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The
art of Senegal is truly unique. |
The
visual culture of the Mourides is on display now at the UCLA
Fowler Museum of Cultural History. This comprehensive
exhibition entitled Passport to Paradise: Sufi Arts in Urban
Senegal is the first major U.S. exhibition to examine
Senegalese Mouride arts.
The
Mouride Brotherhood, formed around the turn of the twentieth
century, is a branch of Sufism founded and led by the late
Senegalese Sheikh Amadou Bamba (1853-1927). The extensive
exhibition at UCLA presents a broad selection of the visual
imagery that has such a large part in the daily life of the
Mourides and in Senegalese society as a whole.
This
exhibition was organized with the idea of helping to create a
better understanding of Islam. The curators, Mary Nooter
Roberts, deputy director and curator of the Fowler Museum and
Allen F. Roberts, director of the James S. Coleman African Studies
Center, wanted to show another facet of Islam, one that many
Americans seemingly don’t know about. Passport to Paradise,
says Roberts, “is about giving an alternative message to the
idea that the United States is against Islam, and that “There is
respect for Islam in the United States; that a lot of people are
hoping that there will be peace in the world...”
As
one of Senegal’s four Sufi movements, the Mourides number as
many as 4 million in Senegal alone and thousands more abroad. The
Mouride Way, based on the teachings of Amadou Bamba, emphasizes
the virtues of pacifism and the importance of hard work and has
within this century become the biggest influence on contemporary
Senegalese life and culture. The teachings and presence of Bamba
have taken visual form and now offer great inspiration in the
daily lives of many Senegalese. The entire visual culture of the
Mourides sprung from one photograph taken of Amadou Bamba while he
was under house arrest by the French colonial government in 1913.
The image of Bamba, pacifist and resister of colonial rule has
manifested literally everywhere: on buildings, the sides of
vehicles, in homes and in Mosques.
Passport
to Paradise attempts to incorporate every form of Mouride art
into the exhibition in order to give the viewer an idea of the
importance of art in the everyday lives of Senegalese people. The
exhibition begins with a room of introduction that displays a
large photographic reproduction of a painted wall mural by an
artist who calls himself Bapisto Boy. The original mural is a
quarter of a mile long painted on the outside wall of a factory.
The mural features of course the image of Bamba with other human
rights heroes such as Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.
The exhibition is divided up into ten comprehensive sections, each
devoted to depicting and displaying a different aspect of Mouride
visual culture. The sections are titled as followed: The
Rise of Islam, The Life of a Saint, The Aura of Mass Produced
Imagery, Devotional Sanctum, The Mouride Work Ethic, Apostles of
Hard Work, Healing Prayers, Sainted Women, An Architecture of the
World, Global Networks, and Pilgrimage to Touba.
The
first section offers a quick introduction to Islam, Sufi mysticism
and a history of Islam in Africa and Senegal. The next
section is an explication of Bamba’s life. Included in this
section is a reproduction of the original photograph from which
all imagery of Bamba is based on is followed by a suite of glass
paintings depicting significant points in Bamba’s life by
Mouride, Mor Gueye. The proceeding gallery displays a plethora of
mass-produced images of Bamba. His likeness is painted on many
surfaces such as plaster and coconut shells along side images that
popped up post colonial during Senegal’s age of mechanical
reproduction, a time when adoption of Islam was becoming more and
more widespread in the area.
Passport
to Paradise also takes the visitor on a virtual tour of
Senegal. A street in Dakar is recreated complete with urban
fixtures such as a break kiosk and a brochette cart. A video
accompanies this portion of the exhibition to give the viewer a
better idea of the extensive imagery that covers the city. The
following section gives the viewer an idea of the Mouride work
ethic that goes hand in hand with the 1980’s youth movement Set/Setal:
meaning-cleanliness and propriety. This movement was an
especially positive and influential aspect Mouridism on the people
of Senegal and the city of Dakar. Set/Setal was a movement
that came out of frustration with the lack of paying jobs and a
decaying urban landscape. As a reaction to their desperate
situation youths of Dakar took to the streets in non-violent
demonstration. Their campaign included cleaning up the city of
Dakar by continually collecting trash from the street and
beautifying decaying buildings by painting murals of Bamba and
guru of the work movement, Ibra Fall.
The
final section of the exhibition is a display of paintings by
contemporary Senegalese artists working in accord to the
principals of the Mouride Way. According to Times staff
writer Christopher Knight, this is the only part of the exhibition
that is problematic: “Most are painters, but they’re engaged
in an academic conversation with antiquated school of Paris
Modernism”. Night also praises the color-field of Viye Diba, who
also incorporated materials such as wood and strips of cloth.
If
you can not make it to the exhibition, the official Passport to
Paradise website is very comprehensive and is worth checking
out. Not only does the site offer great detail of each
exhibition room; it also provides the visitor with a brief history
of Islam, the life of Bamba and the art of the Mourides.
Passport
to Paradise will be on show through July 27th, 2003
at the Fowler Museum at the University of California in Los
Angeles then will be traveling to the Birmingham Museum of Art
from August through October, 2003.
www.fmch.ucla.edu/passporttoparadise.htm
Museum
hours-
Wednesday
through Sunday 12:00 noon to 5:00 p.m.
Thursday 12:00 noon to 8:00 p.m.
Closed Monday and Tuesday
Admission
is free
UCLA
Fowler Museum of Cultural History
Box 951549.
Los Angeles, California, 90095-1549
313-825-4361
