The Smithsonian African Art Museum’s newest exhibition invites visitors to descend from heaven, through purgatory and into hell. Spanning all four levels of the museum, “The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists” takes Dante Alighieri out of Italy and into Africa, bringing together more than 40 artists from 19 African nations and the diaspora. Dividing their works into each of the three possible afterlives, curator Simon Njami chose to focus on the universal nature of Dante’s epic poem rather than its Catholic overtones. The goal is to “take [heaven, purgatory and hell] out of the cradle of the church and to make them something everybody can live with,” he says. Njami hopes the touring exhibition, which opened at the museum last week, will call into question people’s preconceptions about the afterlife, Africa and African art. “I like people to be uneasy at an exhibition,” he says. Elena Goukassian (for Express)
Heaven
‘To Sleep’ from ‘The Binding’
Christine Dixie, 2009
Hell
Film still from ‘Beatrice and Virgil’
Berry Bickle, 2013
Hell was the most popular category among artists in the show. “60 to 65 percent of the artists wanted to be in hell,” Njami says. Zimbabwean artist Berry Bickle’s contribution — a video loop on two screens — features the characters who helped guide Dante through hell in “Inferno”: Beatrice, a woman Dante was obsessed with for most of his life, and the Roman poet Virgil. Dressed in traditional Zimbabwean attire, Beatrice is a ghost-like presence, while Virgil guides viewers through the hellish history of Zimbabwe.
Purgatory
‘The 99 Series’
Aida Muluneh, 2013
National Museum of African Art, 950 Independence Ave. SW; through Aug. 2, free.
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