REPRINT EIGHT CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN ARTISTS Okwui Enwezor

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EIGHT CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN ARTISTS

Okwui Enwezor and Octavio Zaya

IT HAS BEEN ARGUED that the emergence of in turn motivates the possibility of the plural complexity of modern experience. Anyone post-colonial discourse in the debate of in the discourse of cultures. who has experienced the 20th century in Modernism made the processes of hegemonic This possibility of the plural is what has places where there has been much violence, reversal possible, such that the cultural time and come to define the postmodem, and its cele- barbarism, genocide (both as products of legislative authority of the centers of power have bration of contingency, fragmentation, and colonialism and post-colonialism), can been irresolvably put at risk. rupture (which defy reconciliation), events scarcely avoid being incredulous about a This discourse disturbs the gaps occupied that are profoundly anti-Hegelian gestures. narrative which casts history as the progres- by an articulate enunciatory practice that poses They reinforce the incredulity of grand narra- sive realization of freedom. a challenge to contemporary thought. It is a tives - and indeed of all metanarratives. Such If art then is a practice of freedom, we must place where the supercessional language of objections represent not just a mere critique of equally insist on a subjective critical practice Modernism is peeled away and made mute in systems, nor are they exclusively internal which dislocates the ingrained cynicism and the stereophony of clashing tongues. This in philosophic objections to what now strikes us prejudice that mars the speech of the so-called many ways represents the fraught encounters as the myth of the progressive dialectic of the 'other,' which sequesters its agency outside the between cultures, in that juncture where Enlightenment Spirit. time line of history. We must insist on the furtive glances are exchanged in the Many of them are motivated by ethical- contingent analysis of all cultural discourses sprawling market place of modernity, which political considerations that address the that claim this freedom exclusively for them-

