In David Alekhuogie’s latest presentation with Commonwealth and Council, the artist gathers a remix of works from A Reprise, a series that co-opts the 1935 Walker Evans commissioned photographs of African sculptures featured in the exhibition African Negro Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Western artists like Evans and collections have long maintained a fascination with African objects that borders on embarrassment—photographing them, cropping them, stripping them of cultural context, and re-photographing them into modernist abstraction. A Reprise intervenes in this obsession, remixing its archive without claiming a clean, oppositional break or “taking back” to recuperate the past.
