Still Fighting Ignorance & Intellectual Perfidy

Tuesday, 11 March 2014

Beyond the Postcolonial: Video Art from Africa

Beyond the Postcolonial: Video Art from Africa.

By Marie Rodet

Lecturer in African History, Convenor MA Film and History, SOAS London

This set of video art from Africa offers to the spectator a crucial entry key into a new historical atmosphere, in which the cultural legacies of postcolonialism no longer seem to matter much. Indeed, while many African contemporary artists have been much concerned, in the past three decades, by responding to European modernity and cultural neocolonialism, this new generation of African video artists proposes a different stand deeply anchored in their intimate – sometimes violent – daily experiences of globalization and displacement. They are very much preoccupied with being within their time, sharing their own everyday life and their responses to constantly moving environments, more than responding to a (post)colonial past which appears henceforth far from their immediate concerns.

If the globalization process sometimes left us with the impression of dissolution of geographical territories or the disappearing of old landscapes of power, these video artists remind us that it was far from being a uniform process, that globalization has often affected the global South differently. In the same way as their predecessors experienced a hangover of the African independences, this new generation of African artists seems to have experienced a hangover of the false promises of a globalised cosmopolitan world in which boundaries of race, ethnicity, class or religion were no longer important. Despite the tremendous hopes sparked by the 1990s’ democratization process on the continent, many Africans continue to be confronted with economic and political distress on a daily basis.

The life of African artists is not the one of the Afropolitan that the Western world would like to believe. Their mobility is still constrained by the rules of the market and the increasing fears built in our Western fortresses. The videos convey these often-traumatic experiences of migration and exile, and dislocated identities in the face of the delusion of globalization. They are therefore powerful political denunciations of the fault lines of our systems and definitely offer alternative and more complex views of the world.

These videos certainly belong to the globalised world of incessant flows of materials, information, and images. But their intrinsic ubiquity, their simultaneous negotiation of multiple cultural systems and temporalities defy the structures of the contemporary art market which long ignored African art production and then started catching up in a clear attempt to control its internationalisation. Indeed, video art is a very astute arm of resistance against these market structures. It offers its own modes of production and reception. It can be easily transferred, downloaded. Not surprisingly, at the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London last year, there was a complete absence of video art. Video art from Africa do not need to be put on the market to be accessed and valued. They simply need a virtual platform to be visible, as the one in motion masterfully deployed by Kisito Assangni. As such, this exhibition materializes the internationalisation and democratization of arts and information networks of the past decade, but also denounces their fault lines. No one should wonder that the new generation of African artists increasingly favour the video medium to fight against ignorance and intellectual perfidy in the interconnected world that we all live in.

Thursday, 20 February 2014

BEN URI GALLERY & MUSEUM, LONDON

Tuesday, 28 January 2014

MARRAKECH BIENNALE, MOROCCO

Monday, 6 May 2013

KUNSTHALLE SAO PAULO, SAO PAULO, BRAZIL

Friday, 12 April 2013

MOTORENHALLE Opening

Thursday, 28 March 2013

MOTORENHALLE CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART, DRESDEN, GERMANY

