{"id":676,"date":"2011-09-24T09:50:59","date_gmt":"2011-09-24T09:50:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue10\/?page_id=676"},"modified":"2012-03-04T14:30:35","modified_gmt":"2012-03-04T14:30:35","slug":"rikki-wemega-wawu","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/writings\/essay\/rikki-wemega-wawu","title":{"rendered":"Rikki Wemega-Kwawu"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Politics of Exclusion (2)<\/strong><\/h1>\n
Rikki Wemega-Kwawu<\/h6>\n

Interview with El Anatsui<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Below is an excerpt of a rare interview El Anatsui granted the Art Critic Denrele Ogunwa in 1995, when he had a solo show of his work at the October Gallery in London. Anatsui took the world by storm with that exposition, which culminated in the production of his famous monologue, El Anatsui:<\/em> A Sculpted History of Africa<\/em>. This interview is culled from West Africa<\/em> magazine, No. 4069, 9 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 15 October, 1995. (pp. 1575 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 1577), and it is captioned, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153A Man of the Earth – Denrele Ogunwa talks to a foremost African Sculptor.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Relax and read on. This is what Anatsui himself has to say about his work, his inspiration and stay in Africa:<\/p>\n

DO: This is your first solo exhibition in London?<\/em><\/p>\n

EA<\/em><\/strong>: That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s true, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been taking part in group shows, but this is actually my first one man exhibition.<\/em><\/p>\n

DO: Why has it taken so long?<\/em><\/p>\n

EA<\/em><\/strong>: I think it has to be the fact that if you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re an African artist based on the continent you suffer from the invisibility syndrome, unless you have some \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcgodfather\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 or \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcgodmother\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 but I have none of these, so I had to let things take their natural course.<\/em><\/p>\n

DO: Are you saying that, no matter how well your art is, if you are based in Africa, you need contacts down here to exhibit?<\/em><\/p>\n

EA<\/em><\/strong>: I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not saying that. I am just happy that they have noticed. They are here and none of them actually goes out to know what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s happening on the continent. So it is when our work is shown in group shows that people get to know about it. If there were people coming to the continent, they would have bumped into one and helped one come and show. I have lived all my life in Africa, even though I have exhibited all over the world, that doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mean that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve actually been to those places.<\/em><\/p>\n

DO: What do you think of africa \u00e2\u20ac\u212295<\/strong>?<\/em><\/p>\n

EA<\/em><\/strong>: I think it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a significant event. There are some concerns and flaws here and there, which are only human, But like I said early on it is difficult for people to know what is happening in the arts scene in Africa, without actually having been there. africa \u00e2\u20ac\u212295<\/strong>, like all other initiatives that start from here, suffers from that syndrome. The festival is grand in scope, alright, and that is one of the challenges that it has, but they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve managed to put something together which is somehow representative.<\/em><\/p>\n

DO: Somehow?<\/em><\/p>\n

EA<\/em><\/strong>: Somehow because like all other shows, none of them can be truly representative no matter how well they are planned.<\/em><\/p>\n

DO: If you had the chance to arrange something like this, how would you do it?<\/em><\/p>\n

EA<\/em><\/strong>: If I were to arrange something in the visual arts, I would have had graded shows. Since most of Africa has not had much exposure in the West, it is possible that few artists throughout the ages have been shown here. If we exhibited by generations (I think we can talk about up to four or five generations of African art) you can have five shows, each devoted to a separate generation, that would give people an idea of what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s going on. I think Whitechapel (the exhibition: Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa<\/strong>, at Whitechapel gallery) in a way tried to do that.<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0I would have also made sure that a lot of information is gathered about what has happened in each place before selecting the art pieces\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/em><\/p>\n

DO: How do you work on a typical working day?<\/em><\/p>\n

EA<\/em><\/strong>: Most times I have to do a lot of thinking, decisions are really time-consuming. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll often spend about four out of six hours thinking about the art work before I actually started cutting.<\/em><\/p>\n

