New spaces for art and artists in Africa

African Arts, Summer, 2009 by Dunja Hersak

While new spaces and exhibitions of contemporary African and diaspora art are sprouting throughout the northern hemisphere, this globalizing phenomenon has had a certain spillover in Africa. But what is the nature of these new spaces down south? What messages do they project and whose visions of the world do they embody?

In Luanda, a place where I spent much time between 2000 and 2003, there were many who called themselves artists of various types. Exhibitions and performances were sporadic, poorly advertised but inevitably recorded on camera by the national TV network. Whether in a restaurant, cafe-bar, the beach, a private abode, or some official cultural venue, the glaring lights were everpresent, tracking potentially significant figures for history. The civil war was waged until 2002 and Luanda was a city characterized by oil-wealth ostentatiousness, on the one hand, and devestating impoverishment, on the other.

Within this fragmented urban milieu, the petrodollar opened the doors to a few flashy, privately owned spaces where only a small portion of the elite came to admire whatever was the flavor of the moment, as well as themselves. But these slick, lifeless venues were not the sites of particular action. Dialogue, exchange, confrontation, and even conflict resounded behind Luanda's crumbling walls, the ruins of the past. Among these, UNAP (National Union of [Plastic] Visual Arists), founded in 1977 on the Soviet model, and Elinga, a multicultural alternative space, are cases in point. Both are housed in the types of decaying places ravaged by time, neglect, and socio-political circumstance (Fig. 1) that Jean-Loup Amsell claims fuel and nourish the Western imagination (2005:39). These, he says, are the places of exploration and adventure that contrast to the museified, sterile, and lifeless Western settings (ibid.).

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It is of little surprise that the editorial team of the Revue Noire emerged from the exploration of this context with one of the stars on their list of Angolan artists, namely, Paulo Kapela (Fall 1998), who was subsequently sent orbiting by Njami with the "Africa Remix" blockbuster. In 2007 we even found one of Kapela's installations carefully assembled at the "Luanda Pop" African pavilion of the Venice Biennale.

From the outset Kapela was identified as a self-made "artist" and recognized for his so-called multimedia "installations" that include religious images, political posters, plastic flowers, candles, etc. (Fig. 2). Like other visionaries such as Georges Adeagbo or Zinsou (Fall and Pivin 2001:130, 140), and in keeping with the trend of aesthetisized recycling of scrap, Kapelas work was exported from the underworld of Luanda, framed within different spatial perimeters, and recontextualized for Western museum consumption. It is strange that Njami and Pivin were at odds atone time precisely with those "curator-experts" (i.e., Jean-Hubert Martin and Andre Magnin during "Les Magiciens de la terre") who magically transformed craftsmen into artists (Amselle 2005:141).

Njami was also the one who reacted, more recently, to the "fictionalization of reality" by the media; but what about the fictionalization of Kapela (2005:13)? The Kapela I knew, or Maitre Kapela, as we called him, lived in the dungeons of UNAP, with cracking floorboards and walls, mildew, and the total absence of modern facilities. His quarters were accessed via a side door leading into a small courtyard full of debris and the stench of urine. From there, a wide staircase led through a series of vast spaces in an advanced state of decay and full of all manner of accumulation. Among this assortment were Kapela's installations, and in the smaller areas, walled off with cardboard, cloth, corrugated iron, and other salvage materials, his mattress. Yes, this was indeed the place where he slept and not a part of an installation or any other aesthetic construct of his "studio-sanctuary," as Revue Noire editors speculated (Fall 1998:15).

Kapela was certainly a well known figure in central Luanda. He provided hope and guidance to young aspiring artists and musicians; he sheltered the street boys who came to sleep off their drug doses as well as the policemen from the nearby station who flopped out to smoke or sniff whatever.

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So who was this man before the arrival of Revue Noire? He was, in fact, a fugitive, a displaced person in his own country. He is a Mukongo from Uige, in the north of Angola, and as such an "undesirable" to the Dos Santos regime. He is principally Francophone and speaks and writes Portuguese with difficulty. Kapela's installations are private altars, as noted correctly by Revue Noire (Fall 1998:15), but they are also, and more importantly, protective devices that have allowed him to survive and to stave off harrassement. They are accumulations of diversified and opposing images and objects that combine past and present, official and unofficial, re-ordering and re-creating another, personalized and safe spatio-temporal "elsewhere".