Modern Africa, more than any other continent, is experiencing a period of compressed time. It is just 50 years old and thus only slightly older than the average age of its current population. At the same time, it has still not opened up fully to industrialization.
However, in the last few years a marked upturn in art production has been observed in the urban centers. Africa is now the last continent to become part of the global art scene, with all the advantages and disadvantages that this involves. African artists are regularly shown at major international exhibitions: at the documenta in Kassel, the Venice Biennale and even at biennials in Asia and South America. The fact that many of the most important African artists live in the big cities of Europe and North America is problematic, of course; even though they are still inspired by subjects from their continent, they are hardly ever exibit there.
At the same time, several biennials have been launched in Africa itself, e.g. in Dakar, Johannesburg, Marrakech, Bamako, Cairo, Kampala, Luanda, São Tomé and Lubumbashi in Congo. In addition, there are art spaces and art fairs in nearly all the region’s important countries.
As a result, African contemporary art has shirked of two persistent prejudices: the stigma of it being little more than handicraf work and ‘airport art’ on the one hand, and ethnological attributions on the other
As everywhere in the world, contemporary African art is also in a permanent process of creative renewal. Although the consequences of colonialism cannot be denied, the importance of artistic exchange during the transition from the colonial to the post-colonial period should not be underestimated—and and in this context the reaction of the artists to the period before Independence.
It will come as no surprise that a continent the size of Africa has produced a wealth of aesthetic archives which have their roots in at least three legacies: the indigenous culture, Christianity and Islam, which, as in the case of Nigeria, coexist in close proximity. The countries bordering the Gulf of Guinea are home not only to at least 1,000 diferent ethnic groups, but also to Anglophone, Francophone, Lusophone, even Hispanic and Arab elements.
Between Senegal and South Africa, Sudan and Angola, modern African identity is marked by many cultural encounters and interactions, by exchange processes and acculturations. Although these phenomena initially afected Europe and America, they have recently, in the course of globalization, also incorporated elements from China, India and the Persian Gulf. African Art thus moves in worlds spanning diferent archives: traditional and modern, colonial and post-colonial, local and global, provincial, cosmopolitan and those infuenced by the diaspora.
Unlike Western art, which is embedded in, indeed squeezed into, a strict sequence of styles, African contemporary art has the advantage of not having to satisfy any canon and being able to take its orientation strictly from the here and now. In this context, it uses any material that might be tohand across all artistic media.
Alfons Hug
The works in this exhibition were part of the exhibition Ex Africa at CCBB.