Meschac Gaba was born in the largest city of the former Republic of Dahomey (present-day Benin), a year after the former French colony gained independence. He belongs to the generation of African artists that are working towards the creation of a post-colonial identity. Through traditional craft and European aesthetics, Gaba depicts Africa’s history as being scarred by oppression and exploitation. He also focuses on the fragile political-economic realities of the present-day, and probes exchanges between his own continent and the West. Gaba examines how cultural identity is constructed; how trade networks function; how value is created and lost; how African art is viewed; and the role played therein by museums, artists and audiences. Meschac Gaba plays with political, artistic and personal codes, as well as forms of expression, in a critical but humorous way.
During his residency at Amsterdam’s Rijksakademie in 1997, Gaba developed the first phase of what would evolve into his ambitious Museum of Contemporary African Art (1997-2002). When visiting European museums, he encountered a ‘different reality’ that seemed to exclude African artists, himself included. He responded by building his own conceptual museum, comprising twelve interactive, transplantable rooms. It provokes the Western art world and aims not only to highlight African contemporary art, but also to analyse the raison d’être for borders between the two worlds. Gaba’s rooms are new types of spaces, wherein togetherness, study and play, and life and art merge. His surreal, sometimes wry and often playful museum is autobiography, novella and protest rolled into one.
The museum’s first space is the Draft Room, a collection of ceramic chicken legs – a reflection on the overproduction of food in Europe – and devalued banknotes, amongst other things. Money as an instrument of power is a common motif within Gaba’s practice. One by one , the rooms in the museum started to be shown in international museums. Several resemble the typical spaces found in Western museums, such as the Library, which contains stories from Gaba’s childhood, books donated by art institutions, old computers powered by bicycles, and a coffin with the voice of a storyteller, after the African saying, ‘When someone dies, a library is lost’. Gaba also designed a ‘Museum Shop’, which he filled with creations made by artist friends, including gadgets crafted from Benin’s banknotes. Gaba combines his conventional-looking museum spaces with examples that break the mould, such as the Art and Religion Room. In this installation, he references the ancient intertwining of art and religion across cultures and polytheism in Benin. A single home can contain both voodoo artefacts and a Christian figurine, for example. Gaba married Dutch curator Alexandra van Dongen at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2000. Photos of the ceremony, wedding certificate, wedding dress, guest book and gifts can be found in the Marriage Room.
Gaba also develops individual artworks in the spirit of his ‘Museum’. For instance, Sweetness (2006) is a model of a fantasy city made from sugar cubes, uniting familiar buildings worldwide into a utopian, global but eminently fragile city. This kind of work typifies Meschac Gaba’s preoccupation with the legacy of slavery and the African diaspora, as well as his fascination with architecture and intercultural exchange.