DO: What do you think about?<\/em><\/p>\n

EA<\/em><\/strong>: At the back of my mind, I think about things concerning the conditions in my environment but sometimes I simply let the medium or the process lead me on. These are the two approaches which, I guess, all artists use, with one, you attempt to impose your ideas onto the medium; with the other, the medium leads you on.<\/em><\/p>\n

DO: Looking at some of your sculptures like, Unfolding the Scroll<\/strong> of History<\/strong> or The Ancestors Converged Again<\/strong>, one gets the feeling that most of your work seems to be pre-occupied with Africa\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s cultural history.<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0Why is this?<\/em><\/p>\n

EA<\/em><\/strong>: If I seemed concerned with history, it is not that I want to relate history per se. I think I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m more like trying to play around, with the effects of that history or where that history is eventually consigning the continent and its people to. Rather than recounting history, my art is telling about what history has provoked.<\/em><\/p>\n

DO: One of your works that immediately catches the eye and makes you think is the Visa Queue<\/strong>.<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0Not only does it make a witty commentary, but it also holds a deeper meaning, what is it really all about?<\/em><\/p>\n

EA<\/em><\/strong>: When you think about Visa Queue<\/strong> it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not only a spectacle, but the ideas that it could provoke. Long ago, people were forced into migration through slavery across the Atlantic. Now, you see, apparently, no one is forcing anyone but people still want to go there and I start wondering if they are doing it on their own or maybe it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a disguised form of that enforced migration which started so long ago. As Africans say: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153there are so many ways to catch a rat\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, either you attract it so that it comes of its own will or you put smoke in its hole, so that it will run out. I feel that the latter is happening now. The process that was initiated long ago, has turned into something like smoking out rats because the incidents of trans<\/em>–Atlantic voyage and colonialism have set into motion a lot of processes which have resulted in the place (Africa) not being attractive. You find that one cannot seriously or intrinsically relate to that environment since it has been violated. So Visa Queue<\/strong> is not just that people are queuing for visas, but it is also trying to explain why they are queuing for visas.<\/em><\/p>\n

DO: While we are on the topic of a violated Africa in which no one can live, several creative artists have brought up the arguments about how hard it is to create art in the atmosphere in Africa at the moment. How hard has it been for you?<\/em><\/p>\n

EA<\/em><\/strong>: Art is something that is environment based. It takes its roots from a certain soil. For instance, if you take a tree that thrives in the tropics and plant it in a temperate clime, it might not survive. The same can apply to an artist. If what you derive your nurture from is not much in the new environment, you might find it difficult to create. There are some artists who have relocated and have done as well as they were doing in their origins. But it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t cut across the board. It might work well for others, but not for some.<\/em><\/p>\n

DO: Do you think it would work for you?<\/em><\/p>\n

EA<\/em><\/strong>: If I moved from Africa to the West, then my orientation would have to change because you have to be concerned with what is around you. Even the media that you work with might change. I work with old mortars now, I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t find them here! I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d probably have to work with fiberglass or bronze or some other synthetic media which I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not attuned to. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think my temperament is attuned to it because all along I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve worked with media that are naturally found and organic like wood, clay, etc. In Africa, we are people of the earth and when I came to Nigeria I found that the Igbo among whom I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve lived are people of the earth, too. We have \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Legba\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, which is our earth goddess and they also have \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Ala\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, and I know that in Yorubaland also, they are people who have a lot of attachment to the earth.<\/em><\/p>\n

DO: You\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve lived in Nigeria for 20 years but you are a Ghanaian, how have the two countries influenced your art?<\/em><\/p>\n

EA<\/em><\/strong>: Most of my professional life, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been in Nigeria. I did only my training and about five years teaching in Ghana. When I left Ghana, my plan was to spend three or four years in Nigeria and I ended up spending 20 years. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve maintained a close contact with Ghana. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just a 35 minute flight away. It is difficult to say that this is the Ghanaian influence or this is the Nigeria influence. Most of the time, the two of them are acting together.<\/em><\/p>\n

