LIGHTNESS OF BEING
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Malick Welli’s first major solo exhibition in his home city and coinciding with the tenth anniversary of his prolific career as an artist, ‘Lightness of Being’ is across-sectional career retrospective hosted at Galerie Atiss, Dakar. Welli tackles his usual esoteric themes of duality, spirituality, history, material culture and restitution— not of objects, but of memory, pedagogy and displaced identity. Welli is interested in the convergence religion with material influences; economics and power dynamics and how these devolve to shape visual culture. There is a questing for ecology and interdependence and how apparently independent events coincide and influence each other. Well I brings these material community concerns into sharp contrast with individual spiritual needs. Since the 1st (Christianity) and early 7th century (Islam) Abrahamic religions have spread almost unmitigated throughout Africa. Notions around African spirituality have largely been lost and demonised and with it a loss of aspects of tradition, memory, knowledge and history. Whilst religious ideas of concepts of cosmogonies seem fixed, culture and science are constantly being revised, always evolving and perpetually in a state of flux. At the very foundation of Quantum mechanics is the Uncertainty Principle which explains the limits of measuring position and momentum and in general the delimits of knowing, wherever observation is involved—for by observing there is always a shift in position and so forth. By what means do we measure, capture and transmit our sense of place, culture, loss and memory in the twenty-first century? Evidently through lens based media as manifested through photography and film. Perhaps this explains the essential shift for Welli from photoreportage/press documentary photography to staged mise-enscène style photography. For within with this canon he is able to be transparent about his own influences, biases and demonstrate a position and be clear about the delimits of the medium in capturing position and momentum shifts in culture. He is also able to deploy aspects of critical design aesthetics to set a stage to reexamine studio photography and their dialogical role and relevance in the twenty-first century Africa as seen in Homecoming. In Anonym(us) Welli deploys the performative and stylistic in addressing the transaction between humanity, objects and trees. The trees are significant, they predate us and in Senegal have a special reverence and spiritual presence and weightiness. Trees like humans have individual roots but through the Mycorrhizal network plant communities and forests are nourished underground connecting individual plants into what is colloquially referred to as the World Wood Web. Welli’s work reflects and contrasts the lightness of the individual questing with the community.
extract from the text by curator Azu Nwagbogu for the monographic exhibition Lightness Of Being at Galerie Atiss Dakar, October 2022
