Siddig el Nigoumi: A Potter in Exile
The British Craftsmen Potters Association’s shop and gallery (the CCC) is located on the opposite side of Great Russell Street from the main entrance to London’s British Museum. The CCC shows objects that many see as irrelevant in a post-industrial society. Hand-made pots of uncertain function and status that mimic the techniques and forms found in the latter but are otherwise utterly different in significance and meaning. The historic pots in the British Museum were embedded in the economic, cultural and social context in which they were made. Despite the ethnographic and anthropological isolation imposed by the museum they retain the authority and power that shared value and a common cultural language seems to bestow.
The museum’s African collection was radically reconfigured when it was rehoused in 2010. Formally located next to London’s fashionable Burlington Arcade as the Museum of Mankind, the director had to contextualize the artifacts by synthesizing their cultural origins, complete with a somewhat unconvincing reconstruction of an African village. The new display presents these magnificent works quite differently. The works are clearly displayed as art, not artefact – something reinforced by the dramatic lighting, the style of hanging and the inclusion of contemporary works that clearly signify sculpture, such as the ‘tree of life’ constructed from rusty Kalashnikovs. Some of the other modern work, however, seems relatively tame, lacking the power and material presence of the older work or the edge and rootedness of contemporary artists such as South Africa’s Nandipha Mntambo.
The theatricality of the gallery gives the collection a visual status it deserves but at the