From the above, you ask, why would anybody now want to imperiously force any globalized identity debate-cloak on Anatsui? Anatsui himself is very unequivocal in enunciating his views when it comes to staying in Africa as against relocating to a Western metropolis, and the African environ and history being the stimuli for his work. He has always been very proud of his origin \u00e2\u20ac\u0153born 1944 in Anyako, Ghana\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6\u00e2\u20ac\u009d unlike many other successful African artists living in the West, who do not even now want to be associated with Africa at all. Chris Ofili is a typical example. They prefer to be described simply as artists instead of an African artist. They find the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153African\u00e2\u20ac\u009d tag rather condescending and derogatory, for whatever reason, I do not know.<\/p>\n

Chike Okeke-Agulu\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s cursory comment only feeds the growing perception of a grand scheme spearheaded by the Nigerian-born international curator and writer, Okwui Enwezor, and his cohort of disciples, Okeke-Agulu included, to shift the polarity of contemporary African art practice and discourse from Africa to the West. This strategy is obnoxious and evil and would have to be challenged and condemned in no uncertain terms. The Okwui Enwezor School paints a bleak picture of Africa, as if nothing worthwhile is happening on the continent. It has developed a complex, bizarre philosophy based on the writings of V.Y Mudimbe and Paul Gilroy which suggests that Africa and African culture are imaginary concepts, a firmament of the imagination, that no common African culture exists, and that the real Africa is the African Diaspora, the Africa which has come in contact with the West. Based on this false and unfounded philosophy, all their curatorial work and writings on contemporary African art are skewed in favor of the few African artists domiciled in the West, in Europe or America, marginalizing the bulk of their counterparts who live and work on the African continent. These privileged Diaspora African artists are re-circled from one mega-show to the other, hailed far and above their colleagues in Africa and widely published in all the emerging books on contemporary African art. Even beginning artists, neophytes who are now cutting their teeth as artists, but for the obvious fact that they live in the West, have been made overnight into superstars by Okwui Enwezor and his school, whilst some African contemporary masters, who have worked a lifetime and are in the dotage of their years, have been banished into total obscurity and oblivion, all for the simple reason that they live in Africa. This curatorial protocol adopted by Enwezor and his team, which privileges the Diaspora African artist to the neglect of the home-based African artists, and is now fast being adopted by other non-African curators and writers, as well, because they see it as the status quo, is absolutely wrong and odious, and has to be resisted. The sooner Enwezor and his disciples changed from this protocol to look more closely into the mother continent, the better.<\/p>\n

It is not with any animosity that I am interrogating Okwui Enwezor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s curatorial work. Some colleagues of mine, interestingly, all living abroad, have tried to restrain me from going ahead with my critique. Some have suggested that Enwezor has become so powerful, moving in the high corridors of art, he could easily destroy me if I dare raise a voice against him, whilst others see a criticism of Enwezor as an indirect attack on the whole establishment of contemporary African art, which, to them, has struggled so much to get to the present height it is enjoying today, therefore has to be spared of any reproach. I totally disagree with the assertion of those colleagues of mine. What they fear and are intimating are even the more reason why Enwezor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s intervention for African art has to be brought to close scrutiny and objectively criticized with perspicuity. He has become the apotheosis synonymous with contemporary African art in the West, in fact, the sole advocate, and anything he spills out there, the art world would swallow it whole-meal without any question, because it is coming from Okwui Enwezor.<\/p>\n

I am proud I was one of the first to hail Okwui Enwezor as far back as 2003, when few people knew him on the African continent, in an international conference paper as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the non-pareil African Art Historian, Critic and Curator.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d This is how I opened the chapter on Enwezor in my paper:<\/p>\n

This paper on the State of Fine Art in Africa will not be complete without talking about one African art historian, critic and curator who has had an extraordinary career and, at the young age of 38, distinguished himself into world – class stature. He is the Nigerian born and bred Okwui Enwezor. It is important talking about Okwui, as he is popularly called here, because I know for a fact that many serious contemporary practitioners of art in Africa do not know who he is nor are they familiar with his curatorial activities or extensive writings\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/em><\/p>\n

