Africas: El Artista y la Ciudad - African art, various artists, Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

African Arts, Winter, 2001 by Pamela Allara

Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona Barcelona, Spain May 30-September 11, 2001

This ambitious exhibition, curated by philosopher and critic Pep Subiros for Barcelona's CCCB, took as its premise the idea that urban culture rather than national identity conditions and shapes African artistic production. In undertaking to present the varieties of urban experience on the continent, Subiros grouped major African cities with European centers that have historically exerted colonial control. The eight art-city areas, organized into three sections, were Dakar, Abidjan, and Paris; Lagos, Harare, and London; and Johannesburg and Cape Town. These groupings permitted Subiros to address interconnected themes such as the increasing migration to urban centers within the continent, and the diaspora from those centers to the West. Crucially, it underscored a key aspect of urban experience--mobility--and thereby undercut any fixed notions of "Africanness."

The increasing urbanization of African life is a product of the globalization of late capitalism, and so the urban focus necessarily acknowledged the international scope of contemporary cultural production, no matter what its locus. Unfortunately, the fact that the two South African cities were not grouped with a European counterpart had the misleading effect of isolating it as a special case, just as South Africa is attempting to integrate itself into the rest of the continent. Given the history of Dutch colonization, why weren't the South African cities paired with Amsterdam, especially since one of the artists, Moshekwa Langa, now lives there?

By selecting the city as the vehicle to represent aspects of African culture today, Subiros acknowledged that it is in the metropolis where demographic and social changes can be best charted. The deep historical irony at play here, however, is that African nations achieved independence and began to forge a postcolonial identity just as the nation-state declined in power, both politically and as an ideal. (1) As centers of international capital, cities are oriented less toward their immediate surroundings than to their links abroad. Thus, despite the negative baggage of "tradition" and the current chaotic governance of many African nations, it is the state alone that can counter the influence of the corporate power that sits isolated in glass-enclosed cells within the city's fabric.

Because the exhibition's focus was on the dispersal of "Africas" among continental and Western cities, political issues, even urgent social ones such as racism and AIDS, were not addressed. Instead, Subiros focused on the ways in which the mobility that characterizes city life brings various cultures--"indigenous" and diaspora--into a situation of flux. With the differences between "settler" and "native" minimized, the artists all become citizens of an international art-world, and "Africas" becomes not a geographic locale but a state of mind.

Building on a decade of exhibitions of contemporary African art organized by curators from Western Europe and North America, Subiros highlighted individual artistic sensibilities while providing the city-based context for their works. The latter was presented not through tedious blocks of wall text but through "documentary modules" that included montages of photographs as well as film, press clippings, and music. The framing of the artwork through visual culture rather than text enriched the exhibition visually while permitting an open-ended, viewer-based interpretation. However, the implied premise that the visual supplements would provide the exhibition's historical context was not satisfactorily realized. In its admirable avoidance of a single argument about the nature of contemporary African art, the exhibition also contained certain unfortunate ambiguities and inconsistencies that made its address to contemporary "Africas" hard to read. From the evidence presented, the cities are pretty much the same. Surely their differences are as important as their apparent similarities, however.

Because of the inclusion of photography in each of the "strictly artistic modules," the boundaries between the art spaces and the context modules were often (deliberately) blurred. While some of the documentary photographers, such as Ananias Leki from Abidjan, Akinodbode Akinbiyi from Lagos (Fig. 3), or Santu Mofokeng from Johannesburg, were also included as individual artists, others, such as Luc Gnago from Abidjan, were not. Although this sliding of artist-photographers from one category to another acknowledged the dual role photography plays in our culture as both document and art, those imagemakers who were not permitted the flexibility of moving between categories were inevitably downgraded.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

Further, Subiros compiled the still images of three photographers'from Harare--Luis Basto, David Brazier, and Calvin Dondo--into a video that employs the techniques of the mobile camera: fades, close-ups, pans, thus completely altering their compositions. This compilation, which in its lyricism bears an uncomfortable family resemblance to a National Geographic film, is situated not in the documentary but the art section, leaving in dispute the question of the author of the piece-Subiros or the individual photographers. The question of authorship need not have been an issue had not the art section celebrated the individual creative voice, but in this case the different approaches each photographer took to the city of Harare during this tense political time were muted.