African Encounters has moved to Johannesburg from Cape Town, where it received favourable reviews. Ivor Powell takes a different stand
AFRICAN Encounters, presented at MuseumAfrica in Newtown under the auspices of the paragovernmental French Institute, is one of those shows that the official representatives of the old colonial governments love to treat us to: seemingly profound but in real life structured in such a way as to be devoid of any content beyond the fact of cultural appropriation.
It is no accident that this particular version of the theme was originated by Jean Hubert Martin, whose better known excursion into latter-day colonialism was the much reviled Magiciens de la Terre. This time, though, Martin and his co-deviser, Brahim Aloui of the Institut du Monde Arabe, have created a situation in which Africans themselves become the plunderers, the dilettantes, the agents of the appropriation: an East African artist was entrusted with the selection of West African art, and a West African with the selection of East African art. Thus, in the reduction of both to the status of tourists, in the transfer of the foreigner’s alienation on to the indigene, the “dialogue” of the show’s title.
The way the exhibition has been put together is visible in much of the work on show. I didn’t bother to note the names of the individual exhibitors, but a lot of the work had the look of things bought in tourist markets. There is, for instance, a group of paintings by an Egyptian artist of market scenes and suchlike — all Arab swirls, the dusky crush of the market place, the suggested sweep of robes and turbans, and basically everything one would expect as a stranger to find there. But, well, nothing from the inside.
Similarly there is a series of two-dimensional works by an Ethiopian artist which combines a contemporary sensibility with the visual intensities and decorative impulses of the Ethiopian icon tradition. For me the most successful works on the show, in context these nevertheless had something of the same quality of the curio: the work that renders back to you in concrete form the shapes not of its own identity, but those of your preconceptions and of the romance of place that you brought with you.
Throughout — through the Moroccan and the Malian and the Algerian selections — and for reasons written into the structure of the project, this appropriationist perspective is sustained.
The dialogue, in short, is an interior one. Africa only comes into it as the ventriloquist’s dummy comes into his performance.