Tuesday, 26 March 2013

VIDEOFORMES Opening

Wednesday, 13 March 2013

VIDEOFORMES, CLERMONT-FERRAND, FRANCE

Monday, 25 February 2013

MALMO KONSTHALL, MALMO, SWEDEN

Friday, 25 January 2013

On African Video Art

Kwa Baba Rithi Undugu, Rehema Chachage

Catalogue introduction

Why is it that - in the wake of prolific work by twentieth century scholars, curators, artists, writers and critics - we need to draw attention to the category African video art as if it is something unusual, idiosyncratic and unexpected? Why are we still fighting ignorance and who is committing intellectual perfidy? Or is this something we imagine we or ‘they’ are doing? And who is the ‘we’ or ‘they’? The questions remain impenetrable, but I only have to listen to the conversations around me to realise that voices both from within the African continent itself, and those speaking out of the so-called western world, continue to naturalise irrelevant ideas about Africa and ‘the west’. All aesthetic production emerges out of conditions of specificity; but specificity is not the monolith of Africa or the West. We inhabit a world that has already witnessed accelerated forms of globalisation, migration and travel (and the ubiquitous phenomenon of the travelling artist, curator, critic and scholar). We know we cannot feel secure in categories that suggest a natural order of things, but we continue to mobilise them. When we’re speaking about identity or any discursive category, it’s no longer enough to draw from the arsenal of strategic essentialism. Any form of essentialism functions merely to evade and inadvertently reinscribe freighted ways of seeing and being and runs the risk of being co-opted in ways that are, at the very least, precarious. The idea of Africa as it encounters an idea of ‘the west’, is haunted by histories and lived experiences of race, gendered looking and a restless discourse of the other: it remains unclear whether these experiences, either mobilised or veiled, are ever really fully grasped. In a present where much is at stake in human relations; and so much is contingent upon who looks, writes or speaks, what does it mean to produce art, curate exhibitions, and occupy spaces brought into being by art worlds that move and migrate?
We need to pay attention to how this exhibition is staged and reflect on the conditions that shape its circulation. Who will see the work, and how will this seeing take place? Who will perform the discussions it generates and what will these look like? Who will do the speaking and whose voices will be heard and why? It would be productive to pay close attention not to the category African video art, but to video art that exists in relation to particular conditions and modes of production. Moving images inhabit spaces shaped by the sensate co-ordinates of movement, duration, pacing, colour, sound, or time. One of the most distinctive capacities of video art is its ability to occupy multiple temporalities simultaneously offering us more than one perspective at the same time. It continues to be arresting to re-visit these elements afresh, to consider the particular capacities of art objects that embody the idea of movement, and to reflect on the meanings produced by each individual work.

The works on the exhibition operate in a number of different ways: they play with the buried surfaces and sounds of digital technology; they deploy animation, performance, music, spoken word and visual layering. They explore the relations between image and text, and open up the possibilities of established genres such as portraiture. My looking recognises the affects and sensations of remembering and forgetting, and it registers the poetics we attach to urban environments, peripheral spaces and the places we inhabit in memory. The works exhibited here are inflected by the experience of migration, and they ask questions about what it means to inhabit multiple languages, geographies and states of being in the present. These are all the familiar territories of contemporary art practice and critical debate - no matter where you are situated in the world. But it is for us – viewer, artist, critic, curator, art historian - to figure out whether these works and the ways in which they are curated do something significant and specific, and whether we might begin to disintegrate the historical monoliths that obscure our vision.

Yvette Greslé
Arts Writer and PhD candidate, History of Art, University College London
http://yvettegresle.wordpress.com

Monday, 3 December 2012

MACT/CACT - SWITZERLAND OPENING

Photo & Copyright: Pier Giorgio De Pinto, PRO LITTERIS / Zurich

Wednesday, 14 November 2012

MUSEO/CENTRO ARTE CONTEMPORANEA TICINO, SWITZERLAND

Thursday, 18 October 2012

NATIONAL CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS, MOSCOW

Monday, 10 September 2012

PORI ART MUSEUM, PORI, FINLAND

Thursday, 5 July 2012

TORRANCE ART MUSEUM, Torrance, California, USA

DATES

13-30 March 2014: BEN URI MUSEUM, London

26 Feb-31 March 2014: MARRAKECH BIENNALE, Morocco

2013

19 May 2013: KUNSTHALLE SAO PAULO, Sao Paulo, Brazil

3 April 2013: MOTORENHALLE CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART, Dresden, Germany

20-23 March 2013: VIDEOFORMES, Clermont-Ferrand, France

2 March - 7 April 2013: MALMO KONSTHALL, Malmo, Sweden

2012

1-2 December 2012: MUSEO/CENTRO ARTE CONTEMPORANEA TICINO, Bellinzona, Switzerland

2 November 2012: NATIONAL CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS, Moscow, Russia

21 September 2012-13 January 2013: PORI ART MUSEUM, Pori, Finland

21 July-1 September 2012: TORRANCE ART MUSEUM, Torrance, California, USA

2-27 May 2012: Lu.C.C.A-LUCCA CENTER OF CONTEMPORARY ART, Lucca, Italy

29 April 2012: ARENA 1 GALLERY, Los Angeles, USA

26-28 April 2012: AIVA FESTIVAL, Angelholm, Sweden

2011

10-18 November 2011: MUSEO ExTERESA ARTE ACTUAL & UNIVERSIDAD METROPOLITANA, Mexico City, Mexico

31 August-3 September 2011: THE SUNFLOWER, Beirut, Lebanon

1-2 June 2011: ESTONIAN ACADEMY OF ARTS, Tallinn, Estonia

31 March - 2 April 2011: ARAD ART MUSEUM, Arad, Romania

17-19 March 2011: CITY ART GALLERY, Kharkov, Ukraine