Origin Art | African Queens: Restoring History

Origin Art is pleased to present African Queens: Restoring History by Chantal Coetzee. 

The term ‘African Queen’ has become something of a pop culture honorific, a term not only of endearment but of empowerment, alluding to the strength, charisma and resilience of ordinary African women who rise above their circumstances with grace.

Cape Town-based artist Chantal Coetzee has produced a powerful new body of work whose subjects are literally African Queens, a collection of portraits of meticulously researched historical subjects, all of whom were Queens of their people in various parts of Africa in past centuries, comprising a fascinating social and political history consistently suppressed by subsequent generations of patriarchy and colonialism.

The title points to the key element of the exhibition. It uses allegorical portraiture as a means to establish a series of revisionist histories – more accurately, herstories – to address the active suppression and neglect of these important historical figures in most colonial and patriarchal accounts. The portraits of the Queens therefore act as African History Paintings, a subversion of the European painting genre used in the Enlightenment to valorise and document nobility and influential European figures.