190 FlashArt JULY SEPTEMBER 2008 Flash Art ntr186 1996 selves. Following the discourse of power that the work of young and innovative artists and defines colonial relationships along the binary the so-called untutored artists. logic of Us/Them, Center/Periphery and which MOVING IN As Valentin Y. Mudimbe has pointed out, also sees the contributions of the dominated to the colonizing structure has resulted in a culture as either inconsequential or supple- dichotomizing system and with it a great mentary, one cannot avoid being suspicious number of current paradigmatic oppositions and skeptical of the possibility of achieving have evolved: "traditional versus modem; oral some kind of reconciliation with reality versus written; agrarian and customary through speculative comprehension. communities versus urban and industrialized In the contest of history, Africa is a lost civilizations; subsistence economies versus continent to many, a modern day Atlantis, highly productive economies." elusive in the vicissitudes of 20th century It is particularly pertinent to write about this cultural narratives. To locate Africa as an generation of African artists without arresting arbitrary soundbite in these narratives is to the comprehension of their work through the regulate its commensurability. Today African regulatory devices of institutional and curatorial art, and most emblematically contemporary framing. Such devices privilege this dichotomy African art, exists as a dehistoricized territory in historicizing Africa's contemporaneity. The teeming with fictive narratives. As the critic great temptation would be to continue to write and artist Olu Oguibe has vividly written, this on the practice of African artists in terms of is a contested territory "where the contempo- arguments that struggle to untangle their indi- rary African artist finds herself locked in a vidual aesthetic projects from the camivalesque, struggle for survival, a struggle against as marginal inscriptions written on the tattered displacement by the numerous strategies of endpapers of modernity. However, what regulation and surveillance."' It is a territory demands enunciation between stereophony where the West Okwui Enwezor and Octavio Zaya, Moving In.Flash Art has assigned itself the power of International 1°186, 1996. and muteness - is that wide space of unmedi- sanction and legislation while inscribing Opposite: IKE UDE, British Vogue and Cosmopolitan ated desire in which many contemporary artists African subjectivity in "the befuddled corners (from the Cover Girl series). 1994-99. from post-colonial cultures search for a voice. of obscurity and rudimentary episteme." Bili Bidjocka slyly steps out of the muteness In the frenetic events of late 20th century and stereophony of a false African speech and critical summations, Africa also remains, as in enters the dismal wreckage of the modern the past, a territory of the imagination, contra- ration as artists. These interests and philosophies metropolis. Today it seems a commonly dictorily occupying a place of origins and lack, slip away from the received and prejudicial accepted practice among contemporary artists a forest of excessive and aberrant signs that notions of Africanity (read: pre-modemity) with to show works of art that address social, political troubles the cultural logic of the Modernist which the Western establishment endows art by and economic conditions - an end-of-century project. But for those in search of genuine Africans of any period or generation. condition implicit in most postmodem art. knowledge of this area of contemporary In these works, scattered and subsumed If most viewers feel increasingly cultural production, it is these fictive within the prime networks of many critical alienated from this art, that supposedly histories that have come to repeatedly regimes, what we encounter are acts that aspire ignores the aesthetic idealism of prior art, it is circumscribe the potent artistic activities of a to agency, the desire for an extensive and because, as many socially and politically young generation of African artists. Those complex elaboration of what it means to live and engaged artists see it, those viewers need to be histories turn their practice into colonies of work as an African artist in a uniform environ- weaned from such idealism. Bili Bidjocka perversion that are magnified and projected ment that refuses their value through recourse to however, attempts to recover the vital aspects through the peculiar lens of occidental desire primitivization. The debates around which their of these two conditions by mobilizing the and its almost insatiable taste for the exotic. work is centered contend for and aim to prise historical conjunctions and the competing Turning to the practices of contemporary open a space that can interrogatively turn the demands of the social and the aesthetic. African artists and their relation to critical art subjective agency of the depersonalized into a Born in 1962 and resident in Paris since age discourse, we are jarringly confronted with fruitful discursive activity. Thus, they arrest the twelve, Bidjocka is a conceptual artist whose questions that dance around the possibility of an historical contingency which hegemonic dehis- work is positioned on that vital and contentious autonomous post-colonial enunciation. It is a torization imposes and turn it into an event of boundary between Modernism and postmod- challenge made keen in a set of questions posed disruption and empowerment. ernism. Mobilizing the political and social by Homi Bhabha when he asks "How is histor- Today contemporary African art is very dimensions of identity, and locating his practice ical agency enacted in the slenderness of much in the news. More and more exhibitions on philosophical inquiries into accepted narrative? How do we historicize the event of are devoted to its artists. But there is conventions of artistic activity and representa- the dehistoricized? If, as they say, the past is a something peculiarly distasteful about exhibi- tion, he pluralizes his forms and materials by foreign country, then what does it mean to tion opportunities that grant almost sixty turning to discarded objects already touched by encounter a past that is your own country reter- percent of their time and space to artists from or imbued with human hands and presence. ritorialized, even terrorized by another?" the collection of one Swiss collector. Jean In a recent work titled Explicit Lyrics Western attitudes willfully ignore or refuse to Pigozzi's collection which, with characteristic (1995), Bidjocka appropriates elements of engage these questions, choosing instead a regu- bombast and inelegant immodesty, bills itself rapture to address questions of emptiness and latory distance from which to pay hp service to as the largest collection of contemporary absence, of beauty and its limitations. To make a notoriously patronizing relationship. African art, has made the past few years a his work, Bidjocka, like Olu Oguibe and Reading the careers of the eight contempo- template for the abuse of privilege and access. Georges Ad6agbo, exits the confines of the rary artists discussed later in the text, who by Administered by his curatorial henchman studio to probe the fissures and submerged gaps accident of origin are African, what becomes so Andr6 Magnin, the collection privileges the of modem material entropy. A poet of obsoles- clearly articulated is the broad spectrum of kind of art that typifies what might be called cence, he plunders the streets of the metropolis, interests and philosophies evident in their matu- Outsider Art setting up a dichotomy between rescuing discarded objects and resituating them