We have an adage in Africa which says, literally, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153One does not know his back is crooked if he is busy cutting a pathway\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Okwui Enwezor is cutting a pathway for Africa. He has done so much, in fact, immeasurably in bringing international critical attention to contemporary African art, centering it within the global discourse of art and he deserves high commendation for that. But he is beginning to go crooked! And his attention has to be urgently drawn to that. As another African adage goes, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Observers are Worried.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d And I am only being a voice of the worried observers, the voiceless masses.<\/p>\n

The undue focus of Okwui Enwezor and his henchmen on African Diaspora artists, side-lining their counterparts on the continent, only smacks of a very selfish motive and utter laziness in curatorship. I hate to think so, but I cannot figure out any other plausible reason for this lop-sided curatorial bias. With Okwui\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s meteoric rise to the apogee of the curatorial world, obviously, it would be expected by the mainstream art establishment for Enwezor and his team of critics, historians, writers and curators to go back home to Africa, with fairly improved political and social conditions than what impelled them to migrate to the West, to help build the necessary structures and platform for the advancement of contemporary art on the continent. But because of their continual stay in the West, and their reluctance to relocate back home, Enwezor and his disciples have had to create the erroneous impression to the art world, that there was not much happening on the continent of Africa, and that if you want authentic contemporary African art, just look to the West, to the African Diaspora, which to them, is the real Africa. This is absurd! Absolutely preposterous! So, for one man\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s selfish reason in protecting a hard-earned empire he has built for himself as the Curator-Supremo of contemporary African art, and to justify his continual stay in the West, a whole continent\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s art has to be marginalized and subjugated through self-satisfying, idiosyncratic strategies.<\/p>\n

Apart from this selfish motive, coming to think of it, it really does not cost anything to continue recycling the same old names as the pantheon of heroes of contemporary African art, because of their easy visibility and accessibility \u00e2\u20ac\u201c they live in the West. It is expensive, of course, to undertake frequent field research into Africa, visit all the countries on the continent to find out what is currently happening on the ground there. African contemporary art is in very dynamic and complex flux and it is simply difficult to keep pace with it. A survey book written today on contemporary African art, for instance, will be outdated in no time – three years, at most. The contemporary creative energy of the African continent is simply overwhelming and has not been documented or theorized enough. It is almost impossible to really keep abreast with it. And that is exactly what I expect Enwezor and his team to attempt to do, but they prefer the easier pathway, which I call lazy curatorship \u00e2\u20ac\u201c sitting comfortably in their studies in Europe and America, and turning over the same old Western \u00e2\u20ac\u201c based names, over and over again, in their representation of Africa. As I have said earlier, the current curatorial strategy of Okwui Enwezor and his school is inimical to the advancement of contemporary art on the continent and, surreptitiously, thwarts its growth. Indeed, the magnitude of its repercussion is far reaching and it may take generations of African artists yet to be born to recover from this dastardly, despicable curatorial scheme, designed to slump art on the mother continent, unless the status quo is quickly remedied.<\/p>\n

First, what Enwezor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s strategy seeks to do, unfortunately, is to eclipse the professional careers of numerous African artists who live on the continent and work in dire circumstances to contribute their humble quota to the advancement of the continent. They are literally banned from joining the global post-modernist discourse, and their work is easily dismissed as moribund. Many of these artists struggle to eke out a bare living from inadequate and poor sales of their work. In fact, the works of African artists living and working in Africa, apart from El Anatsui and, probably, one or two others, sell for a pittance, whilst that of their colleagues abroad, because of their constant exposure, visibility, circulation and discursiveness, have a much greater market and cultural value, catapulting their prices into stratospheric realms. They are often represented in auction houses in Europe and America, too. Have Okwui Enwezor and his disciples ever wondered why there is such astronomical and incongruous disparity in the value placed on the works of African artists in the West and those based on the continent? This is a serious anomaly and does not have to be countenanced one-bit.<\/p>\n

