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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Eschewing stereotypes: Strategies of artists and curators
| Panel |
33. Visualizing Africa, from there to here, between now and then.
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| Paper ID | 264 |
| Author(s) |
Heissenbuettel, Dietrich
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | Stereotypes tend to be long-lived and hard to eradicate. They depict “others” in a summary way that is more often the contrary of oneself than what the other really is. Thus the African continent, that seems uniform only from a European point of view, becomes the contrary of Europe, but in turn, through colonial rule and postcolonial media, Europe has the power to define the image of Africa to the extent that Africans have to struggle hard to re-define their image.
The artworld as a privileged locus for the production of images is not immune to these tendencies. In the early era of decolonization especially, African artists have tried to present themselves as the “other”, looking for typically “African” features, thus confirming against their own will biases they tried to overcome. In the same way, until today, even well-meaning curators frequently cannot escape the following double-bind-situation: They may want to come away from prevailing prejudices, still they look for the “typical” in African art, which is all the more appealing the more it is “different”. As a result, stereotypes tend to be confirmed instead of questioned.
This paper will try to draw a historical framework of how African art has been presented since the early postcolonial era and, secondly, how contemporary artists and curators try to overcome the stereotype. One point will be that the image of “African art” is still mainly being produced in the “West” and not on the African continent itself, and how in recent times, many African artists try to create resources not only in Europe, but also within their own countries. But there is also a mutual understanding with well-informed European agents. The issue seems to be no more “identity”, but rather in how far the artist or curator has reached a certain level of reflection.
The paper will try to demonstrate this by focussing on recent work of artists and curators both from Germany and from the African continent. A comparison of their individual choices will allow to compare the view of African artists on Germany and vice versa, as well as the way African art is presented by German and African curators both in Germany and on the African continent.
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