The Rallying Call to Decolonize

When Okwui Enwezor gained world renown as artistic director of Documenta11 in 2002, his accomplishments as curator of contemporary African art were already well established. His In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940–Present, exhibition (1996) had the temerity to describe the intentional ways in which Africans shaped their own photographic representation in a medium whose history was as long and distinguished in Africa as in Europe. Enwezor’s 2001 exhibition The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994, was a revelatory journey through the long process of colonial resistance and independence no less revolutionary for its astonishing range of content far beyond that of art objects, including film, music, theater, literature, and literature. In helming Documenta11, Enwezor not only included a historic number of non-white, non-European artists but also redefined the exhibition, before its opening in Kassel, by conceiving it as a final installment of several “platforms” staged worldwide. His were strategic, paradigmatic interventions engineered to globalize the art world, and they effectively amounted to acts of art-historical decolonization. Enwezor’s legacy is instructive. Achieving an inclusive and equitable art history that is sustainable requires decentralizing white, Eurocentric, male, cisgender, and heterosexual hegemony. In two of his final projects, large-scale solo shows of Frank Bowling and El Anatsui, exhibiting these artists on their own terms did just that. It is through his curatorial practice of art-world decolonization that Enwezor has issued a rallying cry. He has shown us the way forward.

CULTURAL RAMIFICATIONS OF THE FOUND OBJECT IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN ART

Arguably Found Object genre represents the most dominant form of contemporary artistic expression with unlimited possibilities of material exploration and conceptual ideation. However, Found Object discourse institutionalized in European art history is exclusively western and dismisses those of other cultures as mimesis and time-lag. This paper aims to prove that the dominant contemporary discourse of „Recyla Art‟ which many African sculptors have been absorbed into, problematically blurs the conceptual and ideological differences in European and African exploration of discarded objects in art creation. Using a triangulation of Formalism, Iconography and Interviews as methodologies, this paper subjects the works of El Anatsui, Delumprizulike, Nnena Okore, Bright Eke, Olu Amonda and others to formalistic and interpretative analysis to establish the postcolonial context of the found object in contemporary African art. Findings demonstrate that European and African appropriation of discarded objects in art differs according to societal context in form and content. The paper therefore concludes that found object art is culturespecific and defined by unique cultural ramifications, thus, to fully understand the dynamism of this art genre, a culture-specific or localized reading is required because the context of its emergence in Europe stands in contradiction to its conceptualism in contemporary African art-space.

Kuntanshi yamikalile (The Future): speculative nonconformity in the works of Zambian visual artists

In recent years, select African visual artists practising on the continent as well as in its diaspora have increasingly been attracted to themes that explore, portray or grapple with Africa’s future. Along with this increasing popularity of the ‘future’ or indeed ‘African futuristic’ themes by visual artists, such themes have also attracted academic consideration among various scholars, resulting primarily in topics described as ‘African Futurism’ or Afrofuturism. These are topics that may be used to disrupt what some scholars – across disciplines and in various contexts – have highlighted as the persistent presumptive notions that portray Africa as a hinterland (Hassan 1999; Sefa Dei, Hall and Goldin Rosenberg 2000; Simbao 2007; Soyinka-Airewele and Edozie 2010; Moyo 2013; Keita, L. 2014; Green 2014; Serpell 2016). This study makes an effort to critique certain aspects of ‘African Art History’ with regard to the representation of Africa, and raises the following question: How can an analysis of artistic portrayals of ‘the future’ portrayed in the works of select contemporary Zambian artists be used to critique the positioning of Africa as ‘backward’, an occurrence at the intersection of a dualistic framing of tradition versus modern. Furthermore, how can this be used to break down this dichotomy in order to challenge lingering perceptions of African belatedness? The study analyses ways in which this belatedness is challenged by the juxtaposition of traditional, contemporary and futuristic elements by discussing a series of topics and debates associated to African cultures and technology that may be deemed disconnected from the contemporary lived experiences of Africans based on the continent. The study acknowledges that there is no singular ‘African Art History’ that one can talk of and there have been various shifts in how it has been perceived. I argue that while currently the African art history that is written in the West does not simplistically position Africa as backward as it may have done in the past, there appear to be moments of a hangover of this perception (Lamp 1999:4). What started out as a largely Western scholarly discourse of African art history occurred in about the 1950s and the journal African Arts started in the 1960s. Even before contemporary African art became a big thing in the 1990s for the largely US- and Europe-based discourses there were many discussions in the US about how the ‘old’ art history tended to freeze time and that this was not appropriate (Drewal 1991 et al). In order to advance the discourse on contemporary African visual arts I present critical analyses of the select works of Zambian artists to develop interpretations of the broader uses of the aforementioned themes. The evidence that supports the core argument of this research is embedded in the images discussed throughout this dissertation. The artists featured in the study span several decades including artists who were active from the 1960s to the 1980s, such as Henry Tayali and Akwila Simpasa, as well as artists who have been practising since the 1980s, such as Chishimba Chansa and William Miko and those that are more current and have been producing work from the early 1990s and 2000s, such as Zenzele Chulu, Milumbe Haimbe, Stary Mwaba, Isaac Kalambata and Roy Jethro Phiri.

