REPRINT EIGHT CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN ARTISTS Okwui Enwezor

REPRINT Moving In 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

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