Allegory of Construction I
2009
Mixed media
Site-specific installation, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution
António Ole achieved international acclaim in the 1990s for a series of site-specific installations made of locally found materials. He transformed a wall in Chicago with an assemblage of gilded moldings, windows, a picket fence and other unlikely items. In Düsseldorf he used German street signs and corrugated metal sheets enlivened with bright colors. For this exhibition Ole takes his work in a new direction, one that builds on his past successes, links the shanty towns of Angola to the junkyards of Washington, D.C., explores issues of territorialism and responds to the central space he shares with the Congolese artist Aimé Mpane. While Mpane uses paint to convey the appearance of the African urban setting of Kinshasa, Ole employs local detritus to evoke the creativity of Luanda's musseques-vast stretches of shanty towns built from abandoned materials. Rather than recreate a specific structure, Ole harnesses the inventive spirit of the impoverished homeowners to direct his aesthetic juxtapositions of discarded maps, metal and other junk. This installation continues on sublevel 3 of the museum, where Ole clustered "totems" fabricated from locally found debris.
I like to work with my hands with things that come from nature, matter you get from the junkyard, or even from a cook.
-António Ole
Allegory of Construction I (Original sketch)
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