‘Africa Calling’: West African royalty and Zulu magic at Haifa Museum of Art

African treasures kept at the Haifa Museums warehouses form the basis of Africa Calling (curated by Dorit Shafir and Meir Itkin), a new exhibition at the northern city’s art museum. “Our curation style, like the city of Haifa itself, is all-inclusive,” Haifa Museums CEO Yotam Yakir told reporters during a guided tour in early April.

He was followed by Dr. Kobi Ben-Meir, chief curator of the Haifa Museum of Art, who said that the museum is “turning over a new page” with the decision to present non-Western works.

As curator of Facial Topography, a new Israeli art exhibition from the museum’s collection, Ben-Meir cleverly included the 1927 painting Port of Jaffa by Israel Paldi. The stormy waves Jewish arrivals once crossed to make it to the warmth of the Promised Land are in dialogue with Jaffa Sun by Kenyan artist Cyrus Kabiru, shown on the floor above.

“What Kabiru is saying is that he may show his art in the West, but he is proud to be an African,” Shafir explained.

The golden eyewear Kabiru created for this work resemble suns, or Jaffa oranges, and are a microcosm of the loaded themes of gold and colonialism, race and memory, explored in Africa Calling.

The lands on which New York was built were purchased for Chevron beads. Created by Italian glass artist Marietta Barovier, the beautiful baubles were one of the items the West offered those outside its sphere in trade.

“Europeans made a 1,000% profit from selling Venetian glass beads to Africa,” Shafir said. In Ghana, the Krobo people make beautiful glass beads to this very day. Beads, beer, and guns were sold in exchange for gold and slaves in a centuries-long process that, eventually, also led to Leopold II of Belgium becoming the sole owner of Congo.

Visitors will marvel at the vividness of the royal drapes with the emblems of the kings of Dahomey (today Benin) and see the ritual masks used by the Bambara people of Mali during the N’tomo initiation ceremonies – a males-only society that teaches boys how to take their place as men in the world. The masks are shown cut off from their original function, lifted from their social role as sacred objects, seen only during a ritualistic function. They offer today’s patrons a glimpse into a human psyche in which everything is pulsing with life.

A special space in the exhibition is given to the role of the sangoma – the healer – in South African cultures like Zulu, Xhosa, and Swazi. The diagnostic tools of this unique trade, lion bones and snail shells, drum and herbs, were obtained by Maria Stein-Lessing, an eccentric Jewish-German art scholar who fled Nazi Germany to build a new life in South Africa. She was one of the first to sell African art in the 1940s via her Johannesburg gallery, L’Afrique.

In time, the collection was bought by Roza van Gelderen and Hilda Purwitsky, an openly lesbian couple that supported, among others, important Jewish painters Irma Stern and Wolf Kibel. The sangoma collection was donated by Hilda to the Haifa Ethnographic Museum in the 1970s after her partner died.

One Xhosa item now shown is a necklace made from bull hairs, called ubulunga – “Everything will be fine with my daughter” – and is given by the father of a bride to his daughter during a wedding. She also gets ubulunga cattle to keep, Itkin told The Jerusalem Post.

THE AFRICAN items once shown to Haifa residents at the Ethnographic Museum, opened under Haifa mayor Abba Hushi and folklore scholar Dov Noy, formed an eclectic collection.

Now, for the first time since the museum was closed in 1995, they are brought to light. They include the story of Maurice Alhadeff, a collector of Jewish origin who wanted to present African-made art to the West.

In a New York Times article from 1953, his collection was estimated to include 2,000 paintings. Alhadeff was amazed at “the miracle of whole groups of painters developing with no instruction and having seen very few oil paintings in their lives,” Albion Ross wrote.

Alhadeff gifted Haifa with four paintings by Bela Sara, a Chad-born artist who painted with his fingers after being taught by Pierre Romain-Desfossés in the Congo. The latter founded Le Hangar in Lubumbashi, then under Belgian control.

Sara quit painting when the Hangar closed after the death of its founder in 1964. Compared to other artists of his generation, such as Nigerian artist Ben Enwonwu, it seems Sara and others associated with Le Hangar were ill-served under the Belgian system.

Two current works shown at Desktop (curated by Yuval Saar) offer, alongside artistic brilliance, a poignant note.

In How to Enjoy Nature (go outside), Neta Moses dumps a laptop inside a fish tank and viewers see her waddle into the sea, holding the time-wasting technological marvel, about to dump it and reclaim her freedom.

In Thank You for Coming, Stay Forever, Roy Cohen filled a room with server-grade cooling fans. Cobalt, that crucial metal for all computer technology, is mined in today’s Congo.

If Paldi welcomed the sun and Kabiru dared look at it, Cohen hints at the immense efforts needed to keep cool the machinery we use to live – and the debt we carry to unseen others as we do.

Africa Calling. Facial Topography. Desktop – Three new exhibitions at the Haifa Museum of Art. 26 Shabtai Levi Street. Hebrew-language tours of Africa Calling are available throughout the Passover holiday. A lecture with Itkin (in Russian) will be held on Friday, May 2, at 10:30 a.m. Two more lectures will be held on Friday, May 16, and Friday, May 30, at the same hour.

Chorale Vie Nouvelle, a musical group composed of legally recognized asylum seekers from the Democratic Republic of Congo, will perform on Friday, May 9, at noon (90-minute concert). Call (04) 603-0800 to book. Visit hma.org.il/eng