nowhere land

This work was first shown in the exhibition Constructing Paradise, curated by Dieter Buchhart at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York. The show exhibited contemporary reinterpretations of notions of the "exotic". Taking iconic artworks such as Paul Gauguin's Noa Noa and Oskar Kokoschka's Tiger Cat as starting points, the show assembled a diverse range of work from early contemporary to more recent artistic responses to the modernist imprint of desire and fantasy on contemporary culture. Particularly when juxtaposed with hyperbolized images of modern-day advertising, the exhibition explored the psychological impacts of the modernist image on image culture and the Western psyche.

Moussa Kone's two large ink drawings entitled nowhere land were printed in the form of a panoramic map for tourists and distributed among the exhibition visitors. A nautical chart on one page lead the readers to an island, that was described in detail on the other page of the map: there, figures from well-known art historic images of the Brazilian Tupi people were combined with footage from video stills of 1980s Italian cannibal movies. It was the poet Oswald de Andrade, who declared in 1928 in his famous Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibal Manifest) a strategy of getting rid of the colonizer's culture in Brazil through an exotic practice that was long attributed to the indigenous people of the continent.