Secondly, African countries are battling with having to stem the tide of the brain-drain. The young, budding artist only sees African artists living in the West as successful and regarded with reverence and esteem more so than their counterparts in Africa. This young, ambitious artist obviously, desiring a glint of the limelight, would not see any future of himself in Africa. He will pack bag-and-baggage and head to the West, depleting the continent further of its human resource.<\/p>\n

Thirdly, other African art forms that are contemporaneous to all the current development of art in the West in this post-modern era, where your difference is wholly acceptable in the global dialogue, have been relegated to the background or pushed to the margin because they do not fall into the parochial definitions of post-modernist art for these African curators.<\/p>\n

With the advent of Post-modernism, the hierarchical authority which Modern Art once had and enjoyed, the high-brow elitism, have all been dismantled; art from high and low cultures now co-exist in the same discursive space; Modern Art which was the cultural appendage the Colonizer used to differentiate itself from the Colonized, had become moribund and was no longer in currency; the dichotomy of the center and the periphery no longer exists. The world has become flat! And buttressed by ICT (Information Communication Technology), there is equal opportunity for everybody.<\/p>\n

Postmodernism, therefore, does not mean sublimating your own culture to appear at the global dinner table without any culture of your own. Far from it. There is, indeed, African culture, contrary to what Okwui Enwezor has been postulating. Our difference as Africans is wholly acceptable to the postmodernist dialogue. In fact, the global universalizing cultural machine is gullible for all the cultures of the world. We do not have to clone ourselves as Euro-Americans to be welcomed to the global discourse on art today. But that is exactly what Okwui Enwezor has done with contemporary African art.<\/p>\n

Given the opportunity to introduce contemporary African art into the global discourse, if Okwui Enwezor had, for instance, presented the native Sirigu (Ghana) wall painters as Africa\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s contemporary artistic expression, of course, with a discourse accompanying it, I overly believe the art world would have embraced and welcomed it into the global universalizi0ng table, coalescing it with other artistic expressions from elsewhere to become one universal culture. But for easy accessibility, Enwezor who was living in the West at that time (and still does), preferred settling on Western-based African artists, many of whom, in order to become acceptable in the West, which was largely unreceptive to their work, had tailored their works to look like work by Western artists, mainly a preponderance of installation work and new-media, that is, technology art, video and photography. This was a golden opportunity lost for Okwui Enwezor in presenting African contemporary art as it truly was, as authentically reflected from the ground. So he defensively had to get into all those bizarre definitions of authenticity when it comes to cultural production, who the African was and what African culture represented vis-a-vis global culture, to validate the work of artists in the Diaspora.<\/p>\n

Okwui Enwezor should not delude himself into thinking that he has brought contemporary African art to a universalizing culture. With his renunciation of all that is traditionally African, what Enwezor has rather done is easily succumbing to the Western hegemonic dominance of art. So instead of a true global culture which gives cognizance to various cultures in its grafting and blending processes to achieve a true universal mono-culture, what we have today is still the Western-dominated art. Okwui Enwezor has sold Africa short! So, from one art fair to the other, from S\u00c3\u00a3o Paolo to Basel, from Istanbul to Cairo, it is still the same art we see, a proliferation of installation and new media. The Western metropolises of London, New York, Paris, Barcelona and Berlin are still the major centers of world art, where all the decisions on global art are taken. The African continent is still marginalized when it comes to World Art.<\/p>\n

Reviewing africa\u00e2\u20ac\u212295<\/em><\/strong> in Glendora<\/em><\/strong> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c African Quarterly of the Arts<\/em> in a self-revelatory, trenchant article captioned, Occupied Territories: Power, Access & African Art<\/em>, what Enwezor said of Jean Pigozzi and his collection can be said of Okwui Enwezor himself today:<\/p>\n

