Africa: Capolavori da un continente

African Arts, Winter, 2003 by Silvia Forni

Africa Capolavori da un continente

Galleria di Arte Moderna Turin, Italy October 2, 2003-February 15, 2004

"Africa: Capolavori da un continente" (Africa: Masterpieces from a Continent) is one of the most impressive exhibitions of African art ever to appear in Italy. Curated by Ezio Bassani, (1) it displays approximately 400 pieces from important African, European, and American museums and private collections. The installation occupies three floors of Turin's Galleria di Arte Moderna (GAM), whose permanent collection has been removed for the occasion. The wide publicity given to this show, evinced by the great number of articles appearing in the major Italian newspapers and magazines, reflects the clearly stated intention of the curator and the organizers to present the excellence of African arts to the Italian public, which is still largely unaware of these traditions. (2) Indeed, "excellence" and "formal beauty" were the guidelines governing the choice of the objects--exclusively sculptural forms--which represent the genres most widely recognized and appreciated in the Western world. The sheer number of artworks and their overall outstanding quality result in an atmosphere charged with emotion and wonder even for the devotee.

Many of the objects are indeed old friends, and several were exhibited in previous shows curated by Bassani. (3) Their appearance here seems to reinforce the idea that true "masterpieces" of African art are indeed few. The aura of preciousness and rarity is further enhanced by the dramatic lighting, which emphasizes the curator's intent to present the Italian public with an "art exhibition" rather than an "ethnographic display." Nevertheless, some aspects of the complex and multifarious cultures from which the pieces originate can be inferred from a number of initiatives promoted by the City of Turin to complement the show: music dance, literature, cinema, contemporary art, and ethnography are the focus of "Consonanze d'Africa" (African Consonances), a series of smaller exhibits, seminars, and events intended to amplify the effect of the exhibition beyond the museum's walls. Instead, though, these external cultural initiatives seem to present different visions and stories about Africa that somehow contradict the rather limiting formal focus proposed in the GAM presentation.

The exhibition is divided into four independent sections loosely connected to one another by the lines from a poem composed expressly for the exhibition by the Matinke writer Ahmadou Kourouma. The visitors' experience, Kourouma says, should be conceived as an "initiative journey" to the discovery of the objects and the spirit of the "ancestors of negritude" through which he, as a griot, will be the guide. (4) The first part of his poem--divided into five thematic "wakes'--introduces the first section, "The Great Kingdoms," which celebrates the richness and the depth of Africa's history. Upon entering the dark galleries, one is welcomed by some remarkable exemplars of Nok terracottas and Ife heads on loan from the Nigerian National Museum, Lagos, and the Ife Museum. The minimal information on the labels is complemented by short texts by Bernard Fagg (1990) (5) and Leo Frobenius (1936); these texts suggest Westerners' surprise and wonder at finding such beautiful antiquities and evoke the mythical foundations of these ancient civilizations.

The emphasis on the wealth and prestige of the ancient African kingdoms is also seen in the rather expansive section devoted to Benin "bronzes" and ivory sculptures. A color print of the famous Olfert Dapper illustration of the Benin oba's procession and excerpts from Dap per's 1670 text offer the only contextual information about the wonderful pieces on loan from Vienna's Museum fur Volkerkunde and other important museum collections. The sudden shift from Benin material to a series of wooden sculptures from other parts of the continent is intended--as indicated in the catalogue--to extend the idea of antiquity to those works whose age has so far been technically difficult to determine. Figures from the Cross River, Madagascar, and a large selection of works from the Dogon area, some of which are dated to the tenth century A.D., are presented as testimonies to a history that may find greater depth and articulation with improved scientific research. However, since the question of accurate dating is not explicitly mentioned in any of the wall texts, some visitors may exit the exhibit with the false impression that the "People of the Falaise" (as the subsection is titled) are just another ancient powerful African kingdom.

The second section, "The Collections of Sixteenth Century Courts and the Afro-Portuguese Ivories," presents one of the largest selections of the so-called Afro-Portuguese salt cellars, spoons, and horns ever displayed. The ivories are introduced by a group of ancient port maps and manuscripts, which represent some of the earliest Western depictions of the African continent and its in habitants. Bassani has devoted decades of scholarly work to this topic, which is also the subject of one of his contributions to the exhibition catalogue. Unfortunately, this fascinating story of first encounters and representations is barely implied by the minimal wall texts.