contemporary African Art Sale, September 2000, p. 32 (on Godfried Donkor).] But looking at Donkor’s work, one rapidly gets the sense that no one interpretation, no matter how wide ranging, is adequate to summarise his practice. We are obliged to look at Donkor’s work from many different angles and from many perspectives, if we are to avail ourselves of its multiple dimensions…

…For the Bonington Gallery exhibition Michael Forbes has a contributed a series of screenprints titled Red Black Blood Skin… The screenprints are stark affairs - black ink printed on a red background - and feature reproductions of lithographs graphically depicting scenes of torture, brutality and death that were an intrinsic feature of the slave trade. As with Donkor’s use of the slave ship lithograph, the origins of these drawings of slaves and their tormentors date back to the abolitionist movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century…

…Frequently, the starting point for Phokela’s works are old master paintings by the likes of Rubens and Breugel. Such artists are taken as being representative of Europe’s so-called 'Age of Enlightenment’ and it is this period of history, and its wider international ramifications, that are studiously and critically examined by Phokela. As Terence Doohan has written “Phokela takes as his subject matter the art of the Enlightenment and through his re-workings of these images and with the aid of a technical device (a superimposed grid) critically interrogates the values and ideals that have been attached to them. The ideas presented in the ‘great’ works of the Enlightenment, are ones of humanism and rationalism. And as importantly, these ideals are presented as universal and neutral.” [Johannes Phokela Fixation, the Art Exchange Gallery, Nottingham, March - April 2000, text by Terence Doohan. Catalogue unpaginated]…

…To summarise, Phokela seeks to make work that critiques certain aspects of the Renaissance era. However, it is my belief that he is simultaneously demanding for himself a place within the wider panorama of art history. To this end one of the most striking devices he employs is “his insertion of black figures into white-only scenarios.” [Paul O’Kane, reviewing Johannes Phokela’s exhibition at Rack Gallery, London, May – June 1998, Third Text, No. 43, Summer 1998, pp. 103 – 104] Whilst being mindful of the dangers of collapsing Black people into an homogenous whole (or seeing one as being interchangeable with another or one Black person  as being representative of all others), I would venture to suggest that, in different ways, but like Araeen before him, Phokela’s intention (by inserting black figures into white-only allegorical scenarios of Renaissance painting) is to make himself visible. [Rasheed Araeen, through Kala Press, published in 1984 a collection of his essays, articles and correspondence, titled Making Myself Visible.] And in making himself visible, to reclaim a humanity lost to unfortunate numbers of African people, dispossessed and marginalised within their homelands, by European settlers and their modern-day descendants.

The above extracts are from a catalogue essay by Eddie Chambers, for “There is No Redemption” (Godfried Donkor, Johannes Phokela, Michael Forbes) group exhibition at Bonington Gallery, Nottingham [7 - 25 January 2002] and City Gallery, Leicester [7 June - 13 July 2002],  pp. 10 - 41