Curio and Craft as Commodity and Exchange in the Work of Daniel Halter

Abstract

The Zimbabwean born artist Daniel Halter turns towards traditional forms of craft such as soapstone sculptures and woven mats to uncover narratives of loss, displacement, and destruction experienced since Robert Mugabe has come to power. These forms of craft are traditionally seen as curios sold to tourists as a document of an authentically “African” experience, but in Halter’s deployment they capture the day-to-day struggles of Zimbabweans under the Mugabe regime. For example Halter makes woven mats that contain farming maps referring to government redistribution policies that led to famine interspersing them with Zimbabwean currency now valueless because of hyper-inflation. In the practice of crafting these works, Halter documents a loss of production represented in the maps and a decline of value represented in inflated currency. By using craft as a narrative tool, specifically invoking the curio and its disposable function, I argue that Halter narrates the politics of loss, reshaping the dialectic between Africa and the West, undermining a singular and ahistorical image of Africa traditionally encoded in these crafts.

The question of value becomes central to Halter’s work, conceptualizing a mode of exchange between Africa and the West. In a body of work surrounding Zimbabwe’s presence in British rave culture, Halter produces a series of soapstone sculptures, a traditional form of Shona craft in Zimbabwe, entitled Stone Tablets/Bitter Pills where he carves the form of ecstasy tablets now enlarged to the size of landmines. An accompanying piece, Untitled (Zimbabwean Queen of the Rave), juxtaposes images of British youths dancing to Zimbabwean singer Rozalla’s mid-90’s hit single “Everybody’s Free (to feel good)” with protests in Zimbabwe. In these works Halter frames craft production to consider how an image of Africanness is transmitted between Zimbabwe and the West, making an implicit critique of the image of Africa articulated through its craft production. Specifically, using ecstasy tablets, a hyper inflated commodity in the U.K. (drawing association to the freeness referenced in Rozalla’s song), now crafted as a bitter pill in the form of a land mine, causes one to question who is actually free to feel good. To do so through the image of a hyper-inflated commodity returns to the bits of detritus collected in Halter’s woven mats, where it becomes clear that traditional guarantors of value in the form of money no longer function in present-day Zimbabwe.

Making use of Walter Benjamin’s treatment of the outmoded and the image of the chiffonier, or rag picker, as a witness to history, I argue that Halter’s work through the function of craft critiques the devalued form of the curio as a symbol of Africanness. At the same time Halter’s work constructs an implicit dialectical engagement between Western nations and African alterity, which repurposes these outmoded and discarded commodities and modes of production into something that again has value, preserving its status as art object, a document of loss, and a mode of remembrance.