A Reprise

In A Reprise, David Alekhuogie investigates Walker Evans’s photographs of African sculptures, provocatively remixing them into vibrant collages, and confronting the legacy of authorship behind Western perceptions of African art.

In 1935, Walker Evans photographed hundreds of African sculptures for the landmark exhibition African Negro Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Sixty-five years later, the Metropolitan Museum of Art presented Perfect Documents: Walker Evans and African Art, 1935, revisiting Evans’s tightly cropped images. But what do these photographs reveal—or conceal—about the connections between Africa and twentieth-century modernism? In A Reprise, David Alekhuogie investigates Evans’s photographs, provocatively remixing them into vibrant collages, and confronting the legacy of authorship behind Western perceptions of African art. Drawing upon the musical concept of the reprise—a performance of repetition—Alekhuogie stakes a claim to restorative ideas around Black antiquity by questioning our relationship to what we consider fake or original, art or archive.