| |
Africa 05
The last time that London saw anything like this [‘Africa 05’]
was of course ‘africa 95’, on which this latest initiative
appears to have been modelled. ‘Africa 05’ provides a useful
barometer of the commitment (or lack thereof) of major London galleries
towards the art of Africa. With the dubious exception of exhibitions
such as the Serpentine’s showing of South Africa’s William
Kentridge, ‘Africa 05’ reminds us that it has been a full
decade since many of London’s major galleries exhibited any art
from Africa. If London’s biggest galleries are only prepared to
take art from Africa seriously once every ten years, and if the ‘africa
95’/’Africa 05’ model is to be the one with which we
are saddled, then there can presumably be little genuine hope of African
art gaining lasting acceptance and prominence. Several months of feast
followed by a decade of famine doesn’t make any sense. Furthermore,
once-a-decade festivals are guaranteed to ensure the
continued marginalisation of art from Africa, assuming that we accept as a certainty
the debatable premise that contemporary African art has indeed yet to take up
a prominent place in the so-called mainstream.
One also has to wonder at the motives of those who continue to suggest that African
artists are not yet ‘firmly within the UK and international arts scene’ and
that there are caricatures of Africa that perpetually need
dispelling. Contemporary African art has had a vigorous if patchy presence within
the international art world for decades now. We can go back as far as we’d
like to, for evidence of this. For example, when I was still in short trousers,
Camden Arts Centre held an important exhibition of Contemporary African Art in
the Summer of 1969. More than two decades later, Cheri Samba regarded at
the time as being the most contemporary of Africa’s contemporary artists had
a major exhibition at the ICA in 1991. A decade on from that particular exhibition,
in the early 21st Century, and no biennale, no Documenta, no mega-exhibition
held anywhere in the world, is now deemed complete without at least a smattering
of African artists. Many exhibitions of contemporary or modern African art, too
numerous to mention, have been held over the past three or four decades. So where
does the idea of an absence of contemporary African art come from?
From another perspective, it is probable that ‘Africa 05’ will, at
best, do comparatively little or, at worst, nothing to facilitate or engender
much in the way of debate and exhibition activity within the continent itself.
Africa consistently finds itself being plundered for the gratification of those
living and consuming art in the West. There are of course one or two biennales
in countries such as Senegal, but these, compared to the blow-out that is ‘Africa
05’, are patchy, low budget undertakings. Contemporary African art has
become an exported commodity no less than its traditional counterpart. We have
grown used to seeing many of the finest pieces of traditional or historical African
art in museums in Europe and the United States. Likewise, over the past ten or
15 years we have grown accustomed to seeing much of what constitutes contemporary
African art in the leading art galleries of Europe and the United States. Furthermore,
in a relatively short space of time we have come to expect ongoing debates about
the nature of contemporary African art to originate and to take place in centres
of the art world such as London and New York, rather than anywhere within the
continent itself. ‘Africa 05’ might exist for our gratification,
but London doesn’t really need this festival of African art. But cities
such as Lagos, Accra, Lusaka and Johannesburg surely could benefit from a regular
flow of
exhibitions by the continent’s most important expatriate(d) artists.
Africa 05 is taking place at various museums and galleries across London over
the course of 2005.
The full version of the above text was published in the March 2005 issue of Art
Monthly
|
