New York's Mayor Points to West African Architecture Show at MoMA
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has urged people to see a new exhibition on modern building design in West Africa at the Museum of Modern Art, known as MoMA, in Manhattan. He highlighted the show in an Instagram post, the photo-sharing app.
The exhibition, Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa, contains 400 works. It looks at architectural projects built in seven countries: Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria and Cameroon. Those projects were produced during decolonization, the years when countries in the region moved out of European colonial rule, starting in the late 1950s.
Martino Stierli and Ikem Stanley Okoye curated the show. Visitors will find architectural models, archival photographs and documents, and contemporary artworks alongside them. Architecture exhibitions often rely on models, which are small-scale replicas of buildings, to show designs that were never fully built or that have since changed.
Mamdani singled out one piece in particular: Indépendence Tchao (2014) by Kader Attia, an Algerian-French artist. The sculpture is made of rows of rusting index card boxes. According to ArtNews, the boxes came from a French colonial police headquarters, the office that once ran records for the colonial government. A sign on top reads "HOTEL INDÉPENDENCE," a reference to a hotel with the same name in Dakar, the capital of Senegal.
In his post, Mamdani wrote that the sculpture asks how far the visions of the independence era were achieved. The question sits at the heart of the show: what did the people who designed new cities and public buildings in the years after colonial rule set out to build, and what came of it?
For visitors, the exhibition offers a chance to see the region's architecture through its own plans and images, not only through the lens of colonial-era records. The show brings together plans, photographs and newer art in one space, and the museum's visitors can judge the results for themselves.
