Antoine Tempe’s 'Dancers of Africa' In Newtown

Public spaces can undeniably offer a glimpse into the soul of a city, even the decrepit sterility of a commercialization which often drives the artistic components to private spaces. Crossing Mary Fitzgerald Square towards The Workers' museum, I was choked by a solemn contemplation about the Newtown of yester-years, not that I am a nostalgist, but rather mourning the depleted cultural ambiance that characterized the precinct. Yet, on this day something marvellous awaited in the form of a photography exhibition by Antoine Tempe, a major outdoor exhibition of amazing images from his world renowned Dancers of Africa series that transformed The Mary Fitzgerald square into an installation space that adjusted the photographic technical means to suit the aesthetic ends of dance. 

The photographer’s website describes “Dancers of Africa” as an exhibition of photographs collected over the past ten years. “Antoine Tempé has followed Africa’s greatest contemporary dancers. By getting ever closer to his subjects, his unmistakable style dives deep into the dancers’ vital energy. Caught in mid-motion, Tempé’s dancers show us the imperceptible: moments of grace invisible to the naked eye that are revealed only when stopped by the photographer’s talent as the subjects expose their souls in the intimacy of the studio."

Through the choice of exterior space, a sensory immersion interested in the physical space of the city and its emotional and psychological impact on the bodyof work is roused in viewers. As Kristine Stiles writes in Uncorrupted Joy: Forty Years of International Art Actions, Commissures of Relation: “Removing art from purely formalist concerns and the commodifications of objects, artists employing action sought to reengage both themselves and spectators in an active experience by reconnecting art (as behaviour) to the behaviour of viewers. Art Actions and their related objects move through the body of the artist in his/her material circumstances to the viewer in the social world…a situation in which the object draws viewers back to actions completing the cycle of relation between acting subjects, objects, and viewing subjects.”

With these works, Tempe seems to privilege sedimented images that denote becoming, as they do mortality or finality, in the cycle of life and death so readily acted (in the case of the exhibition, danced) out by the young performers. What remains tantalizing is the lightness with which the existential burden of the movements of the dancers is nurtured, coddled, tossed and relayed.

The images, reproduced on larger scale canvases become evocative sculptures that stand to impact the body and the senses through their sheer size and special choice of the exhibition. Scale by its nature, affects human psychological and behavioural responses, and for the gestures referenced by this exhibition the value of the associative processes in perception of macro images, and their sheer enormity border on a play of the myth of invincibility of the subjects within the borders of photographic portraits in relation to questions of gender and identity.

These photographs’ reach expands from gentle derelictions to harsher realities of dance as a physically challenging form of expression; from grim portrayals of jubilant expressions to human leftovers of various emotions communicated through the dance pieces captured.  As though abandoned to the metropolitan street, the exhibition becomes a migration from the traditional confines of the dance studio or theatre stage, the images encouraging a broader understanding and appreciation of the visual, emotional and social impact of photographic art.

“Offering the viewer a humorous gesture, a pouting mouth, a longing to soar or collapse, this is indeed today’s Africa revealing herself through this series of danced portraits. Similar to a lexicon of souls and bodies in a universe free from clichés, Africa mirrors herself through a decidedly modern and contemporary lens, while remaining mindful of her roots.”

Drawing attention to this contingency of the art object on social relations–in other words, of reconnecting it to life–was to transfer the contingent moment of the art object–the action of dance–into a public, shared experience. This strategy reveals the simultaneously exhilarating and mundane nature of the creative act, both enlivening the experience of the photographic work to the audience while also breaking apart the privileged experience of the creative act of dance performance, usually hidden away in the studio, to make it accessible to a broader public.

A close reading of Tempe's photographs provides the conclusion that photographed movement in continuum can propose and construct a personal sort of background space in so far as the dancers are prominent in their contribution to the image's overall signification. Once coupled with subjects who openly perform their gendered identities, these canvas allusions to common city signs and billboards are no longer popular urban marks whose particularity - whose very message - is easily overlooked. 

Instead, the coupling transforms (or unveils) the aesthetic of dance not only into a thing worth seeing and contemplating, but also into a signifier of gender and identity. The dancers' works alongside the photographer’s captive moments of choice, shape personal identity in contradistinction to prevailing attitudes informing the body and gender identity within a physical space that could be said to “dance” out its feminine and masculine compositions in the background.

From the confines of borders as ascribed by photographic framing of a body, we see in these images bodies treated as spaces without confines, yet within a space (the square) which is object in-its-self. The intricate question that soon arises is whether the original exhibitions subsisted better in interiors, and how this specific curation that lives beyond the walls of museums, will leave viewers almost chaotically emotionally invested in the subjects' creative acts, as well as the photographer’s own?

A variety of theories can account for the uneasy relationship between art and society, a kind of love-hate relationship that exists between the two since art is constantly critical of society, whilst all the while giving hope to the self-same society and providing images to back up its endeavours. Society, on the other hand, can support art, even whilst resenting both its distance from the everyday. 

And in a country that boasts more galleries than museums, privatization of expression and it objects/subjects which seems to be the main exacerbating cause of the art’s inaccessibility to its audiences and vice versa, will need to be redressed in ways similar to this exhibition. I wish for this type of use of public spaces to engender a re-examination of the shifting dynamics of public space and how artworks can either inspire or dissuade the masses from engaging with each other and their various modes of creative expression.

See more of Antoine's work at 

www.http://antoinetempe.com/dancers-of-africa-danseurs-d-afrique/