After the Miracle State
Frieze|Issue 243 - June - August 2024
Built Environment: Reimagining a postcolonial Ivorian cityscape with less concrete and more natural materials
Lennart Wolff
After the Miracle State

IN JOANA CHOUMALI’s mixed-media work As the Wind Whispers (2019), dawn light engulfs the modernist towers of Abidjan’s Cité Administrative. Here, the artist stitches an intricate figure-ground composition: a scene of everyday life – companions relaxing in the shade of trees – against the backdrop of the city’s seemingly indestructible buildings made from the 1960s through to the ’80s. Structures including Hotel Ivoire (1963) and La Pyramide (1973) cemented the national aspirations of postcolonial Côte d’Ivoire: unity, independence and modernization. Long after the ‘miracle state’ of the country’s first president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, these buildings continue to echo an unfulfilled promise of unbuilding the (neo)colonial relations between periphery and core.

Following recessions, political instability and World Bank-mandated aggressive neo-liberalization, the cranes are once again turning in Abidjan, where the tallest governmental glass high-rise in the Economic Community of West African States is being erected. The recent economic and construction boom has coincided with publications, exhibitions and nothing less than the canonization of the independence period’s so-called tropical modernism. This climate-based architectural regionalism appropriated traditional and vernacular building typologies and techniques, and was developed from the 1950s onwards by the Architectural Association in London (AA), amongst others.

Esta historia es de la edición Issue 243 - June - August 2024 de Frieze.

Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.

Esta historia es de la edición Issue 243 - June - August 2024 de Frieze.

Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.

MÁS HISTORIAS DE FRIEZEVer todo
I'm trying to follow my instinct: to have confidence and not get into my head too much about what other people are expecting.'
Frieze

I'm trying to follow my instinct: to have confidence and not get into my head too much about what other people are expecting.'

Conversation: Ahead of a solo show at London’s Cubitt Gallery, Marlene Smith speaks to Lubaina Himid about her time in the BLK Art Group, friendship and collaboration

time-read
8 minutos  |
Issue 243 - June - August 2024
Tell It Slant
Frieze

Tell It Slant

Built Environment: Giovanna Silva on photographing history through unexpected architectural interventions

time-read
2 minutos  |
Issue 243 - June - August 2024
Dean Sameshima
Frieze

Dean Sameshima

What does it mean to be alone? In Dean Sameshima’s recent body of work – 25 monochrome photographs of queer men in Berlin porn theatres with sumptuous black negative spaces and blinding white cinema screens – ‘alone’ is a complicated term.

time-read
2 minutos  |
Issue 243 - June - August 2024
Nicole Wermers
Frieze

Nicole Wermers

Nicole Wermers’s Reclining Female #6 (2024) looks out over Glasgow.

time-read
2 minutos  |
Issue 243 - June - August 2024
Greater Toronto Art 2024
Frieze

Greater Toronto Art 2024

Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto, Canada

time-read
2 minutos  |
Issue 243 - June - August 2024
Echoes of the Brother Countries
Frieze

Echoes of the Brother Countries

In recent years, the former German Democratic Republic (DDR) has been the subject of a reappraisal that, while not seeking to redeem the stiflingly authoritarian state, has attempted to present a more nuanced overview of its social and cultural realities.

time-read
2 minutos  |
Issue 243 - June - August 2024
Pierre Huyghe
Frieze

Pierre Huyghe

A pale tetra fish swims around a vast obsidian tank, while another bobs on its side at the top of the water, perhaps ailing from debilitating swim bladder disease (Circadian Dilemma [El Día del Ojo], 2017).

time-read
4 minutos  |
Issue 243 - June - August 2024
Inward Yearnings
Frieze

Inward Yearnings

Essay: Rianna Jade Parker retraces the history of the Jamaican intuitives, a group of self-taught artists who ushered in a national form of artmaking mythologizing African traditions through religious divination and esteem-raising cultural work

time-read
8 minutos  |
Issue 243 - June - August 2024
The Promise of the Past
Frieze

The Promise of the Past

Built Environment: On the occasion of the ‘Tropical Modernism’ exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Derin Fadina examines the architectural movement’s exclusionary narratives

time-read
5 minutos  |
Issue 243 - June - August 2024
Where Is Everyone?
Frieze

Where Is Everyone?

Built Environment: Minoru Nomata’s paintings ask why we obsess over unpeopled architecture

time-read
3 minutos  |
Issue 243 - June - August 2024