Biography
Art can be a document, a diary, or a manifesto. The art of Hawa Kaba is all these and a kind of prayer as well. It is an art that gathers to itself history and memory, and the scraps of ordinary life, to form a vision that transcends its disparate origins. From images and materials imbedded in tactile fields, emerges a hard-won sense of energy and hope.
In her mixed media paintings, Kaba has found a means of expression that is both highly personal and inclusive of the world. She works with the raw material of her own immediate experience: the culture of her native West Africa, and the multi-cultural world of contemporary Canada. The abstract qualities of her work are a crucial ground for Kaba’s art of remembrance and convergence. She often creates a kind of altar of centered space that echos the vertical rectangle of the canvas. This “painting within the painting” is a privileged precinct, separated from the mundane world outside, where honor is given and memory preserved.
Ensconced in this floating zone may be found printed matter, xeroxed images, political posters, netting, leather, or textiles. The surface itself is highly activated both with the collaged material, and by pigment that may be ephemeral and atmospheric or earthlike with rough textures and the ability to hold within it the evidence of times past. One has a sense of the artist’s intuition at work, poetically and aesthetically, with the work arising directly in the process of its making.
Thematically, Kaba’s work ranges from the historical, to the political, to the social, to the personal. And she sees no need to maintain clear divisions between these categories. For instance, the piece The Last Emperors of Africa, combines photographic images of the last monarchs of West Africa prior to French colonization with government documents of the artist’s father. In other works, images of the African diaspora in the Americas echoes the story of Kaba’s own immigration. The image of women is a recurring presence, as dancers, activists, and mothers, are given recognition for their role both in society and as the heart of the family.
Many of the works suggest a kind of visual, non-linear diary of the melding of cultures: evocations of Africa through images and textiles, the artist’s Muslim heritage suggested by excerpts of the Koran in Arabic, Hebrew letters, along with mementos of her family and her travels. In a recent series of paintings, Kaba evokes the landscape of Africa through pure abstraction and the colors of both life and the imagination.
– John Mendelsohn
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