AEGIS ECAS 2007 - View abstract

Panel	40. Contemporary African Art: A Rhetoric of Change
Paper ID	170
Author(s)	Pensa, Iolanda
Paper	View paper (PDF)
Abstract	The very concept of contemporary African art is tightly related to the history of its promotion. Exhibitions, publications, magazines and institutions have been launched to change the perception of Africa; to make its richness, liveliness and contemporariness both perceived and visible; to allow its protagonists to be integrated in the global market. Through this process of promotion, Africa turned from a territory into an identity. A heterogeneous and mutable one, each time defined differently according to the promoters who consciously or unconsciously got involved in this wide marketing project. Contemporary African art - promoted as such - is in fact fundamentally a brand, constructed and finalized to the import-export of a continent and its Diaspora. Its history is not only marked by the definition of its content, but also by the definition of its containers. To trace this other history, a reasonable system is to identify its footprints. Focusing on documentation, we may observe the exhibitions, publications, magazines and institutions, which enriched the definition of contemporary African art, and the methodology they applied. The great advantage is that we move from a historical approach to a historiographic one. Instead of defining what contemporary African art is, we define who defined contemporary African art: instead of nourishing a discourse on identity we focus on material evidence. It is obviously a reductive and faulty approach, but it has the advantage of producing and giving visibility to more composite and quantitative documentation rather than trying to define what contemporary African art actually is. The issue of material evidences is essential. Until a growing and diversified documentation becomes widely available, we will be permanently trapped in the necessity of producing background information. We will repeat and multiply promotional projects which, instead of moving on and experimenting new tools and modalities of rewriting history and representing its complexity, will constantly perceive the need to disseminate and didactically teach - mainly to the so-called West - that history and those histories which are still considered excluded and marginal. If catalogues are incomplete, reviews rare and research still limited, what we can do is ask. Witnesses can enrich the sources and, thanks to the Internet, it is now actually possible to produce contents through community-based processes. If we can not agree on Charlemagne’s coronation, we will certainly not trace a shared history (of the history) of contemporary African art. But this is a positive result. Today we need to multiply visions - as Rasheed Araeen would say - and not necessarily to reach a conclusion. Everyone - whatever origin, residency and training - has the inviolable right to have his/her own perspective on the world and to give his/her own interpretation. And online there is all the space and the freedom to do so.

Import-Export: History of the History of Contemporary African Art