“I was friends with a porn star when I moved back to Los Angeles, and we spent a very depressing Christmas together,” Massoud Hayoun, an investigative reporter turned painter, told me steps from the entrance of The Halo in New York City’s financial district.
We’re standing in front of Hayoun’s painting “Christmas Under Capitalism” (2023), featuring a sullen blue man wearing pink eyeliner and sitting in front of three glowing stripper poles. It’s one of the first works that visitors to this year’s 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair will see if they enter through the venue’s Pine Street doors. Held annually in London, Marrakech, and New York City, this year’s Manhattan edition is located in a circular 30,000-square-foot ground-level event space downtown after previous stints in Chelsea and Harlem.
Many of the VIPs who were invited to preview the show ahead of its May 8–11 run were intimidatingly fashionable. I found myself among wide-brimmed hats, pastel blue suits, patterned pants, and lace skirts. These were by far the most artful outfits I’ve seen while covering New York City art fairs over the past year.
“Porn is one of those things I find whimsical, lovely, and fun, but would it exist if we didn’t live in an extremist capitalist society?” Hayoun asked me rhetorically as we perused his paintings, which are heavily influenced by his Tunisian and Egyptian heritage, on sale at Larkin Durey’s booth for $5,000 to $6,000.
Hayoun described 1-54 as a place where exhibiting artists from the African continent could engage in “collective conversations about solidarity and appreciate each other’s creativity.” The fair’s 30 galleries — including exhibitors based in Paris, Brazil, Japan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Bahamas — showcased more than 70 artists from across the African diaspora. Each booth, a publicist for the fair told Hyperallergic, cost anywhere from $10,000 to $25,000.
Excerpt from a piece by Isa Farfan
