Kule Ingozi
featured artist
curated by artists24.net
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United Kingdom
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/artist_profile/Kule+Ingozi/44446.html%20
category: Painting
technique: Mixing technique
Statement:
"My work is not an attempt at healing, the things I have seen and done cannot be cured, or erased that easily. I am merely a billboard for a world brainwashed by greed." Kule Ingozi 2006
Bio / Resumee / Statement:
I spent my childhood running from conflict until I was captured and forced to fight. My youth ended just before my 8th birthday, when my family was slaughtered before my eyes. I was left as dead, but unfortunately I regained consciousness from the smell of my family’s rotting corpses.
My school of terror taught me to shoot with small and automatic and heavy weapons, to survive without food or water in hostile terrain; to maim, torture, kill, and things that are best not spoken. I have killed men, women and children under powerful narcotics. It taught me there was no god to help, only us.
I escape to London in 2004 along the slave routes from Africa through Europe that you refuse to see, and committed any crime that would allow me to travel to England, and buy the drugs that numbed me from what was contained in my thoughts. London was my dream, but it became just a continuation of my nightmare
You do not run away from desperate men, they will follow you until they smell your life drawing away. I found a refuge in the darkness, with the living dead. Drugs were cheap and our only friend, everything else an enemy. I don’t know why I began to paint, I have drawn since I was a child, but this was different.
My first works were in the stolen spaces I made my home. Derelict buildings left to rot by the banks that overshadowed East London. I stole paints and other materials, and used found objects as canvas, creating painted stories of the crimes I had committed, before burning them, and returning them back to the oblivion they came.
I have drawn since I was a child, and continued through my ordeal in my homeland, but my painting career evolved during the three years in London. I have been asked whether my work is not an attempt at healing, but the things I have seen and done cannot be cured, or erased that easily. I am merely a billboard for a world brainwashed by greed.
Activities:
My first gallery show was at Meskalito Gallery in East London in 2007, where I worked with the Mexican artist and curator Raul Pina and showing my ‘Idols of the Cave’ painting series. Since then I have been working on some new ideas with the English curator Alfred Camp.
My first collaboration with Alfred Camp was ‘Ein Grosser Schwartzer’, the Austrian colloquial term for a black coffee, and used a coffee shop as a metaphor to address the effects of western consumption on the African continent. Initially staged at Alfred Camp Gallery in London in 2007 the show will tour to other locations.
The project was has been a big challenge as I had to think as a curator for the first time, not just materially. I learned most that art is more than the object, but how objects work with each other to make more than is physically there. I used this experience with my last show at the Royal Academy in London.
In February 2008 I curated ‘Cockaigne Culture’ at the Royal Academy in London. ‘Cockaigne Culture’ was a new art commission for the Modern Masters Drawing Fair and by Breughel’s depiction of the mythical land of plenty, and my own experience of visiting London.
The last few years in London have been a great challenge to me, and I have resolved many material questions, but I have also felt confident to argue for my own understanding of concepts, and feel that I am beginning to win through.
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The Enemy's Child
Painting
Oilpainting
50 x 28 cm
2008
Price: 540 Euro
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Bitter Presence
Painting
Oilpainting
50 x 28 cm
2008
Price: 540 Euro
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Marabou Stood
Painting
Oilpainting
50 x 28 cm
2008
Price: 540 Euro
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Self Portrait
Drawing
58 x 48 cm
2008
Price: 640 Euro
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Like a tree split by lightning
Drawing
58 x 48 cm
2008
Price: 640 Euro
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Carnivorous Vulture I
Drawing
58 x 48 cm
2007
Price: 640 Euro
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Like a tree split by lightning
Drawing
48 x 58 cm
2008
Price: 640 Euro
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Idols of the cave
Painting
Mixing technique
180 x 110 cm
2007
Price: 4.500 Euro
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