Pigozzi\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s imprimatur\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6effectively plays on the access provided by (his money and) powerful connections. He has used them in an accelerated campaign through alliances with major institutions, publishers and write-ups in important publications to legitimize and valorize many questionable artists (in his collection), pushing them to the world as the only \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcauthentic\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 artists from Africa. This way debate and criticism is silenced, foreclosed, or pushed to the periphery. While a sunny carnivalesque, celebratory and (ethnographic) [postmodernist<\/strong> – <\/em>my own word] discourse is woven around the various appropriate artists (in his collection), major institutions, in clear violation of their own policies towards other forms of representation, unnecessarily tow the party-line, allying themselves with what is basically a con game.<\/em><\/p>\n

In this same incisive and scorching critique, Okwui Enwezor questions why the curators of africa \u00e2\u20ac\u212295<\/em><\/strong> did not feature artists like Bili Bidjocka, Ike Ude, Yinka Shonibare, Olu Oguibe, Folake Shoga, Kendell Geers, Ant\u00c3\u00b3nio Ole, Oledele Bangboye, Lubaina Himid, and Ouattara, to name a few; all these artists, interestingly, living in the West. This is the question he posed to the curators:<\/p>\n

Why do we never consider the achievements of those artists who at great professional cost and individual isolation have equally transfigured the borders constituting the notion of Africanity? How could anyone serious about contemporary art in Africa overlook the importance of artistic practice that breach the etiquettes of racial determinism and national origin, of boundaries and territories within Africa?<\/em><\/p>\n

He quips that in the representation of contemporary art from Africa:<\/p>\n

\u00c2\u00a0Discussion is never elevated to a pitch that allows for even the most rudimentary debates around contemporary Africa\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s post-colonial enunciation, theoretical strategies, and artistic practice. Neither do such conversations ever consider the deep implications of Africa\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s post modernity, the locationary and migratory (mental and physical) disruptions, palpably evident in works of artists such as\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 (Those listed above).<\/em><\/p>\n

From the above, there is no gainsaying Okwui Enwezor had the obdurate courage and fought gallantly and relentlessly the art establishment, the Euro-American machinery, which was largely unreceptive to contemporary African art, and practiced the policy of exclusion, marginalizing Africa when it came to presenting and discussing global art. Finally the doors were perceptibly opened for Okwui Enwezor to allow his hand-picked artists, mostly African Diaspora artists, into the global discourse, and the doors quickly shut again. Most of the artists just mentioned above and a few more others Enwezor endorsed have all gone on to become world-class artists with highly successful careers, whilst their colleagues back in Africa still operate on the fringes of the art world. Soon after that, this hitherto exclusionary machine had Okwui Enwezor himself swallowed up. Once he found himself in the comfort zone of the curatorial world, in the riding seat of power \u00e2\u20ac\u201c unlimited and absolute \u00e2\u20ac\u201c he forgot what had originally set him on the crusading war-path for contemporary African art, that he was once knocking obstreperously and noisily on the doors of the Establishment to open up for Africa art. He had laid down his fire, his once peremptory knock, silent. And he was now practicing the very act of exclusion himself \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a thing he had once condemned \u00e2\u20ac\u201c marginalizing a group of contemporary Africa artists, in fact, nearly all the artists living and working on the mother continent of Africa today.<\/p>\n

It is rather ironical that barely a few years ago, Okwui Enwezor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s firebrand style of art criticism was brutally so critical and disparaging of africa \u00e2\u20ac\u212295<\/em><\/strong>, querying the way Africa and its arts were presented in the London metropolis, in a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153carnevelisque\u00e2\u20ac\u009d manner, which only reinforced the West\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s erroneous perception of Africa as backwards or primitive, and its modernity, non-existent. He wrote:<\/p>\n

These are the least troubling aspects of what africa \u00e2\u20ac\u212295<\/strong> portrayed. Implicit in its mission is the musty arena of egalitarianism, of equal partnership between the organizers and African artists, curators and scholars. But the evidence revealed otherwise. What seemed lost in all the euphoria was the fact that the encounter between Africa and the West often revolves around the discourse of power<\/em> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the fraught relations between the dominator and the dominated. And nowhere is this made more glaringly valid than in the historicisation of, and debate around the contemporary cultural production of Africa.<\/em><\/p>\n

