African art in Denmark: Architect duplicates museum within museum

23 June 2015 - 02:01 By Sean O'Toole

When Cape Town architect Heinrich Wolff was invited to create a temporary pavilion inside a Danish museum due to host a big Africa exhibition, he had two studio assistants build a model of the museum. Installed in a room beneath Wolff's Bo-Kaap studio is a perfectly rendered model of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. The replica not only simulates the linear volumes of this prestigious seaside museum opened in 1958 near the Danish capital of Copenhagen, but the way light flows into it.Using an iPhone set to camera mode, Wolff excitedly demonstrated what it would look like to walk through the museum towards the yellow scalloped form he has designed.Wolff's architectural intervention, one of three created by invited African architects, serves a number of functions. Practically, it creates extra display space for artworks in the square room he was allocated.Wolff's room explores African urbanity and focuses on six cities: Dakar, Lagos, Nairobi, Kinshasa, Maputo and Johannesburg.Johannesburg photographer Mikhael Subotzky, who last month won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in London for his Ponte City book, will exhibit his towering light boxes describing life in the residential block.But Wolff's pavilion is more than a clever wall surface for the display of art. Conceptually, it is meant to "disrupt" and "manufacture congestion", a key aspect of life in cities on the continent.It is also porous, a "wall with eyes", as Wolff put it. The small interior space of the pavilion includes a screening room for films and stairs leading to a balcony.The balcony looks out to a mirror and display space where Cape Town artist Athi-Patra Ruga, among others, will show his hand-woven map of fictional African states."This form aims to subvert predetermined relationships between viewer and subject," said Wolff, who won the Daimler Award for South African Architecture in 2007.Wolff's architectural idea - of facilitating two-way spectatorship - was informed by his reading of Chinua Achebe's 1977 essay An Image of Africa, about racism in the work of novelist Joseph Conrad."There has been a long reciprocal relationship between Africa and Europe where Africa has been a mirror for European self-definition," said Wolff.Africa, the third instalment in Louisiana's trilogy of regionally focused exhibitions, also includes a new installation by architect Diébédo Francis Kéré.Born in Burkina Faso but based in Berlin, Kéré has worked on numerous small school buildings in his former homeland."Please go back to your roots and try to do something at home, in a small space," said Kéré to great applause at last year's International Union of Architects conference in Durban.Alongside Kéré and Wolff's interior pavilions, Africa will include a new installation in its sculpture park by the young Namibian architects Mieke Droomer and Andre Christensen.AFRICA: Architecture, Culture and Identity opens on Thursday..

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