Two Steps at a Time chronicles late artist Hamid Zénati’s ferocious output – spanning the immense variety of disciplines and cultural influences that drove and defined the artist’s 60-year career.
As I push open the door and step into Hamid Zénati: Two Steps at a Time at Nottingham Contemporary, I can hear music. Somewhat counterintuitively, but irresistibly, I follow the strains of experimental jazz through the two main galleries to arrive at a sitting room, the seating around the edge to mirror an Algerian majlis. Here visitors can sit and listen to a ‘radio’, which cycles through a selection of tracks from Zénati’s own CD collection.
It’s here, listening to Ray Charles, Manu Chao and Habib Koité, that I first get a taste of what Sheyda Aisha Khaymaz – an artist, curator and academic specialising in modern and contemporary art from North Africa and who contributed a number of archival materials and texts to the exhibition – calls the “defining characteristic” of Zénati’s work.
“Syncretism and transculturation, the amalgamation of different cultures and traditions,” they say, were the bedrock for this prolific, self-taught artist of the diaspora. Born in Algeria in 1944 under French colonial rule, Zénati came of age as the country gained its independence in 1962, leaving Algeria to settle in Munich a few years later. It was in Germany that his artistic practice emerged and his “diasporic aesthetic” developed.
Only the second-ever institutional exhibition of Zénati’s work, following his solo debut at Munich’s Haus der Kunst in 2023, Two Steps at a Time occupies two galleries of Nottingham Contemporary. Throughout these spaces, we encounter Zénati’s eclecticism, both in terms of drawing influence from different sources and deploying a dizzying range of different media.
The first gallery introduces Zénati’s work across ceramics, fashion, textiles, photography and wearable sculpture, via the objects in the flesh – dishes and other vessels, found in flea markets and painted by the artist, and fabric paintings – together with personal photographs. The second space is an immersive explosion of colour, inhabited by Zénati’s textile paintings, which hang from the ceiling at varying heights and create a dynamic architecture, swaying gently as visitors move through them.
It is perhaps the photos that give visitors the clearest sense of Zénati’s hallmark ‘all-over’ style: a compulsion to cover every surface and break boundaries between art and material culture. He made, for example, his own creative interventions when sending postcards, adding stickers and punching holes or painting his own designs; he created carnival-esque headpieces out of feathers, flags, straw and paper. Another of the images was taken on the island of Bunaken in 1994, when the artist decorated a canoe, naming it Lapisan (‘layers’ in Indonesian) for its layers of paint adornment.
Such an eschewal of what Khaymaz calls a “the established hierarchy between fine art and applied crafts” is also evident in the ways in which Zénati presented his art. He improvised exhibitions by draping his fabric works on bannisters in public buildings, displaying them on a clothing line in a friend’s garden or taking them to Grenoble’s flea market. Even the frontier between land and ocean was to be broken, as one particularly striking photo attests, with the artist taking his fabric artworks out onto the seas of Indonesia and holding them up so they were animated by the sea breezes and billowed in the wind.
Such performativity was foundational to Zénati’s approach to displaying his work. Parts of his photo archive on show in Two Steps at a Time illustrate the artist’s own participation in the activation of the works, showing him wearing his headpieces and performing to the camera. This dimension to his oeuvre is honoured at Nottingham Contemporary, with members of staff intermittently donning textile works and wearing them in the gallery.
The influences on Zénati’s aesthetic were as diverse as the media in which he worked. “A broad spectrum of diaspora aesthetics emerged from imagining Africa away from home,” Khaymaz explains. In Zénati’s case, his visual logic encompassed Northern African inspirations (urban Algerian, for instance) and Amazigh symbols, as well as Sahrawi and Fulani influences, creating a “pan-Saharan dialogue between different cultures in the region”. Beyond Africa, the Japanese kimono, the set designs of French artist Sonia Delaunay (known for the blending of folk motifs with avant-garde abstraction), organic forms in nature such as shells, and Indonesian ornamental design all fed into his aesthetic. “He was drawing from a variety of sources, not only local and Algerian, but going as far as the Caribbean,” says Khaymaz, noting that Zénati had an obsession with collecting, picking up innumerable cookbooks and folios on flora and fauna, for example. “His works defy a single historical or even local origin.”
Nonetheless, Two Steps at a Time does feel rooted – geographically, historically and in the lived reality of Zénati himself. The colour and shape of the plinths in the first gallery are designed to mirror the sand dunes of the Algerian Sahara; as visitors walk among the hanging painted textiles, they walk the streets of Algiers, the works aligned with a map of a neighbourhood where Zénati once lived. The (relatively sparse) labels point out the practical – rather than solely aesthetic – purpose behind his penchant for working with fabrics: without permanent residency in Germany, the artist returned to Algeria each year, with textiles a mobile medium transportable by suitcase.
Sitting alongside the objects, Khaymaz (in collaboration with Nottingham Contemporary) has provided archival materials and texts that situate Zénati’s works within their temporal and socio-political context. The postcolonial period saw artists – most of whom were formally trained in fine art academies in France, unlike Zénati – strive to develop a modern Algerian painting genre that reflected both their cultural heritage and the socialist ideals of the state. It was a process fraught with disagreement and even aggression between artists. Khaymaz posits that Zénati was likely influenced by the avant-garde artist collective Aouchem, who claimed modern Algerian art to be part of a multi-millennial and indigenous heritage, born in the mountains of Tassili, a region rich with prehistoric art.
The strength of the exhibition’s contextual rooting might just be in its illumination of the very impossibility of truly grounding Zénati. The artist left very few signed pieces and rarely provided extensive contextual information on his work; accordingly, few objects in the exhibition have specific labels or explanations. Being simply left to look and wonder, then, is perhaps to experience this free-thinker’s works – in their awe-inspiring variety of form, medium and colour – on his own terms.
