基本説明
French ed. also avail. (see our card no. 4646321, EAN 9788874399468).
Full Description
The book opens a window onto
Africa's symbolism, confirming that the mind naturally computes
according to two parallel codes: the outer code of sensory awareness,
and the inner code of subjective awareness. More than two hundred images
of Zimbabwe's historical art, taken during a window of time when it was
still possible to find it, reveal how art is expressed across life as
the language of spiritual and cultural meaning - a way of ensuring that
such meaning was never far from individual awareness.
The majority
of the images were taken in the more remote "communal lands", regions
"set aside" for Africans during the colonial era. It was here that an
African sense of identity, culture, and history survived colonialism and
the effects of a malign dictatorship. Most of the images date from the
period 1998 to 2015, during which time Duncan Wylie, the artist who took
the photographs, travelled back to the country of his birth to
undertake what he describes as a "work of transmission and a valuable
insight for the non-African world toward a deeper appreciation of
African art forms, and a wider perception of the possibilities of art, a
world few have experienced."
Zimbabwe offered a unique
opportunity to look back a thousand years into African symbolism via the
Great Zimbabwe ruins. This medieval city, built in stone, reveals an
architecture and style that is as unique to the culture as it is rich in
symbols, from its enigmatic solid stone tower and massive walls, which
had no defensive function, to the stone "Zimbabwe Birds" that are a
symbol of the contemporary nation. A highly symbolic statement was to
photograph the ancient stone birds (dating back to the height of Great
Zimbabwe's power in the 1350s) outside a museum context and on the ruins
where they once stood. The work represented by the images and text is
the result of a partnership between the artist, who took the images over
a period of 17 years, and the author, who began a life-long involvement
with the arts of Zimbabwe and sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s, as
curator of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. But accolades must go to
the communities themselves, the subjects of these images, for without
their dedication to the project of recording their culture in the face
of its increasing disappearance, this book could never have come into
being.
