If you click on the photo you'll be led into my Flickr account where you can see a bunch more photos from Africa Remix, a fabulous exhibit of contemporary African art currently on display at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in Joubert Park, downtown Jozi.
But I won't say too much about the exhibit because the Globe's Stephanie Nolen does it a lot better here.
If that doesn't work (it's pay per view, I think), read below.
JOHANNESBURG -- There was drilling and pounding, and acres of bubble wrap being hauled out of crates. The air was pungent with the smell of fresh paint. Crews at the Johannesburg Art Gallery were in a dignified frenzy late last week, installing the most important exhibit the South African gallery has ever shown.
And in the middle of the chaos, Simon Njami materialized, the curator from central casting in a black turtleneck, a black wool scarf with fringe draped just so and, bien sûr, very dark glasses, although it was dim in the hall. "Good morning," he purred, with 48 hours to go before the grand opening, and then turned on one stylish heel to lead the way through the semi-assembled shape of his masterpiece.
Few have done more for African contemporary art than Njami, a Cameroonian-born critic who founded the influential Paris-based journal Revue Noire and who conceived this show, back in 2000, as a way to shake the developed world out of its belief that African art consists of carved wooden masks, woven baskets and beads. There is not, let it be noted, a solitary bead to be found among the hundreds of works that make up the exhibition Africa Remix. There is, however, plenty of video, some sound installations and a piece that incorporates Chinese calendars, razor wire, miles of cable and an inflatable sex doll.
The show has, in the past three years, toured from the Centre Pompidou in Paris all the way to the Mori Art Museum in Japan, breaking attendance records all along the way. But Africa Remix had never come to Africa - most of these works had never been seen in Africa. In fact, a large show of contemporary art like this has never been held anywhere on the continent before.
It took painful fundraising, but Remix is now here, in one of the cities that can claim the title of continental cultural capital. Njami walked through a room or two before halting in front of Zoulikha Bouabdellah's Dansons, a cheeky video of the artist's midriff, as she ties on red, white and blue scarves decorated with a belly dancer's spangles - and then starts to shimmy to the tune of La Marseillaise. Bouabdellah was born in Moscow to Algerian parents, and lives in France. "Is she French? African? I'm sure you take the point," Njami said - that purr again.
It's a recurring theme both in the show and in debates about it: Who gets to decide who is African? Is Njami himself - who grew up in Geneva, lives in Paris and teaches in San Diego - an African? Of the 85 artists exhibited here, a third are living outside of Africa; some were born in the diaspora. Do they count? In whose eyes?
For many of the artists - a dozen of whom flew to Jo'burg for the Remix opening - the question is highly charged. "When people make [contemporary] art, they can't perceive it as being African - they say 'it's not really African,' " said fiery Fernando Alvim, an Angolan with three large, insouciant canvases in the show. "People are thinking that Africa doesn't need sophisticated processes of art and culture" - he threw his hands in the air - "yet America has deep problems of poverty but it has the Guggenheim!"
Remix involves a staggering array of media - from large-format photographs to multimedia futuristic cities painstakingly constructed by Democratic Republic of Congo's Bodys Isek Kingelez to a show highlight, The Room of Tears by Cameroonian Bili Bidjocka. The room has 30 centimetres of water on the floor and a scattering of concrete stepping stones. Video screens along the wall show loops of pained faces muttering indistinguishably. As people walk through the piece, their footsteps trigger different sounds.
Although it is organized around three themes (Identity and History, Body and Soul, and City and Land), Remix lacks an overall coherence. In his desire to show the breadth of contemporary art by African artists, Njami may have inadvertently fallen prey to one of his own critiques, lumping it all together just because it is "African" - when in truth the line drawings of William Kentridge of South Africa have little in common with the projector-and-mirror creation Dancing with the Moon of Goddy Leye of Cameroon.
In the end, what ties the show together is a strong flavour of irony and a subtle sense of being observed. Alvim mocks this explicitly, with a large canvas bearing the words "We are all post exotics" and a mirror that reflects the observer.
Njami, making his rounds through the exhibition, stopped in front of an enormous, curvaceous body imagined for Osama bin Laden, naked but for his turban and his beard, splayed on a patchwork American flag overlaid with Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Great American Nude, by the Sudanese artist Hassan Musa (inspired by La fille allongée by 18th-century French painter François Boucher) is about Africans looking at America, but with a sly poke. The America of flags, Harleys and pornographic terrorists, of course, is no less accurate than an Africa "of people with bones in their noses." Njami, being a Parisian curator, quoted Jean-Paul Sartre on the subject. "It's the shock of being seen."
Yet the intended target for this shock is not just the developed world; Njami aims Remix just as much at Africans. "You have a lot of preconceived ideas in Africa about Africa. Very few Africans travel within Africa - they know very little."That curiosity may account for the mob scene two days later, when the show opened. The Johannesburg Art Gallery was, in the apartheid years, located beside a park in a graceful corner of the heart of the city - but when the white rulers fled with their money at the dawn of democracy, downtown became the territory of illegal immigrants from across the continent and gangsters.
So the sidewalk barbers and broom peddlers looked on in astonishment on the last Sunday in June as lines of Mercedes Benz SUVs battled to get into the gallery parking lot; eventually most people just gave up and left their cars in the gridlock, pouring in the gallery doors. Inside, heavyweights from the new black cultural elite gave speeches and toasted each other while township mamas with their babies tied on their backs mingled with wide-eyed, blue-haired ladies from the old gallery-going crowd and curious children surreptitiously reached out to finger the art. Half of the works were invisible behind the throng, but
everywhere, there was an electric conversation - "Did you see ... ?"
The gallery's curator, Clive Kellner, looked sweaty and ecstatic. He first saw the show in Europe and vowed he would get it to Jo'burg - but he has an annual exhibitions budget of $4,200, while bringing the show here cost nearly $1-million. Kellner threw himself into a frenzy of fundraising. Njami, meanwhile, had always intended for Remix to be exhibited in Africa, but found that was easier said than done.
"From the beginning, I knew I wanted the show to tour three countries in Africa - one in the north, one in the central [region] and one in the south - but this is a show that is a bit expensive and complicated. You need a big building, a crew, infrastructure and money - conditions that only [Johannesburg] could fulfill," Njami said. There were political considerations, too - a museum in Cairo wanted the show, for example, but he rejected it because the curator is a political appointee of President Hosni Mubarak and, Njami said, he views glorification of the president as his chief task.
For Kellner, there is a transformative value in having the show here in Johannesburg: The gallery has recruited a raft of unemployed young people to train as guides, provided art education to the builders who put in place the exhibition space (and invited them all to the opening) and mounted a large program to bring local school groups to the show. "There's a much bigger cultural process at work," he said.
As Njami muttered as the last works were uncrated, it's about time. "If you want to understand African art history, you go to London, Paris and New York. It would be a pity for our grandkids to [have to] go to London, Paris and New York to understand what is being produced now."
No comments:
Post a Comment