Clashing textures, contrasting prints and bright and bold colours: these are the three main visual elements that immediately strike you while looking at Atong Atem's photographs. Yet, there's more behind her images currently part of an exhibition at Messums in London (28 Cork Street; until 28th August, the images are part of the Emerging Talents programme at the gallery).
The Ethiopian born, South Sudanese Melbourne-based photographer and writer explores indeed through her images issues of identity. This is a topic she has confronted and tackled since she was a child: the artist arrived in Australia when she was six years old, after living as a young child in the Kakuma refugee camp in Nairobi, Kenya, where her parents settled when they flew the second civil war in South Sudan.
Atem confronted therefore the issue of identity from a very young age and tried to find a medium to express her feelings and thoughts and to celebrate the way young immigrants combine their own background with the culture in which they grow up. After studying first architecture and then fine art at Sydney College of the Arts, Atem started analysing migrant narratives and postcolonial practices in the African diaspora through her photographs.
One of Atong Atem's inspirations remains sci-fi writer Octavia Butler, author of the "Patternist" (or Patternmaster) series (who focused in her novels on issues of identity and transformation), but her visual references come from vintage African studio photographers such as Seydou Keita, Malick Sidibé and Philip Kwame Apagya. The artist's Studio Series features indeed Atem's Melbourne-based friends, celebrating their culture and countries of origin in recreated environments similar to the settings of these iconic African photographers.
Atem fills these spaces with colours and prints, kitsch objects like plastic flowers and cheap vases (the artist is very much inspired by 1950s kitsch interiors) and reminds us that the people she portrays could be considered as living in a sort of liminal space, their identities suspended in an "in-between" state, between one nationality and the other. They are therefore the result of layered existences, again symbolised by those fabric panels layered in the background that create Atong Atem's maximalist aesthetic.
The people in her portraits take pride in their origins but they are open to other cultures as proved by the combination of traditional African clothes and headdresses, wax-print textiles and fabric panels in bold clashing colours and patterns or vintage styles from the '60s and the '70s (that their parents may have donned), mixed with Western inspirations (a denim jacket matched with a wax print dress for example).
There are different elements in these pictures featuring the artist's friends and family members - storytelling, performance and costume - and they all contribute to create a fascinating narrative.
In her celebratory self-portraits Atong Atem plays at transforming herself à la Cindy Sherman, looking like a benevolent and mighty goddess from a fantasy world, maybe from one of her beloved sci-fi stories: her face is often painted in bold shades like bright blue or aqua green, or decorated with golden stars, gems and pearls forming swirling arabesques on her skin.
These studies about her own identity could be conceived as representations of the strength and fierceness of the artist, who boldly stares at the camera, almost challenging the viewer.
Will we have to wait long to see a collaboration between Atong Atem and a fashion house? No, probably not: the artist already exhibited at Vogue Fashion Fair in Milan, so you can bet her maximalist aesthetic and her multi-layered and multi-cultural narratives will soon become an inspiration for some fashion designers out there. In the meantime, you can discover more about Atong Atem in this podcast that features an interview with her on Messums London site.
Image credits for this post
All images in this post by Atong Atem, Courtesy Messums London
Ego 2 , 2019
Ilford smooth pearl print
60 x 90 cm
Adut and Bigoa, 2015
Ilford Smooth Pearl Print
84.1 x 59.4 cm
Adut, 2015
Ilford Smooth Pearl Print
59.4 x 84.1 cm
Ajok, 2015
Ilford Smooth Pearl Print
59.4 x 84.1 cm
Akuot, 2015
Ilford Smooth Pearl Print
84.1 x 59.4 cm
Self Portrait in Gingham no.2, 2019
Ilford smooth pearl print
90 x 63.57 cm
Dit, 2015
Ilford Smooth Pearl Print
59.4 x 84.1 cm
Morayo, 2015
Ilford Smooth Pearl Print
84.1 x 59.4 cm
Paanda, 2015
Ilford Smooth Pearl Print
84.1 x 59.4 cm
Self Portrait with Pearls, 2019
Ilford smooth pearl print
90 x 60.31 cm
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