>>PREVIEW
DOUGLAS CURRAN: THE ELEPHANT HAS FOUR HEARTS
Runs until September 3
Main Gallery (Art Gallery of Calgary)
Photographer Douglas Curran knows how to keep a secret. It’s a secret that lies somewhere between outerspace and a male society located in Central Malawi, in Southeast Africa. But he’ll let you in on part of it: "Everything is connected through ancestral spirits."
Known for his documentary photography, the Vancouver-based photographer has a keen eye for the unusual. With past projects that range from documenting Canada’s national parks visitors, to eccentrics with an unfailing belief that aliens exist, he is there to offer his reassuring presence and a form of credibility that can exist only through the relative, permanent records created with a camera.
In his exhibition, The Elephant Has Four Hearts (the title inspired by a metaphor of the society he photographed), on display at the Art Gallery of Calgary, this pattern is reversed, with the subjects seemingly selecting Curran, as if they have a greater plan for his ongoing photographic efforts.
The result is the best work ever created by this documentarian, with imagery that moves beyond the idiosyncratic to stand as an important accounting of a people that have largely been ignored. As Curran recently told a group gathered to hear him speak at AGC, "This has been an incredible journey for me."
His journey began in 1992, when on assignment in Zimbabwe to take photographs for a film. It was there he happened upon a temporary structure made from feed sacks, where a group of ritual dancers had gathered. He took two photographs.
Three years later, he returned to Africa in an attempt to discover what he had witnessed. His travels led him to Malawi and a French priest who introduced him to Chief Chitule, a now deceased elder of the Nyau society of the Chewa people. That introduction began a kind of photographic pilgrimage to document the entities of a semi-secret society marked by the dramatic, sometimes humorous, masks the men wear as part of their rich spiritual and cultural life. Curran’s photographs provide a glimpse into the broader lives of the Chewa, a pre-literate people whose history and contemporary struggles are noted on the elaborate masks the dancing spirits wear.
"These people believed their ancestors came from outerspace," says Curran. "The masks are an instrument to reveal, not conceal."
And what the masks tell the viewers of Curran’s 60 photographs is a compelling tale that speaks of village life, threats from colonialism and the even more pressing scourge of AIDS.
A place the United Nations describes as "one of the poorest countries in the world," Malawi through Curran’s eyes is a nation full of spectacle marked by ritual that’s inspired by the otherworldly.
Using natural settings as backdrops for the masked subjects to pose, the photographer skillfully maintains the integrity of the spirit entities. "Secretly, everyone knows these are not spirits," says Curran. "But everyone acts as if they are."
In this collection, the Chewa spirits are typically found staring into the camera’s lens, in what amounts to the joining of the ancient and modern – renderings that surely will take on even greater significance as time marches on, and the Chewa continue facing the threat of extinction from disease, displacement and demands to conform into Malawi’s mainstream.
Curran, who has been initiated into the Nyau society, stops at one point in his presentation and says, "Of the most sacred piece, there are two things. These are things I can’t say, I won’t say." |
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