Abdoulaye Konaté: Power and Religion at Rivington Place

Abdoulaye Konaté, Pouvoir et Religion (Power and Religion), Window commission at Rivington Place, 2011, Textile. © the artist. Photograph: Kate Elliott

Next week is your last chance to see Abdoulaye Konaté’s unusual window commission, Pouvoir et Religion (Power and Religion),  at Rivington Place.

The seven-metre-wide textile was created especially for the vast window space of the Rivington Place arts space in Shoreditch.

The work, made up of around 4,000 strips of fabric depicting the feathers of guinea fowl, digs deep into the symbolism and traditional craftsmanship of Konaté’s native Mali.

South of the Sahara, the guinea fowl is a common character in tales, legends, theatre and literature. Konaté’s piece purports to reflect on Malian writer Massa Makan Diabaté’s comment that ‘the guinea fowl spreads out its colours over its plumage and man keeps them in his heart’.

For Konaté, this saying can be used to interpret the ambiguous positions that heads of governmens take with respect to religion.

As the exhibition opened earlier this month, the Hackney Citizen asked Konaté about his work:

HC: You have chosen the theme of religion and its relationship to politics. Why does this theme interest you?

AK:  It interests me because I find today the relationship between religion and power is very ambiguous. We get the impression powers are scared of religion and religions are titillating powers as if they were to test them. Therefore you see the emergence of fanaticism.

HC: What does the guinea fowl mean to you in this context?

AK: I get my inspiration from anecdotal stories, proverbs and sayings. These are traditional stories that analyse society in relation to the bird. The relationships that people make between the behaviour of the bird when it is in a group, and with human society.

Konaté is a well-known artist who was nominated for the 2008 Artes Mundi Prize. Other recent exhibitions include Documenta 12, 2007 and Africa Remix, Contemporary Art of a Continent in 2005 at the Hayward Gallery.

Pouvoir et Religion (Power and Religion)
Abdoulaye Konaté Window Commission 2011
Until 3 January 2012
Rivington Place
Rivington Street
London EC2A 3BA