Wax is a brightly-coloured cotton textile with sophisticated patterns, printed using a wax technique. Also known as Dutch wax or African print, it has been used in fashion and contemporary art for several decades. First produced in the mid-19th century, wax has a rich history that has spanned several continents. Originally made for the Indonesian market, but rejected as aesthetic, it then became African by adoption, as it was massively used for practical, symbolic, aesthetic and cultural purposes, first in West Africa and then in the rest of the continent. It is also European, as it was first produced industrially by a Dutch colonial company.
Associated with a stereotypical vision of Africa that does not reflect the diversity of local cultures and traditions, it is also controversial for having marginalised traditional African textiles such as Ankara, Aso Oke, Batiki, Bogolan, Kanga, Kente, Samakaka and Sweshwe, the most famous of which come from the four corners of the continent.
But over the last ten years or so, wax has gone from being an ethnic fabric to a trendy fabric, deeply integrated into the wide range of clothing expressions that define contemporary African cultural identity, and has become an alternative to somewhat repetitive Western fashion. Now, more than ever, wax is in vogue around the world. On the street and on fashion catwalks, in interior design and in contemporary art galleries, wax has established itself as an expression of multiculturalism, globalised modernity, African flamboyance and coolness, reflecting the continent’s complex links with the rest of the world. Black models wearing fashion designs or traditional ceremonial costumes are set against a background or backdrop of contrasting colours or colours similar to their clothes.
For several decades, contemporary African and Afro-diasporic photographers and artists have been using wax as a post-colonial model. Their works tell the story of different historical periods and different identities that Africans have adopted as a result of slavery, colonialism, the impact of Western commodity culture, migration and globalisation. These works of art simultaneously acknowledge, critique, reclaim and affirm African identity and iconography.
Here is a selection of contemporary photographers and artists who offer us creative responses to key historical moments and the imaginaries of tomorrow’s Africa.
In photography:
- The famous Malian portraitist Seydou Keita (1923-2001) began his work in Bamako in 1948, transforming his courtyard into a studio, taking just one shot per session, using only daylight with his camera. Only discovered in the West in the 90s, his images offer us a glimpse of Malian high society at the time, with women dressed in their finest outfits to match the wax fabric décor, and tell us about Mali’s commitment to Western modernisation.
- The Kenyan photographer Thandiwe Muriu makes self-portraits with her body wrapped in kaleidoscopic and disorientating backdrops, in bright and surprising colours, highlighting her limbs, her hair and her eyes hidden behind glasses made from recycled everyday materials, including sieves, plastic bottle tops and flat spools of thread, created in collaboration with local artisans and manufacturers, questioning the viewer about what is consumable. Each work reinvents the traditions of portraiture, rethinking what it means to be a modern woman.
- The Senegalese photographer Omar Victor Diop is one of the leading artists of his generation. From a very early age, his attraction to photography, literature and history has provided the terrain for the expression of his imagination, which he materialises in a mixture of artistic forms ranging from collage to textile design (with wax in particular), from fashion design to creative writing, through his series Wax dolls, Studio of vanities and Hopeful blues. “One day, a teacher asked me: ‘Why don’t you make more African art? I didn’t know what he meant, so I went to the market and asked about wax. These fabrics are as multicultural as I am. And using them is like a joke: look at what typical Africa is, knowing where it comes from”, he says.
- The Beninese photographer Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou – who set up his country’s first photography school – immortalises the inhabitants of the port city of Porto-Novo. Through his series Through an African Lens, Untitled and Musclemen, which combine tradition and modern influences, he creates carefully composed portraits in interior spaces, with traditional Yoruba costumes in bright colours contrasting against mud-brick walls, voodoo ceremonial masks and Portuguese-style colonial buildings, highlighting the historic role of his home town as a gateway for the colonial slave trade with Brazil.
- The Zimbabwean photographer Tamary Kudita traces the history of her ancestors from a region colonised in the 19th century by the Dutch and then the British, focusing her lens on black figures, creating portraits of bodies illuminated, making them hyper-visible today when they were once invisible. His subjects wear clothes reminiscent of the European aristocratic era, but in a wax version. “I explore the role of African fabric in reshaping people’s historical and cultural identities,” she explains.
- The Moroccan photographer Hassan Hajjaj, resolutely pop, kitsch and playful, mixes his Moroccan heritage with the cultural scenes of his adopted London. He poses his models against a backdrop of wax with irresistible irreverence and infectious good humour. He also has fun countering the expectations of the Western gaze on North African populations, following the example of his Kesh Angels, a gang of veiled biker women who pose with pride in the streets of Marrakech.
- The French photographer Floriane De Lassée‘s Mama Benz series tells the story of the African businesswomen who dominated the local economy thanks to the wax trade. Becoming Africa’s first female billionaires, they were able to import the first Mercedes Benz cars to the continent, hence their nickname. Digitally mixing portraits of these talented women with a wide variety of wax fabrics, her subjects appear as palimpsests, proudly symbolising the beauty of Africa.
In the visual arts:
- The Nigerian-British artist Yinka Shinobare is himself an example of the complexity of post-colonial African identity. Accepting the labels of “Yoruba”, “Nigerian”, “African” or Black British, he combines post-colonial African fabrics with Victorian signifiers to comment with wit and humour on “the tangled relationship between Africa and Europe and how the two continents invented each other”. He warns against locating African ‘authenticity’ in materiality and wax in particular.
- The Ghanaian-born African-American artist Bisa Butler uses cotton, wool, muslin and wax in bright colours and bold patterns to present detailed portraits of black people on quilts. The materials used and the themes explored connect the American subjects to their African roots and tell visual stories. “I use very bright and imaginative colours to transcribe the emotions of my characters, to reflect their personality, mood and temperament,” she explains.
- The Nigerian artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby creates portraits in intimate domestic scenes or lush gardens in faded but dense and vibrant colours, superimposing images from fashion magazines onto photos of Nigerian celebrities, samples from her family’s photo albums onto pages of Vlisco catalogues. Her experience of cultural hybridity remains the major theme of her artistic work. “My desire as an artist is to focus on black life, my experience as a black woman and the complexity of black life,” she says.
- The Nigerian artist Marcellina Oseghale Akpojotor creates patchworks of colours, shapes, reliefs and textures using scraps of multicoloured fabric. She creates intimate portraits in scenes of everyday life, in a cacophony of patterns arranged in loose undulations and tufts on refined backgrounds painted in acrylic. Although the textiles are of Dutch origin, they have a strong cultural significance, establishing a shared visual memory.
- The Congolese (DRC) painter Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga explores the intersections of colonialism, tradition and globalisation in his homeland. In bold figurative paintings, he dresses his subjects in traditional Mangbetu clothing and replaces their skin with black circuit boards, a reference to coltan (a metal ore) exported from the DRC for use in modern appliances around the world. By rendering both the beauty of traditional Congolese culture and the symbols of historical and contemporary trade and exploitation, the artist captures the dissonance within her society.
Books and exhibitions:
- The various must-have publications by French anthropologist Anne Grosfiley, a specialist in African fabrics.
- The Fancy exhibition, recently held at the Musée du Quai Brandy in Paris, presented a panorama of commemorative loincloths printed to mark major political and historical events, which over the decades have become veritable tools of communication and mirrors of contemporary sub-Saharan African history over the last fifty years.
- The prestigious Vlisco 1:1 One to One exhibition at the Helmond Museum in 2017 told fascinating and colourful stories of colonialism, manufacture, sale, trade, culture, design and art that have made up the one hundred and seventy-year history of the iconic Dutch fabric brand celebrating its link with Africa.
Text by Christine Cibert.
