Viye Diba: African art
Middlebury — First thing last Monday morning,after a brief period of decompression following his 36-hour flight from Dakar, Senegalese artist Viye Diba began installing his work in the Middlebury College Museum of Art exhibition Environment and Object–Recent African Art.
Diba’s installation, which references the densely packed urban landscape of his nation and others on the African continent, uses street litter of a wide variety, photographs of Dakar, and flotsam and jetsam of global dispersion, particularly items wrapped in ubiquitous plastic containers, to replicate an urban environment unlike any to be found in Vermont.
Titled “Nous sommes nombreux, et nos problemes avec...” [or, “We are numerous, and our problems with that...”], the installation has been described as a “chaotically ordered vision of density.” It is a key to the artist’s interest in urban geography, a subject in which he holds a doctoral degree from the University of Nice, France.
Following a visit to Rwanda in 2004, Diba has been probing what he calls the packaging and industrial processing of contemporary Africa in works of art in all mediums.
Diba’s one-week residency is part of the Museum’s programming to accompany the exhibition currently on view. Overflowing into the lobby of the Mahaney Center for the Arts, Environment and Object-Recent African Art is one of the most visually exciting and provocative exhibitions mounted at the Museum in recent years. Not since contemporary art from Latin America was shown in 1997 has so much of the museum been taken over by works of art on loan.
Included in the show are works by El Anatsui and Yinka Shonibare, international art celebrities of great distinction, and works from private collections in Europe as well as Africa. Diba has installed his work at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College (where the exhibition originated) as well as at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. His campus visit will be highlighted with meetings with students in the African Student Group Umoja, students and faculty in African Studies, French, Geography, History of Art, and Political Science (elections in Senegal are imminent).
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