UpClose_why are you angry?

UpClose: a new series of publications focusing on major works from the substantial collection of S.M.A.K, Ghent (Belgium). For each book in this series, a prominent international critic is commissioned to produce a thorough analysis of a seminal piece from the museum’s collection. The book takes the shape of a close reading where all aspects of the work are exhaustively analysed, ranging from its genesis and technical specifications to the cultural context in which it took shape, its position within the artist’s oeuvre, and its reception.

UpClose #2 Nashashibi/Skaer – Why Are You Angry?

1896. Back in Tahiti where he will stay until his death in 1903, Paul Gauguin paints a work with the enigmatic title, No te aha oe riri (Pourquoi es-tu fâchée? / Why Are You Angry?). The painting depicts a group of six women before a hut, with a palm tree in the foreground. Hens and chicks are part of the scene. The only disturbing element is the question posed by the title. Art historians have debated the work’s meaning for over a century, linking the disparate elements and striving to decode the evocative scene – made during the French colonial era, when Paris was ‘the capital of the nineteenth century’, the time of the world Fairs, of cinema and other media that seemed to shrink the world – by interpreting what is strange through what we already know.
2017. Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer travel to Tahiti to make a film with an equally beguiling title, Why Are You Angry? They use the English translation of Gauguin’s original title for the painting, given to the work a 120 years earlier. In this era of de- and post colonisation, woke and #MeToo, how do two female artists, using media that looks and works radically differently to that available in Gauguin’s time, see the island on which the French master spent his twilight years? They see it in fragments. The result is ever-changing. They reverse the male colonial gaze. The artists want viewers to interpret the work, made by and with women, for themselves.

ISBN: 978­907567917

100 pages

25 euro

Published by S.M.A.K., December 2025

Distribution: Exhibitions International