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particularly in the work of French painter Eug*ne Delacroix and, generally, in postcards and photographs from the French colonial period in Algeria. From the terror and fear she experienced as an incarcerated child during the Algerian's war of resistance against the French, Niati's work brings a palpable disgust towards the distorted French colonialist images of Algerian women as exotic possessions, erotic objects and submis- sive creatures. Her work is also critical of the oppression of women in today's Algeria and to the feeling of betrayal by the Revolution's male dominated leadership after independence. Still, complex as her work already is, Niati invests it with multiple sources and artistic traditions, which not only assert her Algerian identity, and her pan-African devotion, in her use of West African decora- tive elements, but also - like her Western colleagues - her claim to styles, issues, influences and interests relate to her experience as an African artist living in the West. Ik6 Ude's work uses photocopies, photography and text which the artist then intercuts with commentary and turns into movie posters and magazine covers, or simply agitated walls plastered with wayward images pillaged from fashion magazines. This is appropriationist art of a high order. OLU OGUIBE, Unititled, 1994. O.A. Bamgboye, range of topics and issues, mixing their volatility In his recent multimedia installations Celebrate #3. and tensions to deracinate modernist exclusivity (video, photography, prints and performance), and possession of the right to discourse. Ud6 uses that most traditional of genres, self- in new performative roles. Dislocating the Untitled (1994), an installation of a mirror portraiture, meticulously disguising and photo- primacy of site and location, the works take in a heavy gilded frame that is roped off at a graphing himself in different identities (waif, on a new life, new role, and new meanings. certain distance from the viewer, suggests dandy, supermodel, masquerader, etc.), which The found objects serve as referents for the ideas about portraiture, self-observation, he then renders as virtual movie-posters or outside world, its memories, its absent and presence/absence, and framing as a metaphor magazine covers such as Vogue, Glamour, diminished bodies. for the reified masterpiece object and the Town and Country, Harpers Bazaar, Conde Caught between memory and absence, in commodified subject. Another untitled work, a Nast Travelers, Parents, etc. Vivid commen- the interstitial space opened by loss, the gleaming toilet bowl friezed with a shower taries such as "Who is Afraid of O.J." and emotional effects of his paintings and installa- curtain made out of the British Union Jack (the "Hysteria over the Death of the Noble Savage" tions are resolved in that space where personal Empire's mascot), evidences the false stiff are added as cover copy to further chart the experience can be invoked abstractly enough so upper lip that decorates the stoic faqade of a territory of power and dispossession. The artist as to be seen as the experience of another. pristine environment while revealing the abject appropriates and subverts the magazine covers Bidjocka appreciates that it is in the instance in nature of waste contained within. and posters that provide the blueprint for his which we feel empathy for, and share the pain One can argue that the hegemony of the interventions, activating a discursive platform and history of others, that we come closest to British empire also appropriates this role in its to engage sociopolitical issues. understanding our own pain. And yet, the colonial projects by posing its brutal annexa- Bound at first glance to the performative profusion of eggs and shaped-ball arrangements tions of overseas territories around the space of the Western drag culture, Ud6's in his paintings and installations suggest desire argument of a civilizing mission. A reading of ambivalent narratives of desire and manipula- for beginning and renewal. this work takes the obvious route of invoking tion are instead connected to "Adanma," a Olu Oguibe, born in Nigeria, works with Duchamp's urinal. But this is merely an inci- contemporary Igbo masquerade performance careful deliberation. Metaphors and symbolism dental art historical reference. The underlying genre in which men impersonate feminine are ruefully deployed and put into jarring but structure of this piece within Oguibe's oeuvre characters to gain access to wide ranging ironic juxtapositions in works fashioned both is of a more mediated and engaged interroga- discussions about gender identity and politics out of cerebral dispersions and concretized tion of structures of authority and domination. and to co-opt and control women's agency. employment of materials in an attempt to Above all else, Oguibe makes work that is Ud6, while replicating impersonation and rupture modernist notions of aesthetic inward- strikingly divergent from the concerns of post- masquerading from an African context, ness invested in objects that reek incompetently colonial cultural ideology and the cloying extends into territories of the Western media, of beauty. Here two polarities converge. charm of oppositionality. thus deconstructing the formation of an image On the one hand, Oguibe primes his Houria Niati was born in Algeria in 1948 of the African as exotic object and exposes the sometimes disputing productions with a cool and has lived in London since 1979. Since the fantasy embedded within the rigid limits of distanced rhetoric that plays on minimalist early '80s, she has been exploring the Oriental- history, identity and difference. iconography. On the other, his works unpack a ists' images and constructs of Algerian women, Folake Shoga's video work and installations

