The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994

African Arts, Autumn, 2002 by Kristina Van Dyke

P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center Long Island City, New York February 10-May 5, 2002

"The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994" was an ambitious, exciting, and important exhibition for the study of African politics, cultural practices, and history. Okwui Enwezor, working with a talented team of associate curators, brought together art, photography, theater, literature, film, music, textiles, and political propaganda spanning the continent and its diasporas to present what he has referred to as an "archive" of the independence period. This massive archive, filling three floors of P.S. 1, a converted school in Queens, ran counter to not only the familiar colonial archive of Africa but also the binary logic that oversimplifies the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, which one has come to expect in exhibitions that deal with colonialism. Remarkably, here Africa talked with and about its selves. Colonialism was only part of the dialogue, not the measure of its content.

Enwezor achieved this conceptual shift by insisting that we stop to examine the period of independence in all its exuberance and promise, messiness and contradiction, and even more important, that we attend to the intellectual and creative resources that Africans of diverse backgrounds mobilized to achieve this end. By examining the period of independence from the vantage point of African cultural processes as opposed to simply framing the exhibition around a neatly punctuated timeline of political history, Enwezor disrupted the notion that independence was a once-and-for-all status change uniformly experienced by all Africans. Liberation affected--and still affects--individuals in different ways and to different degrees that cannot be tied to political calendars. Blurring the distinctions between what constitutes the colonial and postcolonial, "The Short Century" offered an important corrective to Africanist and post-colonial scholarship.

Through a multimedia installation that included video, audio, and visual components, Enwezor literally put hundreds of voices into dialogue with one another, from anonymous Algerian liberation activists to the South African singer Miriam Makeba, from the late Guinean President Sekou Toure to French filmmaker Jean Rouch, and from the contemporary London-based artist Yinka Shonibare to Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiongo, to give but a few examples. The sheer scale and scope of the exhibition, combined with the reality that most visitors possessed only a passing knowledge of African political history would have seemed to destine this project for incoherence. However, with a few exceptions, "The Short Century" avoided overwhelming the viewer with a disorienting cacophony of voices and ideas.

While this review cannot speak to the installation at the other venues (Museum Villa Stuck in Munich, House of World Cultures in the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago), at P.S. 1 Enwezor divided the exhibition among three floors. The first was the most impressive and engaging. The range of primarily contemporary artworks, including Oladele Ajiboye Bamgboye's video installation Homeward Bound (1995), Ghada Amer's sculpture Le Lit (1997), William Kentridge's film Ubu Tells the Truth (1997), and Rachid Koraichi's textile-based Salome (1993), attested to the vitality and diversity of African artists working on and outside the continent today. Many of the pieces were familiar from previous international exhibitions and publications. Though one wished that Enwezor had introduced more new artists and objects, he nonetheless provided a great opportunity for American audiences to see, firsthand, works about which they had only read.

Because most of these objects are situated in the recent past, they worked to present viewers with a number of unresolved issues and lingering challenges from the independence period. A number of them took issue with a particular historical "archive" and asked how it should be reconfigured and presented and who has the authority to do so. The Beninois artist Georges Adeagbo's installation From Colonialization to Independence filled an entire gallery from floor to ceiling with the detritus of the past fifty years, including, among other things, African, American, and French newspaper clippings, literature, album covers, and artworks. French, Francophone, and African-language literature was arranged in rows across the floor, for example, pointing to the ways in which debates initiated around independence about which language was best suited for African literature continue into the present. Other works focused on the challenges of newly marginalized communities of post-independence Africa and the position of the exile with respect to "home"; and many of the South African pieces dealt with how to move beyond apartheid without disavowing its legacy. For example, in their depiction of poor living conditions, Zwelethu Mthethwa's photographs of settlement dwellers in their homes comment on the lasting effects of apartheid. However, these portraits do not aim to characterize their subjects as victims but rather as individuals who make creative choices that result in unique domestic spaces. After raising these questions, the exhibition largely moved back chronologically on the second and third floors to consider how these challenges developed over time.