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Hassanein Hiridjee, the businessman who established Fondation H, Madagascar’s first private contemporary art foundation in 2017, comes bounding into the building in Antananarivo, the capital, right on time, a phone glued to his ear. He is casually but neatly dressed in a short-sleeved white shirt and cotton trousers, his grey hair and beard close cropped; he looks much younger than his 49 years.
“I had the idea of the foundation in 2012 or 2013 after talking to artists,” he says, now seated in the library. “They told me I had to help them because they lacked everything — they don’t have the space to exhibit and they don’t have proper galleries, they can’t even buy proper materials. I was already buying works from them, but I realised I had to have a more organised structure, and this was how the foundation was born.”
Fondation H, which runs programmes supporting artists and exhibits artworks, has been housed since 2023 in an elegant colonial-era building that still bears the inscription “Direction des Postes et Télécommunications” just visible on the outer wall. Wooden-framed balconies look over an internal courtyard, which is where Hiridjee and the minister of communications and culture inaugurated the foundation’s second show, Memoria: récits d’une autre histoire (Memory: accounts of another history). It features 22 artists from Africa and the African diaspora, and of the more than 49 works on display, 15 belong to the foundation, with the others borrowed.
The foundation owns around 1,000 works, 90 per cent of them by African artists or from the African diaspora. Some are displayed in Hiridjee’s home, some in Axian offices and in the foundation itself. The collection includes works by artists such as El Anatsui, Abdoulaye Konaté, Ibrahim Mahama and Zanele Muholi and a considerable number by Madame Zo, a textile artist who was the subject of the inaugural show last year.
Hiridjee is the heir to a family company founded by his father and renamed Axian in 2015. It is present in the telecoms, energy, real estate and financial services sectors and has 12,000 employees in 14 countries throughout Africa, Hiridjee says, with a turnover of $2.5bn in 2023. He was named chief executive of the year in 2022 by the Africa CEO forum.
He started collecting art when he was at business school in Paris and started attending auctions and galleries. “The first work I bought, in my early twenties, was by Chan Sicpo, and I soon found that talking to artists was a source of inspiration for me. I was listening to them, talking about the problems of our country. It was challenging — the artists were right brain, I was left brain, it was very interesting.”
The challenges for artists are real; Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world (GDP per capita was less than $520 per capita in 2022; the US equivalent is more than $76,000). It has no art school, only a couple of galleries; there is no public museum to see contemporary art; about 90 per cent of its artists are self-taught, say local artists. So Hiridjee set himself the objective of building an art ecosystem. “I would say I’m trying to organise an art scene, practically from zero,” he says. “Although not totally from zero because there were existing talents — and when you’ve got talent, you’ve got everything.”
Hiridjee has major ambitions for the foundation, which may include creating an art gallery to go alongside it in the future. But given the country’s economic circumstances, should creating an art ecosystem be his priority?
He nods. “We also have an extensive humanitarian programme through my company’s Axian foundation, which intervenes in education, healthcare . . . we have built 200 schools with the government, there are 50,000 children going to school every day thanks to the programme . . . Yes, there is so much to do and we are addressing that as well.”
But he insists that the art is important too. “I’m proud that the foundation is a real space and a living institution, with proper programmes anchored in the local ecosystem. You can build a nice space and have some shows, but if people don’t come, then nothing will happen,” says Hiridjee. More than 110,000 people visited the first show. “People are coming and the foundation is alive; the magic is there.”
‘Memoria: récits d’une autre histoire’ runs to February 28 2025, fondation-h.com
