"Artefacts: Contemporary Moving Images Adad Hannah: The Raft of the Medusa (Saint-Louis)" now at Glenbow

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Adad Hannah, "The Raft of the Medusa (Saint-Louis) 7, 2016

archival pigment print, courtesy of the artist

Adad Hannah’s The Raft of the Medusa (Saint-Louis), the first installment in the new three-part Artefacts: Contemporary Moving Images exhibition series is on at Glenbow intil May 22.

Adad Hannah is known for creating community-based artworks that involve large scale collaborations with members of specific communities. These collaborations tell stories that are relevant to the place where they are created. Hannah’s photography and video-based works involve creating elaborate sets populated with carefully posed actors who remain motionless and silent as the artist films the scene. These tableaux vivants or “living pictures” are based on a popular style of theatrical entertainment that originated in France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Scenes from literature, history or daily life were recreated by posed, costumed actors on stages and in fairgrounds, schools and community halls.

For this project, Hannah spent five weeks in Saint-Louis, Senegal, on the western edge of the African continent. Hannah recruited local artists, actors, craftspeople, historians, musicians, administrators and boat builders to comprise the cast of over 50 people depicted in The Raft of the Medusa (Saint-Louis). The set of the tableau was created locally in Saint-Louis using salvaged, dismantled pirogues (handmade and brightly painted wooden fishing boats), architectural detritus and other elements found around the Saint-Louis coastline. The resulting video and large scale photographs reference a historical painting: Theodore Gericault’s Le Radeau de la Méduse (1818 – 1819) which dramatically depicts the aftermath of a real-life event – a shipwreck off the coast of Senegal in 1816. That famous painting currently hangs at the Louvre in Paris.

ABOUT ARTEFACTS: CONTEMPORARY MOVING IMAGES

The Artefacts series of exhibitions has been conceived as part of Glenbow’s commitment to presenting both historical and contemporary work by Canadian Artists throughout 2017, as a response to Canada 150 and the sesquicentennial anniversary of confederation. The artists (Adad Hannah, Arvo Leo and Lorna Mills) featured in each of the three-part exhibition series are young, internationally engaged artists who embed themselves in unfamiliar communities and use video, digital media and moving images to investigate ideas about artistic influence, originality and inspiration in today’s digitally connected and image-saturated world.

Source: Glenbow Museum