For Africa\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s contemporary artists working all over the world, the dismissiveness which precedes their entrance and limited incursions into internationalism is a fiercely institutionalized situation…<\/em><\/p>\n

According to Okwui Enwezor, works which Africans regard as craft, utilitarian objects, are brought to the West and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153consistently given the sanction of institutional patronage as the pride of contemporary African presentation\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. He continues in his indignant denunciation:<\/p>\n

The evident astonishment one feels in this foray, into what is supposed to constitute a delimited African art discourse is that while Africa is in the throes of the most brutal evisceration-politically socially and economically, africa \u00e2\u20ac\u212295<\/strong> still adopts the most simplistic commentary to address a very difficult subject. This is a dangerous time, especially if one considers that the pendulum of power between the North and the South seems to be swinging towards a re-conquering strategy of double speak and double dealing undefined by the rhetoric of rational logic. Objectivity, here, is only simulated, hiding a prejudiced institutional subjectivity that suppresses any parity in the distribution of resources, space, and access. While the obvious demand is for an involved and rigorous critical discourse, Westerners instead adopt a strategy of isolation that loses contemporary African culture in the peripheral discourses of power, eventually regarding it as inconsequential.<\/em><\/p>\n

On a number of platforms and in his writings, the latest one being his book which he co-authored with Chika Okeke-Agulu, Contemporary African Art Since 1980<\/em>, Okwui Enwezor frames the genesis of contemporary African art, as he defines it, within a historical time capsule from the 1980s to 1990s when harsh economic conditions in Africa, worsened by the ill-fated World Bank\/International Monetary Fund (IMF)-prescribed SAP (Structural Adjustment Programs); fratricidal wars; corrupt, despotic governments; drought, famine, pestilence, etc.; a total breakdown of political and social structures, drove African artists, writers and intellectuals en masse to the West, apparently shifting the polarity of African art production and scholarship to the West.24This presupposes that the African Artist\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s migration to the West is what gave birth to contemporary African art, predicating its global entry, reception and recognition. This further presupposes Enwezor turning his back to art on the African continent to focus his attention entirely on African Diaspora artists, making art in the African Diaspora the leitmotif of his curatorial activities and his professional career. He writes in his critique of africa \u00e2\u20ac\u212295<\/em><\/strong>:<\/p>\n

But much has changed in the continent. Major artists, intellectuals, and writers pressurized by totalitarian regimes have either fled into exile or have been silenced by censorship. Younger artists, in a climate of apathy and dire economic and political conditions, are no longer indebted to a vision of pan-Africanism which was supposed to be a binder of African consciousness and identity, and have joined the exodus. The unfortunate outcome of this flow of talent has meant that a great many African artists who either once contributed or would have contributed immensely to the debate of Africa\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 20th Century are no longer resident in the continent. This is a major shift, reversing much of the pioneering work undertaken in the 50s and 60s.<\/em><\/p>\n

There are serious factual inaccuracies in this assertion of Enwezor. Unlike the Second World War, which drove most of the twentieth century avant-garde artists from Paris, which was the world capital of art then, to New York, thereby making New York the new world capital of art (It has remained so till today), the exodus which took place from Africa, because of the strangulating economic conditions, dictatorial regimes, SAP, etc., paradoxically, did not shift in any way the production of art from Africa to the West, warranting the current marginalization of contemporary art on the continent. I will challenge Enwezor any day on this issue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Politics of Exclusion (2) Rikki Wemega-Kwawu Interview with El Anatsui Below is an excerpt of a rare interview El Anatsui granted the Art Critic Denrele Ogunwa in 1995, when he had a solo show of his work at the October Gallery in London. Anatsui took the world by storm with that exposition, which culminated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"parent":46,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"authorpage.php","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-676","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=676"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":911,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/676\/revisions\/911"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/46"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}