CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/24/2020

Questions of power and identity in 'Samuel Fosso: Autoportrait'

Featured image, from Samuel Fosso’s 2008 African Spirits series, is reproduced from Autoportrait, a new release from Steidl and the Walther Collection, New York, and the first comprehensive survey of the artist's work. Since the 1970s, Fosso’s self-portraiture and performance have challenged identity in the postcolonial era. In this series in particular, Fosso takes on historic images of 1960s revolutionaries, from Kwame Nkrumah and Nelson Mandela to Angela Davis and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.. In an interview with Okwui Enwezor, Fosso discusses the underlying concept of African Spirits. “While all the series I have done can be understood by viewers as discrete and self-contained, and therefore different, to me there is one unifying theme behind all of them—and that is the question of power. I am particularly interested in the role that slavery played in the history of Africa… I see slavery as connected to all these questions of freedom, liberation, colonialism and power. To me, slavery was the source, and I wanted to deal with it in a really deep way. My goal was to restage key images and figures in this history from King during the American civil rights movement to Kwame Nkrumah, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Aimé Césaire during the independence and liberation of Africa. To my mind, all these struggles had one thing in common, and that is the history of slavery. And these figures were committed to the idea of freedom for black people in order to reclaim their culture and human dignity.”