Recalling the Future Art in Contemporary Africa - Video Recording Review

African Arts, Autumn, 2002 by Joanna Grabski

Produced and directed by Claudine Pommier Executive Producer Cheikh Tidiane N'diaye

Arts in Action Society (Vancouver, Canada) and Sud Prod SenVision S.A. (Dakar, Senegal), 2000. Versions in French (Memoire du Futur: Art en Afrique Contemporaine) and English, each with subtitles. Color, 48 min. Available in BetacamSP or VHS. $220.

This collaborative production by Claudine Pommier and Cheikh Tidiane N'diaye offers an insightful exploration of issues and debates fundamental to discussions about contemporary art in Africa. The forty-eight minute video is underpinned most broadly by three interwoven lines of inquiry: What constitutes contemporary African art? With which issues do selected artists in Africa locate their practices? And finally how do art-world information brokers, especially critics and curators, construct artists as subjects? To pursue these questions, the filmmakers skillfully combine interviews with both artists and art-world information brokers in attendance at Dak'Art 98, Senegal's third Pan-African Visual Arts Biennial. Although filmed during Dak'Art 98, Recalling the Future is far from a documentary reportage of this international exhibition as an event or institution. (1) In fact, the Biennial's objectives and relation to other exhibitions are mentioned only briefly by Remi Sagna, its Executive Director, and Ousmane Sow Hutchard, its Chairman of the Board. Rather, for the filmmakers the Biennial represents a social space, an international meeting point for artists resident in Africa and art-world personalities, where knowledge about contemporary art is constructed and mediated. In this respect, the Biennial affords a platform for dialogue as well as a site in which the dynamics of knowledge production about this subject may be examined.

Just as the video's content and structure are well conceived, the camera work and editing demonstrate pronounced cinematic skill. Recalling the Future is composed of extended commentaries, didactic close-up shots of artists at work or discussing their work, still shots of paintings and sculptures by participants in the Biennial, and long shots of gallery interiors. This footage is intercut with ambient scenes of Dakar's crowded streets, bustling markets, and panoramic coastal vistas to create an engaging and descriptive visual product. The commentaries, excerpted from lengthier interviews conducted by Cheikh Tidiane N'diaye and Nina Ferretti, incorporate perspectives from individuals of various nationalities, ages, and specialties. Despite the effort to represent a cross-section of artists, those featured in the video reflect this particular Biennial's majority participation from Francophone Africa. Among them are the Senegalese mixed-media artist Viye Diba and the painter Tanguy, the Senegalese sculptors N'dary Lo and Ousmane Sow, the Ivorian painter Youssouph Bath and sculptor Lydie Etien Okpoby, the Cameroonian painter Claudie Poinsard, and the South African mixed-media artist Kevin Brand. Of these artists, Diba, who was recipient of the Dak'Art 98 jury prize, is profiled most extensively throughout the video.

Viewers also hear from two art critics, Dakar-based Iba Diadji N'diaye and New York-based Okwui Enwezor, formerly Artistic Director of the 1997 Johannesburg Biennial, Dak'Art 98 jury member, and Artistic Director of Documenta 11. Compared with Diadji N'diaye, whose expertise focuses on Dakar's local art scene, Enwezor provides a more globally inflected viewpoint. Taken together, the two perspectives, one from the inside and the other from the outside, complement each other while challenging supposed center/periphery hierarchies. What the two voices do hint at is the existence of multiple, occasionally intersecting contemporary art worlds and critical enterprises. Although no one individual acts as a narrator, Enwezor is the video's defining voice. Within moments of its beginning, he introduces a set of issues for consideration: What constitutes modern African art, and who defines it? How do critics bring African artists into their discourse? How do curators make meaning out of multiplicity? Enwezor reappears strategically throughout Recalling the Future to punctuate discussions and broach additional questions. His authoritative position in this production further underscores the powerful role of critics in determining and articulating which issues are accorded attention. At the same time, however, by juxtaposing multiple voices, the video calls into question the interface between artists' positions about their practice and production and those of the individuals writing them into exhibitions, scholarship, and critical discourse. Such polyvocality is undoubtedly one of the greatest strengths of Recalling the Future.

A good deal of discussion is devoted to the debate on Africanity, a discursive construct privileging contemporary artistic production that appears to build upon cultural traditions or reference a specifiable African identity. (2) The video emphasizes the complexity of this debate. A point of departure is articulated by Enwezor, who takes issue with the Western insistence on narrating contemporary art from Africa within the frames of negotiated cultural traditions, authenticity, and primitivism. Indeed, as Western scholarship and exhibitions from the past decade demonstrate, contemporary artists from Africa very often enter global art discourse via the relation of their work to Africanity. It is useful that Enwezor grounds his argument in a historical perspective, asserting that Africanity is a deeply entrenched imposition inherited from anthropology, colonialism, and popular culture. Here, black-and-white footage alluding to the documentation of so-called vanishing cultures and the European powers' extraction of Africa's natural resources adds an evocative visual component to his discussion.