Art as Contextual Epistemology: A New Theoretical Perspective on Contemporary Avant-gardism in Africa

Art constitutes a framework for the generation of new knowledge that enables a sophisticated understanding of society. It is deconstructivist/interrogative thus leads to the creation of alternative narratives and realities derived from complex visual interpretation of the universe, societies and circumstances. In a cognitivist sense, beyond aesthetic emotions/visual appeal art constitutes an intellectual source of knowledge through in-depth analysis of form, content and context of any given artwork. The paper adopts discourse and iconographic analysis as methodologies to introduce a new uncovered phenomenon of Contemporary Avant-gardism in postcolonial African art based on knowledge generation tailored to enforce change. This is achieved by interrogating the ideologies, methodologies and visual configurations of the works of contemporary African artists such as El Anatsui, Olu Amoda, Brett Murray, Kudzanai Chiurai, Clem Akpang and others. Their works instigate new lines of inquiries/knowledge through a renewed but subtle bohemian approach to artifactuality and interpretation of contemporary Africa. The paper submits that by its evocative/expressive nature, art creates structures of knowledge through subjective and visual dialogues that foster knowing in different ways beyond language. And that in contemporary African art-space this new artistic ethos is deployed as a form of avant-gardism that underpins the rationale of African art created in the continent today.

Contemporary African Art as a Paradox

The field of contemporary African and African diaspora art and culture is currently riddled by two paradoxes. First, in Africa and its diaspora, we are witnessing a burgeoning of creative energy and an increasing visibility of artists in the international arts arena. Yet, this energy and visibility has not been matched by a parallel regime of art criticism that lives up to the levels of their work. Second, we find a rising interest in exhibiting and collecting works by contemporary African and diaspora artists among Western museums as well as private and public collections. This growing interest, however, has been taking place within an extremely xenophobic environment of anti-immigration legislation, the closing of borders to the West, and a callous disregard for African and non-Western people’s lives. Hence, this essay addresses the need for an innovative framework that is capable of critically unpacking these paradoxes and that offers a critical analysis of contemporary African and African diaspora artistic and cultural production. In doing so, the author asserts the importance of movement, mobility, and transiency in addressing issues of contemporary African artistic and cultural production. This article focuses on the use of the term Afropolitan, which has made its way into African artistic and literary criticism as a crossover from the fashion and popular culture arenas. In thinking about the usefulness of “Afropolitanism,” the author revisits the notion of cosmopolitanism in relationship to the entanglement of Africa and the West and its reconfiguration at the intersection of modernity and postcoloniality.

Bringing Afropolitanism to the Arctic Circle

This article provides a brief overview of a few thematic exhibitions that the author has curated, highlighting the importance of contemporary African art within a wider international context. The author highlights African and African diaspora artists whose careers continue to thrive internationally. Some might argue that their success has been dependent on their representation in powerful galleries, and to some extent this is certainly true. Nevertheless, it is a small step in the right direction that relocating to major cities in Europe or the United States is no longer an absolute prerequisite for African artists who wish to gain international success and recognition. As the exhibitions and artists addressed in this article convey, cosmopolitanism as a metaphor for mobility, and the ideal of co-existence, diversity, and tolerance as its unifying and defining factors, translates beautifully into the language of contemporary art. Most important, if we strip cosmopolitanism completely bare and look beneath its seductive veneer, its real potential and beauty becomes visible, revealing a commitment to ethics and a genuine engagement with the plight of others. When contemporary artists use their success and privilege to address sharp social criticism that questions the global, social, and cultural inequities that exclude most from the cosmopolitan party, something magical happens that gives cosmopolitanism a necessary dimension of hope and possibility that is truly worth celebrating.