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embody a rather tremulous uncertainty, though thought, and since the driving force of the artist intersubjectivity with the viewers where the a more fruitful encounter with them reveals the is a compulsive desire to grasp reality, we can emotional and the speculative are bridged. In artist's sureness of vision. Working in the gaps say that he has a tragic approach to that reality this way, Bamgboye avoids any fetishizing, any that doubly marginalize and glorify women of which he endeavors to communicate, and that availability as object, deconstructing on the one mixed race descent as strange hybrids and his tragic urge outgrows an emotional hand the sexuality projected onto the black male exotic objects, Shoga, born in Nigeria and effacing of boundaries. body and, on the other, demythifying his own resident in England for the last twenty years, The interiors, self-portraits and landscapes role, as photographer and sitter. has instituted a contrapuntal and reflective take that Oladele Bamgboye renders as photo- A recent installation by the South African on issues of race and femininity. graphs, made by performance and props artist Kay Hassan, The Flight (1995), a mise- In order to trace the elusive cartographies of standing as repositories for cultural symbols en-scene that alternately compels us and mixed-race women's lives, their desires and and stereotypes. are also searching for a puzzles us, is another ruptured location of celebration of difference, the artist works from presence. From memory and identity, both emotional intensity. In encountering the work the ground zero of representation by using her blurred among the lights and shadows of on the floor, we are confronted with a made own body. She projects it into those unexplored cultural relocation, Bamgboye presents his mattress, some packages and parcels, old territories of the psyche that refuse naming subjects in their substantiality. He refuses, suitcases and a few bundles. There is nobody while still quivering with knowingness. Her however, to idealize them, trying not so much there except the viewer, but each of these experimental installation, Like Something Not to enthrall the real thing, as seeking to render objects has a personal feeling, a private story to Very Concrete (1994) employs video, film the reality of the thing, its existence, over and tell. On looking more closely, by the bedside, projection, found furniture and sound to furnish above its circumstantial characteristics, so as to we find an open bible, a bottle and some food- an environment in which viewers, in their expe- keep no more than its biting essence, as in stuffs on a beat-up suitcase. These might be the rience of the work, become integrated into the those shots which show a wound in the genital stuffs of the emigrant, of the displaced, of the work's setting as co-conspirators. area of the artist's body. relocated, of the political refugee, of the This dialectical work, set in a temporal and The artist departs from the literal represen- homeless, of anyone used to living on the move. spatial interdependency, uses the traditional filn tation of its subjects to rediscover them in a more We could not say from where or in what technique of quick cuts and edits, as well as real assault on the real, to create some sort of manner these obvious, familiar, direct objects narrative fragmentation, to intercut and splice came to be as they are. We may sense the footage and build dense but still insouciant absence though; and the anxiety and the pain. forests of signs. In Shoga's work, it might be OLU OGUIBE. Untitled, 1994. O.A Bamigbove, We may even come to realize that we are possible to probe attitudes posed around the Celebrate #3. invading the place of someone else. These confrontation between technology and tradition objects trigger in us the memory of an expe- in order to arrest and iterate the probable eman- rience that is not our own, of a condition we cipation of contemporary African art from would rather forget. But we can not evade academic formalism. their meaning: they are the badges of a culture The scars of Angola's recent civil war always searching for a home. pervade the multimedia installations of Antonio Of course, other contemporary African Ole, through its cormigated iron walls, its scrap artists, living either inside or outside the metal parts, its cinders and bone fragments, its continent, would have been equally pertinent in wrecked boats, its brick arrangements and an account confronting and exposing the self- lurking stuffed crows. As a site of desolation, defeating agendas of those who continue to this seemingly empty scenario enacts the profit from the farcical idea that contemporary blindness and deafening silence that Africa has African art is an exotic territory of untutored experienced within the New World Order of craftsmen ready to be occupied. things; but it also unveils those inner dwellings Amongst others, Ouattara Watts. Touhami where the distance between the 'other' and the Ennadre, William Kentridge, Willie Bester, self finds its resolution. For this is not a place David Koloane and Rotimi Fani-Kayode have empty of people, and the emotional impact already proven them wrong. And the big wave which this devastated scenario incites in viewers moving in, including Lubaina Himid, Candice might well reflect the fact that the urban Breitz. Joachim Sch6nfeldt, Fernando Alvim, wasteland is not the exclusive territory of the so Kendell Geers, Yinka Shonibare, Odili Donald called Third World countries. The compelling Odita and Belinda Blignaut are already engaged photographs of Angolan survivors that in a practice aimed at disrupting entrenched accompany Ole's installation indeed look as Western structures of reference. 0 much to the wreckage as to the viewers. Okwidi Enwe or is founder ind editor of the critical art "If at a previous stage my work focused on journal Nka: Joumal of Contemporary African Art. He is a survey of the traditional Angolan culture, Dean /fAcademic Affairs and Senior Vice Presidentat San extracting from there new signs, at the present Francisco Art Institue. Envezo7r was Artistic Director of Docuwnena 11, Kassel, GennanY (2002) andthe 2ndkJhan- moment I am more interested in facing art in a nesbisg Biennale (1996). He lives and works in New York more comprehensive, global, multidisciplinary and San Francisco. form," explains Ole, "where the aesthetic play N develops out of elements linked to collective Octavio ZgYa is a Neo York-based art criticand curator,and co-director at Atl'ntica International, the magazine of the memory in general and out of a certain critical Museiti CentroAtlanticodeArte Moderno (Canaoy Islands, capacity which seems to me to be necessary to Spaoin. reactivate in people." Despite their conceptual "Nose: sophistication, in the experience of Ole's 1. Olu Oguibe. NKA: Journal of Contenirmraftl Affican Art. Sping works, sensation takes precedence over 20021, t20.

TITLE: Moving In SOURCE: Flash Art 41 Jl/S 2008

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